Systemic Gatekeeping As Feature

This week I again have so many thoughts in relation to what is going on in higher education that are interconnected, and how folk fail to see the interconnectedness. So I will try to organize these thoughts in a way that also allows you to see the interconnectedness, but also allows me to go through my week of oh my goodness what are we doing here thoughts.

I want to start with something that has been bothering me for more than a year now but this week became painfully apparent, yet again, in discussions with peers, colleagues and friends at many institutions internationally. That is that Research Ethics Boards (REBs) at universities and colleges have no idea what to do with SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) research. They don't know what SoTL is, they don't know how to assess it, and they create even more barriers to the kind of SoTL work that is really needed right now in our assessment redesign times. SoTL is not the only gap that REB boards tend to have. REB boards don't know how to engage with autoethnography either. Basically there is a certain kind of research that the boards feel comfortable with, and that is the research that will be approved and stamped. 

What I am seeing more and more are REB boards making up random beliefs that research, even research that is purely secondary literary source based, is somehow research involving people. I am not talking clinical records type things or anything with anything remotely personally identifiable (or not). I am talking articles and literature-based research being flagged as human research. And I know why this is happening, I mean I am sure others know why this is happening too but they won't say it, so I will say it. REB has become a convenient place, in our socio-political climate, to gatekeep any research that is remotely connected to ideas of inclusion and equity.

Many in disability community have already mentioned how difficult the system is to navigate in terms of getting research approval for anything. I am talking inaccessible steps, inaccessible documents that need to be filled out (one should never have to "sign" a Word document my goodness) and systems that don't work with assistive tech, right up to inaccessible journal platforms where folk may want to submit research. I am watching this slide towards litigious fear of anything that isn't overtly business model or industry based.

This is coupled with news like what came out of Harvard this week about cuts to their PhD programs. I mean it shouldn't take much to connect those dots, but if you are having trouble connecting them let me make it clearer, less PhDs means less researchers, means less research, especially in areas that are already being gatekept. 

But also connected to this is that they need less grad students because everyone thinks it is more fiscally responsible to use AI to work as grad students in terms of providing feedback and actually facilitating learning. In our AI, LLM (large language model) world of education at scale, relationship building is secondary to profits. Thus, we don't need grad students, we don't need sessionals/adjuncts, we just need that voice from War Games (shall we play a game). Being relational costs money, being human doesn't matter, plug and play education for all. We are 30 seconds away from the education space as just being glorified money laundering. And if this sounds harsh or a bit much, it comes from watching over the last few months, article after article, report after report, suggestion after suggestion, come out that either forgets that disabled students exist, or tries to paint LLMs as disability technosaviour in a way that assumes that all disabilities are the same, and that all disabilities are static. 

A lot of the systems function in static space so it makes sense that this thought process would continue to be present in LLM discussions. But at what point are we going to realize that our neurotypical and ableist framing of the work of assessment and course design is actually going to shrink class sizes and educational outreach even further. And we have folk like Karen Costa asking important questions about how can we do asynchronous online education and what can asynchronous assessment look like in 2025 and beyond. And the response is a collective shrugs shoulders emoji. Or the opposite which is this one male identified white academic who is doing the tour of female identified academics posts on LinkedIn about the need for inclusion in assessment and in relation to online education and trolling them by saying online education should cease to exists and he knows this because he is an "online education expert." I mean it makes a compelling case for the existence of misogyny online if anything, but it doesn't remotely speak to how the removal of online education is basically telling folk who need online education for a myriad of reasons, health, geography, economics, that sorry, you are not important, sorry we cannot take time to make your educational needs part of our plan because we are too busy dreaming up a 10,000 student lecture hall where no one wears a mask. 

It is very difficult times in education for anyone with a conscience or a sense of ethics and morals that guide the work or their lived existence. And if you are one of those people don't worry, I even saw a director of a CTL on LinkedIn this week say, we need to stop making this an ethical conversation. That's right folks, no ethics needed here, it's just money ball from now on. I mean not really money ball I guess because we can't do the research we need to do to get the stats in the first place. 

What's the answer you say, look, there is no answer that can happen if everyone is collectively and without critique jumping on the scale up, people-less, no actual conversations with folk who have knowledge and awareness of inclusion and equity, train. Because folk don't want to say anything because they worry that they are next, they don't want to stand up for morals and values, or multi-marginalized learners because that sounds hard and everything is already hard. So all we can do is keep the receipts (so many receipts) and see when we have a great time to use them. And if you want to have a great read from someone who has kept so many receipts, I suggest Cory Doctorow's new book that I have linked below, because he gives awareness of how the gatekeeping I am referencing throughout this piece is not a bug, it's a feature.

Change the Narrative Resource

Doctorow, C. (2025). Enshitification. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.