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I am writing this while nursing an injury I sustained in my war against the hundreds of grape hyacinths in my garden. I had hoped to make the lives of the hyacinths poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Instead, I ended up injuring myself, which may be a metaphor for several debates currently unfolding in higher education.
Manning the barricades in a cul de sac
One of the recurring patterns in higher education debates is that we often end up arguing about the visible issue while the real issue sits just underneath it.
A recent dispute at Old Dominion University (ODU) illustrates the point. This week, a long-brewing spat between faculty and administrators over course length broke out into open rebellion. The Faculty Senate passed a vote of no confidence in the university’s senior leadership—a move that will almost certainly have little practical effect, given that the Board of Visitors quickly signaled it would continue supporting the administration. The Chronicle reported on the kerfuffle.
Old Dominion University’s Faculty Senate voted no confidence in the institution’s president, provost, and vice president on Tuesday, in the latest show of disdain for administrators’ plan to convert online courses to an eight-week model. The university’s Board of Visitors quickly rebuffed the vote, pledging in a statement to “continue moving forward.”
The dispute has been building since August, when the administration announced that all undergraduate and graduate online courses would be converted from 16-week to eight-week format, and they also specified an asynchronous modality. University leaders argue that the change is necessary both to better serve online learners and to respond to what they describe as an existential financial threat. Without changes, they warn, the institution could face program closures and budget cuts.
Faculty opposition has been strong. A faculty-run survey, largely conjectural and based on faculty perceptions of the change, found overwhelming opposition to the move. What makes this case particularly interesting is the speed of the proposed transition. The initiative was announced in August 2025 with the expectation that the shift would be completed by fall 2026—barely more than a year.
My initial concern when reading about the plan was whether the university had provided sufficient support to help faculty redesign courses for the shorter format. But according to reporting in The Chronicle, ODU appears to be investing heavily in the transition.
The administration has offered a raft of support. It hired an outside company, Six Red Marbles, to help faculty members restructure their courses and employed more than 36 full-time professionals to support the effort, including instructional designers, media specialists, and accessibility experts. Faculty members were given stipends for course redesign. In December, the provost announced that instructors could receive course releases as needed. The university has also offered workshops and training for instructors on asynchronous-course design.
I recently wrote about the growing body of evidence suggesting that shorter course formats can improve student outcomes under certain conditions. But what interests me about the situation at ODU is not the course-length debate itself. Rather, it is what the conflict reveals about how universities may need to operate as they expand online learning and confront growing financial pressures.
The fight over eight-week courses may appear small, but it is likely a preview of the kinds of governance conflicts we will see more frequently as institutions attempt to move more quickly and strategically.
