No thank you, AI, I am not interested. You don’t get my data. #shorts
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No thank you, AI, I am not interested. You don’t get my data. #shorts
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Liberty University in Black and White
Liberty University, one of the largest Christian universities in the world, presents a striking contrast between its largely white residential campus and a more diverse, working-class population studying online. This divide highlights ongoing questions about race, access, and culture in American higher education—especially in religious institutions that promote traditional values while navigating a changing demographic and social landscape.
A Whiter Campus
As of 2021, Liberty’s Lynchburg, Virginia, residential campus remains overwhelmingly white. Seventy-four percent of students living and studying on campus are white, with only 4% identifying as Black or African American, 5% as Latino, and 2% as Asian or Pacific Islander. Less than 1% of residential students identify as Native American. In contrast to the national trend of increasing diversity on college campuses, Liberty appears to be growing whiter. In fact, the number of African American students on campus has declined in recent years, raising concerns about how welcoming the university is to students of color.
This demographic imbalance is not new. Liberty University has a long history of racial segregation and discrimination, particularly in its formative years under founder Jerry Falwell Sr., who defended segregation in the 1960s and opposed civil rights legislation. While Liberty’s public stance has changed over the decades, the legacy of those positions still casts a long shadow.
A More Diverse Virtual World
Meanwhile, Liberty University Online (LUO) paints a different picture. In 2017, only 51% of its undergraduate population identified as white, compared to 15.4% who were Black or African American. Hispanic and Latino students made up 1.7%, and students of two or more races, 2.3%. A significant 26.5% of LUO students were categorized as “race/ethnicity unknown,” potentially obscuring additional diversity. These students come from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and 86 countries, with more than 30,000 military students and over 850 international students among them.
LUO students are also disproportionately older, more likely to be working full-time, and often seeking degrees for career advancement or personal growth rather than the traditional “college experience.” Many are first-generation college students or part of the educated working-class navigating life through faith, family, and financial constraints. In contrast to the traditional campus, LUO’s virtual classrooms are where Liberty more closely resembles the multiracial and socioeconomically diverse America it often claims to serve.
The Racial and Class Divide
This bifurcation between Liberty’s on-campus and online populations underscores a larger tension within the university: a cultural and racial divide that mirrors the broader fissures in U.S. society. The residential campus, steeped in conservative Christian traditions and a homogeneous student body, promotes a culture aligned with white evangelicalism. Meanwhile, its online division serves a more varied student population—many of whom are drawn to Liberty for its affordability, flexibility, and religious identity, but may not share in the campus culture or feel represented by its leadership and branding.
Reports of problems faced by Black students on campus—including concerns over campus climate, lack of representation among faculty, and curriculum that minimizes racial history—suggest that Liberty’s commitment to diversity is uneven at best. While the university has made modest gestures toward inclusion, critics argue that these efforts are often performative and fail to address systemic issues rooted in the institution’s founding principles.
Conclusion
Liberty University’s dual identity—as a white-dominated, conservative campus and a more diverse, online workforce training hub—raises difficult but necessary questions about race, class, and the role of religion in higher education. For an institution that claims to train “Champions for Christ,” the challenge remains whether it can reconcile these differences or if the divide will only grow starker in the years ahead.
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UK higher education in spring 2025: 10 ‘killer facts’
- This is the text of a speech delivered by Nick Hillman, HEPI’s Director, to the 16th Annual Student Housing Investment Conference.
Good morning. It is wonderful to be here, even if the outlook for our sector does not feel quite as rosy as when I have appeared here in the past – and, given the new migration white paper from the Home Office, not as rosy as it felt just a few hours ago.
The currency of policymaking is ‘killer facts’: those one-off striking statistics that act as ammunition for policymakers.
- One example of a recent killer fact is the Office for Students’ announcement in November 2024 that ‘nearly three quarters (72 per cent) of higher education providers could be in deficit by 2025-26’ (1), which has certainly concentrated minds.
- A second killer fact currently obsessing policymakers is 782,000 (2), which is the number for net inward migration to the UK in 2023 and which is driving the new crackdowns.
In what is left of my 15 minutes, I want to focus on a few more killer facts.
