Blog
May 11, 2026
The State of the Humanities in Higher Education
New Insights from Department Chairs
Last year, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences engaged Ithaka S+R to conduct research on the state of the humanities in higher education. My colleagues Chelsea McCracken and Claire Baytaş led a series of focus groups with humanities department chairs to learn how they are adapting to the current climate of retrenchment and technological change. These focus groups yielded information about the perceived value of the humanities, efforts to promote student enrollment, the implications of AI for humanities teaching,…
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March 30, 2026
AI in Research Administration at Emerging Research Institutions
An Issue Brief from NSF GRANTED Workshops
Research administration has grown increasingly complex over the past two decades, and the introduction of AI has only exacerbated this. Expanding regulatory requirements, shifting funding landscapes, rising numbers of proposals, and constrained staffing resources have made research administration more demanding. For emerging research institutions, these pressures compound existing structural challenges in building research operations capable of securing and sustaining funding. As generative AI tools have rapidly entered the market, accompanied by promises of increased efficiency, research offices at emerging research…
March 25, 2026
Open Source Research Software and Open Science
For decades, the Open Science movement—driven by both funder mandates and scholarly norms—has sought to make academic research in all disciplines accessible to everyone, both in and outside the academy. Yet while the academic research enterprise has made significant strides in building infrastructure to support open access publication, the sharing of research data, and other core aspects of Open Science, there is an additional area that has received less attention within academia: open source research software (OSRS). To begin to…
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March 3, 2026
Incorporating Environmental Perspectives into AI Literacy
Announcing a New Mellon-Funded Project
The energy and material demands behind artificial intelligence (AI) technology raise serious questions about the environmental impacts of widespread AI adoption. Understanding these environmental-related consequences is an important component of what it means to be AI literate. Within the sphere of higher education, colleges and universities are launching initiatives to help students, faculty, and staff attain higher levels of AI literacy. Many AI literacy frameworks already call for competency in the societal and environmental impacts of AI technologies. However, tracking…
January 15, 2026
Human Values and AI Adoption in the Research Enterprise
Insights from the Second NSF GRANTED Workshop at Chapman University
Research administrators play an essential role in the research enterprise. Their work managing expenditures and monitoring compliance with rules related to the ethical conduct of research ensure that public money is spent and that research data is collected in ways that protect privacy, minimize risks to participants, and meet the complex legal and contractual obligations required by funders. At large research universities, these and other tasks associated with research administration are undertaken by trained specialists: at emerging research institutions (ERIs)…
December 9, 2025
Supporting International Values in the Research Enterprise
Announcing a New Project Funded by the Henry Luce Foundation
Many of the world’s best researchers work at universities in the United States. While they contribute to the US research enterprise, these researchers also often embody hybrid identities: their training, professional activities, and individual and collaborative work cross national, institutional, and disciplinary borders. However, the past several presidential administrations have enacted federal policies driven by concerns over national security and economic competitiveness that have restricted the flow of researchers and research outputs across national borders. Since 2018, heightened scrutiny, tightened…
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October 22, 2025
Federal Funding Cuts and Research Universities
New Tracker Documents the Impacts of the Cuts on the Human Infrastructure of the Research Enterprise
Today, we are sharing a new resource tracking the costs of the administration’s actions on the people who make the research enterprise possible. As universities adjust their budgets to reflect these new realities, we are seeing what is likely the first wave of layoffs and program cuts. These cuts have immediate consequences for both university staff, faculty, and students and on local economies. The loss of the human expertise required to conduct and administer research, and reduced opportunities for new…
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August 21, 2025
Preserving At-Risk Public Data
An Interview with the Data Rescue Project Steering Committee
Federal data are an essential public good, enabling cutting-edge research and underpinning decision making by governments, businesses, and individuals. However, continued public access to these data is no longer assured. Librarians, archivists, and other information professionals dedicated to the preservation and accessibility of knowledge have responded by building an independent infrastructure to preserve at-risk federal data for continued public use.
July 30, 2025
Announcing the 2025 US Researcher Survey
This fall, we will launch a new national survey of academic researchers. For over 20 years, Ithaka S+R has surveyed faculty across the US about their teaching and research needs and practices, but this is the first year that we are gathering more in-depth data specific to researchers. The survey will be fielded to over 210,000 people who are engaged in academic research, scholarship, or creative activity—across disciplines and job categories—at colleges and universities in the US.