First, just in case you have not come across the organisation I lead before, the Higher Education Policy Institute or HEPI is the UK’s only specialist think tank for higher education and a registered charity. Our goal is to prompt evidence-based conversations about higher education policy through engagement, publications and events. We are funded by most universities throughout the UK and a limited number of corporations, including some of the bigger Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) providers, such as Unite Students, UPP and iQ, and we are very grateful for that support.
The killer number I wish to provide about our own work is 10: that is how many new bits of research we have produced since 1 January 2025 (3). The reports we have covered include:
We have also published 112 blogs since 1 January, covering the full range of higher education issues. The three most well-read pieces so far this year are:
Conferences like this one are organised far in advance and the title I was given is ‘New Government Policy – what does it mean for the Sector?’ All I can say is: I wish I knew. I suspect the organisers thought we might have found out the answer to this question by now when they first scoped out the agenda late last year.
But the fact is, aside from a letter from the Secretary of State for Education, the Rt Hon. Bridget Phillipson, to vice-chancellors from November last year, which chastised universities for not doing more on economic growth, access, teaching quality, efficiency and civic engagement, we are still waiting for a hint on what this Government’s legacy on higher education will be. So far, we have had more higher education policy from the Home Office and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government than we have from the Department for Education.
I keep reading the administration is in its early days and needs time to find its feet, but it is now 10 months in. It took Tony Blair just two months after the 1997 election to announce the (re)introduction of tuition fees and it took the Coalition just six months after the 2010 election to announce the tripling of fees to £9,000.
We have long ago missed the boat for making significant changes to fees and funding for 2025/26 and we will soon miss the boat for making changes for 2026/27, by which point we will be halfway through this Parliament.
One of the reasons for the lack of clarity over government policy is that the shadow ministers who were responsible for the Labour Party’s approach to higher education and research in Opposition prior to the election did not end up in charge of those areas in government, so there was a new broom. This sort of sweeping out is now entirely normal. Which takes me to my next killer fact: in my 11 years leading HEPI, there have been 11 Ministers for Universities and 11 Secretaries of State for Education (4).
The biggest challenge facing institutions currently is obviously the financial one. Since the brave decision to raise the full-time undergraduate fee cap to £9,000 from 2012, inflation has been eating away at the sum so it is now less than two-thirds of what it was, in real terms: according to Mark Corver of DataHE, the current fee cap of £9,250 is actually worth just £5,714 in 2012/13 terms (5). That is the same level as when John Major felt it necessary to set up the Dearing review, with the agreement of Tony Blair in Opposition.
Mark Corver also points out in his recent fascinating LinkedIn post that an international student at a higher-tariff provider is now worth £69,000 (6) more to their university over the lifetime of a three-year course than a home student, as a result of the much higher international student fees. One possible response to that is to beat up on universities, as the Minister for Universities did earlier this week in a piece on the Telegraph website, for feathering their own nests. Another is to recognise that universities have not let their charitable status hold them back in becoming a vitally important UK export sector from which we all benefit – and also that it is our leading universities’ entrepreneurial spirit which has created the cross-subsidies that keep UK universities at the top of the international league tables, which ministers generally like to celebrate.
And despite all the accusations and denials, we should be honest that university staff would have to be super human not to take those stark numbers into account when deciding how many of their places will be reserved for people from other countries and how many for home students.
When I have spoken at this and similar events in the past, I have usually been optimistic on future student numbers. There are still some grounds for optimism in relation to both home and international students. For example, we have had decades of growth in UK higher education and the number of UK school leavers grows in each year of this decade.
We used to predict that English universities alone would need another 350,000 places for home students by 2035 (7) – and many more still if the opportunity to reach higher education were spread more equally throughout society. However, we are more pessimistic now because, while demand for higher education went up during COVID, it has slipped back in recent times.
In relation to international students, last week’s report from the Office for Students notes:
‘The reported non-UK student recruitment in 2023-24 was 15.5 per cent lower than last year’s forecast, largely because of a reduction in recruitment from January 2024 onwards [when the rules on dependants were tightened up]. This reduction is forecast to continue in 2024-25 with a small overall decrease in student numbers, meaning that entrant numbers are now projected to be 21 per cent lower than previous forecasts.’
Yesterday’s migration white paper was accompanied by a Technical Annex, which estimated the policy changes the Government has proposed will reduce incoming international students by getting on for 40,000.
In relation to home students, the Office for Students’ report notes:
‘In 2023-24, UK entrants were reported at broadly the same level as the previous year, but 10.8 per cent lower than forecast.’
When it comes to the future, the OfS chastise regulated providers for being over-ambitious and model some alternative options, which suggest ‘providers would face significant financial challenges in all scenarios.’
No one knows with complete certainty why demand is now so flat, but – when focusing in on home students – it seems to me the most likely causes are:
- First, the cost-of-living affecting students, whose maintenance packages have not kept up with anything like the true cost of being a student – my killer facts on this are that 57% of full-time undergraduates now do paid work during term time (8) (according to the 2024 HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey) and also that, according to our calculations, students need £18k per year to live with dignity (9), which is significantly above the maximum maintenance loan – this number was calculated for second and third-years in houses of multiple occupation, but I can announced today that we are now working on a second iteration of the Student Minimum Income Standard with Technology1 and the University of Loughborough looking at first-year students in PBSA.
- The second factor that I think is dampening demand is the negative rhetoric about higher education emanating from all sorts of places. In the last few days, we even have had two Labour MPs for northern seats say they are relaxed about the prospect of universities disappearing – one of them, Dan Carden, wrote in the Daily Mail that he ‘would close half our universities and turn them into vocational colleges.’ With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Before I sit down, I want to make just one more point. I was asked in the rubric for today to mention degree apprenticeships. So let me say that there is a whole lot of nonsense talked about them, especially to young people. They are amazing when they work out, such as when the apprentice knows exactly what profession they want to enter and to work in for the foreseeable future. I am proud to have a relative doing one. But despite all the promises, especially from the previous Government, degree apprenticeships barely exist for young people just out of school. Only 5% of Level 6 entrants are on degree apprenticeships (10) and the majority of them are 25 or over – just 13% were aged 18 in 2022/23. Moreover, many of those who do start a Level 6 apprenticeship do not complete the course. So for a conference like this one in 2025, degree apprenticeships remain something of a red herring.
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Euro visions: Everything’s going on in Basel but the rent
This year’s Eurovision host city is Basel in Switzerland (“tiny but shiny”), which is also home to the country’s biggest and best Fasnacht.
Every year at the start of lent, the German-speaking regions hold a huge carnival with elaborate parades, artistic masks, and costumes, along with Guggenmusik – brass bands playing loud, off-beat music.
It’s the world’s only major carnival with Protestant rather than Catholic roots – so there’s all sorts of weird rules – picking up confetti from the ground is frowned upon, you must be a member of a registered “clique” to participate in costume, and masked participants have to remain completely anonymous during the parade.
It’s more focused on satire and social commentary than pure revelry, and naturally universities and their students have historically played a big role in that – faculties host workshops where students craft “Zeedel” (satirical verses distributed during Fasnacht) that cleverly comment on academic life or current events.
Some of the old student fraternities like Zofingia organise events like the Zofingerconzärtli, a big pre-Fasnacht performance featuring satire on key figures – this year there a parody of the University of Basel’s Rector Andrea Schenker-Wicki, with a cracking line about overstaying students who’ve “occupied study places for years and now even buildings”.
Drink a sip of beer as punishment
Zofingia has a problem, mind – its membership is male only, and last year the University of Lausanne and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) derecognised it as a result. The case escalated to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court – which ultimately ruled that public universities have the right to revoke recognition of associations that don’t align with gender equality principles:
“It is undoubtedly very valuable and can represent an advantage for one’s future professional network. If female students are denied access to this network solely because of their gender, they do not have the same opportunities as male students.
A few years ago, the Antifa student group in Basel attempted to prevent Zofinga students from making a public appearance at the Dies academicus (a big day when regular classes are suspended to allow for academic and cultural activities, and awards) on the basis of their discriminatory practices – activists pelted them with water balloons.
Having been the object of some of Zofingia’s Zofingerconzärtli jokes, it’s the activists that’ll be having the last light now, not leat because the University of Basel was the first in Switzerland to admit women as students in 1890 and is now under pressure to follow suit.
We noticed it and were surprised
Anyway back to this year’s Fasnacht – which starts at an ungodly 4am. This year one of the other cliques – the Central Club Basel (CCB) – created a theme for their lanterns criticizing breakdowns in communication in society and people existing in filter bubbles, all under the slogan “I won’t talk to you”.