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June 17, 2025
Expanding AI Literacy Integration
Fall 2025 Cohort
Building on success, scaling impact Earlier this spring, we kicked off two cohort projects on AI literacy with 45 colleges and universities. In the months since we first announced the cohorts, the urgency of AI literacy integration has only grown. Students increasingly expect their institutions to prepare them not just to use AI tools, but to understand their implications, limitations, and ethical considerations. Faculty are seeking concrete guidance on how to incorporate AI literacy into their courses meaningfully. And…
May 19, 2025
AI Implementation and Governance at Emerging Research Institutions
Announcing a New NSF-Funded Planning Grant
Generative and other AI tools have the potential to transform and accelerate scientific research and communication. However, realizing that potential will require institutions to invest in the administrative and technical infrastructure, staffing, and capacity required to manage the data security, compliance, technical, and ethical issues of generative AI usage at the institutional level, and provide professional development for staff in units engaged in all aspects of the research enterprise. Creating this infrastructure will be difficult for all universities, but is…
April 16, 2025
Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise
Call for Participants
Ithaka S+R and the Apereo Foundation welcome applications to participate in Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise, a workshop made possible by generous funding from the National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Higher education serves as a seedbed for highly successful Open Source Software (OSS). Apache, Linux, R, and Python are all examples of currently widely-used, impactful, and sustained open source projects with roots in higher education. Colleges and universities…
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April 9, 2025
Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula
A New Cohort Project Gets Underway
While the technological and commercial landscape remains fluid, and the long-term impacts of AI on teaching and learning remain contested, colleges and universities are ready to shift from reactive to proactive engagement with AI. AI literacy will be a cornerstone of that engagement at many institutions. The idea that students will need to know how to use and think critically about AI is one on which skeptics, agnostics, and advocates can largely agree. A few universities have already launched AI…
April 1, 2025
Assessing the Humanities
Announcing a New Project to Better Understand the Structure of Humanities Majors and the Perspective of Department Chairs
Ithaka S+R is excited to announce that we have been engaged by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to conduct research on the state of the humanities in higher education. Our research will be part of a portfolio of commissioned work that will contribute to the Academy’s ongoing efforts to gather comprehensive data on systematic challenges facing humanities departments today. Over the coming year, Ithaka S+R will conduct interviews and focus groups with faculty and administrators from across the…
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February 10, 2025
Defining and Implementing AI Literacy
Announcing a New Cohort Project
Defining and implementing AI literacy is complicated by rapidly evolving technologies and the difficulty of foreseeing the magnitude and variety of AI’s effects on teaching and learning, career readiness, and civic life. Creating institutionally specific frameworks for AI literacy and building the programming and resources necessary to integrate it into undergraduate education will require contributions from across the university. Libraries are well positioned to be campus and even national leaders in these efforts.
February 6, 2025
Convening Stakeholders in the Open-Source Ecosystem Workshop
Announcing a New NSF-Funded Project
Open Source Software (OSS) has great potential to benefit higher education and is increasingly recognized as a core component of open science. The community that supports OSS for teaching and administrative purposes, such as Moodle and MIT Mathlets, has made great progress in seeding, scaling, and sustaining their projects within the academy and has built a robust and sustainable infrastructure. However, academic silos have made it difficult for this community to share knowledge with those developing OSS for research purposes.
October 30, 2024
What Does Generative AI Mean for Scholarly Publishing?
Over the past 24 months, generative AI has become inescapable. As a tool that is capable of generating content, its implications for how scholarly research is conducted and for scholarly publishing and communication are potentially transformative. What is not yet clear is how transformative this impact will be, and which areas of scholarly communication may see more rapid and revolutionary change than others. In a report published today, with funding from STM Solutions and six of its member organizations, we…
June 20, 2024
How Are Faculty Using Generative AI in the Classroom?
Findings from a National Survey
Since the commercial release of ChatGPT in 2022, generative AI has had an undeniable impact on higher education, reshaping student learning methods, prompting concerns regarding academic integrity, and sparking larger questions on teaching and learning. It is therefore vital to understand how instructors are currently using (or not using) generative AI in their classrooms to support teaching. To gain insight into how instructional practices are evolving, Ithaka S+R fielded the triennial survey of postsecondary faculty with a focus on…
April 23, 2024
Generative AI and Scholarly Publishing
Announcing a New Research Project
Over the past several years, Ithaka S+R has conducted several major studies on the scholarly publishing landscape during a time of rapid technological change. There is no better example of how rapid and radical this pace is than generative AI tools, which have moved from the margins to a focal point of scholarly publishing in little more than one year. Last spring, we conducted interviews with publishers, librarians, advocates, analysts, funders, and policymakers as the horizons of possibility and risk…
March 14, 2024
Mapping Research Data Support Services
A New Report from Ithaka S+R Shares Findings from an International Inventory
The complexity of contemporary research practices have created significant demand for a wide range of support services within university research communities. Libraries and other campus units have responded by developing an array of research data support services to help researchers learn new tools, improve their skill sets, and manage their data across the research lifecycle. Because these services often evolved without central oversight or cross-unit coordination, it can be difficult for users to understand exactly what is available to them…