The problem was that their 4am lantern depicted Donald Trump on a middle finger, and members wore giant middle finger masks. When videos went viral on TikTok and X (with over 23 million views), it was misinterpreted internationally as an anti-Trump protest rally in Switzerland – causing both diplomatic confusion and online outrage.
In the aftermath the clique’s leader, Andi Meier, argued they’d “hit the nail on the head” with the theme:
What’s happening now is, in fact, exactly that: A judgment is simply made and uploaded to social media without checking the facts.
Ding-a-dong every hour
Outside of carnival season, the University of Basel feels like a lot of elite-ish universities around Europe – although there are some distinctive things to note.
Its “double bell” system marks the “akademisches Viertel” (academic quarter), a centuries-old tradition dating back to the university’s 1460 founding. The first bell rings on the hour to signal the official class time, while the second bell 15 minutes later indicates when classes actually begin.
The tradition originated from practical needs – navigating between scattered medieval buildings, allowing professors preparation time, and accommodating imprecise timekeeping. Today, courses are designated as either “cum tempore” (c.t.), beginning 15 minutes after the hour, or “sine tempore” (s.t.), starting precisely on time, with most following the c.t. convention.
It offers a fascinating “try before you buy” thing. The “Course Auditing Program” allows anyone that’s interested to attend specific lectures without formal enrollment – participants pay CHF 60 per credit hour, with a strong conversion rate into actual applications, as well as a healthy level of attendance from the general public.
Just as in plenty of other European universities, there’s an Ombudsman’s Office – available to all university members for the purpose of dealing with internal university concerns and complaints. There’s also an (academic) integrity ombudsperson and a personal integrity function that attempts to set professional standards for studying and working together in a respectful and professional way.
Regular readers will know I’ve started to become obsessed with degree structures – here the finances of delivery hang together via the sort of interdisciplinary approach we’ve seen elsewhere, such that UG 180 students studying (for example) English complete 75 credits in the Wahlbereich (intra-faculty electives outside of the subject), picking and mixing their way astound core modules in other disciplines.
Students can also pick up 6 ECTS for internships, and because the university puts a high value on student participation and associative activity, those organising groups and events or sitting on university committees can earn “campus credits” worth 6 ECTS towards their actual degree, as long as they demonstrate the hours they’ve put in and the learning gained.
Pharma chameleon
The student housing association, known as “WoVe,” was founded by students in 1970 as a self-help organization to draw attention to the precarious situation students faced on the housing market at the time – today it operates thousands of bedspaces with rents as low as £350 a month – no mean feat in a city where a schnitzel and chips in the university canteen can set you back £15.
Its AI initiative is interesting too – a broad-based project aimed at addressing the challenges posed to our society by the ongoing development of artificial intelligence. New research findings are bundled and made visible, university teaching is being developed for the age of AI, and employees are being empowered to deal constructively with AI in the course of their work.
Basel is big in pharma – home to giants like Roche and Novartis – but its innovation ecosystem has only recently gained momentum despite the city’s understated culture where “billionaires cycle to bakeries.” Its new Innovation Office has dramatically increased spinout rates by benchmarking against powerhouses like Oxford and MIT – and takes just 4-6 per cent equity in spinouts with no upfront license fees, though entrepreneurs still face Switzerland’s high incorporation costs (CHF100,000).
My favourite thing, though, is the day long matriculation ceremony for new students – which along with the usual inspiring talks and introduction to the university’s history and traditions, involves students queuing up to sign an ornate matriculation book with carefully preserved pages of signatures dating back decades – all of which creates a profound sense of continuity and belonging that the Freshers Foam Party back home is never going to match.
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Victorian universities table 2024 financial results – Campus Review
Monash University vice-chancellor Sharon Pickering appears at the second inquiry into antisemitism at universities at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman
A majority of Victorian universities posted operating losses in 2024 but continued to boost the salaries of their vice-chancellors, annual reports reveal.
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‘We’re here to detect the presence of learning:’ Danny Liu explains USyd’s AI policy – Campus Review
The University of Sydney’s (USyd) new artificial intelligence (AI) learning and assessment policy is commonsense for both teachers and students, head of the uni’s AI group has said.
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UKRI has too many people telling it what to do without the resources to do what it’s told
UKRI has a massive job.
As the National Audit Office’s (NAO) new report sets out in 2023–24 UKRI assessed close to 29,000 grant funding applications and spent £6bn on innovation grants. It featured in 105 policy papers across 13 ministerial departments in the last three years alone, and it has been seven years since the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) formally set out UKRI’s role and objectives.
Scale
The scale of UKRI’s work is so massive that according to its own estimates
[…] were it to receive a 2% budget increase each year for the following three financial years, its existing legal, statutory and political commitments would take up around 98% of its budget in 2025-26, 84% in 2026–27, and 74% in 2027–28. When also including investments that it considers critical, such as continuing to fund similar numbers of new doctoral students and similar levels of new curiosity-driven research, this would then take up around 103%, 101%, and 99% of its future budget, respectively, in those years
The obvious question here is if UKRI has so much to do, if it is then compelled to do even more, how can it possibly change as government introduces new priorities. Whether it is moonshots, levelling up, supporting the industrial strategy, fuelling government missions, working with devolved authorities, or whatever comes next, UKRI’s funding is so committed it has little bandwidth to put its massive resources behind emerging government strategies.
However, this assumes that UKRI has a clear idea of what it’s supposed to do in the first place.
Roughly, UKRI has a corporate strategy which then informs its funding calls which institutions then bid for and through post award work UKRI then assures that the thing it set out to do is being done in some way. The NAO found that how government communicates its priorities to UKRI is a bewildering mix of things:
ad hoc and routine meetings; board meetings; formal letters; key UK government strategies and mission statements; and spending review budgets. These are not consolidated or ranked, meaning that the government does not currently have an overall picture of what it is asking UKRI to do.
It is therefore not surprising that in UKRI’s own strategy none of its formal objectives are “specific, measurable or time-bound, making it difficult to understand what outcome UKRI is seeking to achieve.”
Priorities
To the outside observer it would seem odd that UKRI doesn’t have a single ministerial letter with a single set of priorities which it can then pursue at the expense of everything else. Instead, in reading the NAO report it seems that UKRI has become the everything box where the entire hopes of a government are pinned, whether UKRI has the resources to achieve them or not.
It’s easy to see how the research funding ecosystem becomes so complex. UKRI is an important part but it sits alongside the likes of ARIA, charitable organisations, national institutes, venture capital, businesses, and others. The bluntest assessment is that if the government is unable to specify a single set of aims for UKRI, UKRI then cannot measure outcomes as clearly as it would like – and even if it could there is little spare budget to pivot its work. The report makes clear that there is ongoing “prioritisation” to address this confusion – but this work will not conclude until after the spending review, by which point key decisions will already have been made.
It’s not that UKRI is failing – by any reasonable assessment it is powering a world-leading research ecosystem, even with some deep cultural challenges – it’s that as NAO point out it is given a lot to do without all the tools to do it, and even when it can measure its work government priorities are liable to change anyway. The one thing that good research and innovation policy needs is time. The one thing every government has is little time to get anything done.
It is even harder to assess whether its measurable things are good value on their own terms. NAO is interested in ensuring the public gets value for money in the things it funds. One of the challenges in assessing whether what UKRI does is good value for money is that outcomes from research and innovation funding are diffuse, happen on a long-time scale, and may even fail but in doing so moves the research ecosystem toward something that works in some hard to measure and adjacent way.
Value
Although not directly captured within the NAO report, assessing value for money within research and innovation also depends on which level it is assessed. For example, there may be investments in breakthrough science which return little direct economic benefits but expand the knowledge of a field in a way they one day might. There may be investments that achieve immediate economic benefits but have few long term economic benefits as new technologies become available.
It is clear that UKRI would benefit from fewer directions and fewer priorities which would allow it to use its resources more efficiently and in turn measure its impact more easily. The problem is that government policy overtakes bureaucratic needs which in turn encourages policy churn.
In lieu of being able to change the nature of politics part of the solution must lie in changing how UKRI works. The organisation is aware of this, and realises it needs a capacity which goes beyond adjusting the direction of its existing activities – rather, one that “incentivises applicants to put forward ideas that align with government objectives which can be quicker and more efficient than setting up new programmes.”
The fundamental problem for policy makers is that they have collectively turned to UKRI with an enormous list of asks without the resources to achieve them. UKRI either needs clearer direction or more resources, or both, what it does not need is more asks without clear priorities.
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The National Audit Office’s review of UKRI has lessons for the government
It should come as little surprise – given the scale and complexity of the challenge – that the government sees investing in research and innovation (R&I), and the accompanying promise of new technologies and ideas, as key to achieving its complex policy goals of growing the economy, transitioning to clean power, and modernising the NHS.
After all, history shows that state backing of R&I to overcome a range of problems – particularly in times of crisis – is hardly a novel idea. If the rapid technological advances witnessed in the 1940s to support the war effort are receding further into the past, then memories of the mass Covid-19 vaccine rollout at least remain fresh.
With this in mind, the government’s commitment “to promote innovation and harness the full potential of the UK’s science base” through “protecting record funding for research and development” is merely the latest example of those in power acknowledging the vast capacity of R&I to transform society.
This tradition at least partly explains the strong international reputation the UK has accumulated over the years in the field of R&I, with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – the country’s largest single public funder of R&I – at the forefront.
In 2023–24, UKRI assessed 28,866 applications for competitive grant funding, ultimately spending £6 billion on R&I grants. Its recently approved projects have included funding for very early-stage research in microbial fuel cells and hydrogen purification, and the development of bone stem cell and biomaterial technology to reduce infection rates and the cost of hip repairs.
In short, UKRI plays a critical role in the country’s R&I ecosystem, supporting cutting-edge work that feeds not only into the government’s environmental and health policy ambitions, but in other areas too.
And by looking at the effectiveness of UKRI’s grant support, the National Audit Office (NAO) has identified some lessons for government that can serve a very useful, and much broader, purpose when it comes to tackling the major challenges facing the country.
Lessons learned
First is the importance of taking a planned and coordinated approach to R&I, which involves using good quality information on funding and knowing how to build a base to innovate in each research area. Government departments should be aware of other organisations with related objectives, determine whether they are also putting funds or resources into trying to innovate in that area, and identify potential linkages with their own workstreams.
This “portfolio” approach to innovation is a key component in well-managed risk taking, which brings us to our second lesson: the need to establish a clear and effective risk appetite, and put in place the organisational cultures and processes that can support bold decision-making. Innovation – the act or process of doing something that has not been done before – goes hand-in-hand with risk. Embracing it requires the knowledge and the confidence in accepting that things may not turn out quite as intended, or may even fail together.
The head of the NAO said as much in his recent address in Parliament, where he called on the government to unlock the vast opportunities for boosting productivity and strengthening resilience in the public sector by adopting a fast-learning approach when investing in innovation: in other words, learning quickly what works and what does not, so that failed projects can be promptly scrapped in favour of redirecting energy and resources to more promising ideas.
Ultimately, a coherent, comprehensive and clearly communicated risk appetite can help organisations reap substantial rewards, more than offsetting the disappointment of unsuccessful ventures.
Third is the caveat that while a clear plan, coordination and risk appetite can lead to successes, the full benefits of innovation cannot be realised without effective monitoring and evaluation. As well as evaluating programmes on a macro level, organisations should regularly draw together learning by theme (such as in a specific research area), with the support of strong data systems. Doing so can ensure that they effectively capture cumulative learning and develop a well-rounded understanding of which innovations are working well, which ones are not, and why.
Across the whole of government
Arguably the most important lesson of all, however, is remembering that these insights cut across the whole of government and need not be strictly applied to the domain of R&I. The projects funded by UKRI may be operating on the frontier of scientific and technological research, but this does not mean that what we learn about their approaches to innovation cannot be applied to other government contexts.
If government is to achieve its long-term policy goals, it must do more to identify the public spaces where innovation is lacking, and take measures to reverse this trend. This includes breaking down the barriers that are preventing some organisations from adopting the right culture to allow innovation to flourish. It would do well to start with taking on board some of the lessons learned from UKRI’s approach.
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Freelance investigative journalist Sammy Sussman to headline FIRE’s student press workshop
FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative is thrilled to announce that freelance investigative journalist Sammy Sussman will keynote our third annual Free Press Workshop on June 14! The workshop brings college journalists together to learn about the First Amendment, media law, and using the law as a tool in reporting.
Sussman is based in New York and has written for a variety of publications. He serves as the lead reporter on “Behind the Badge,” an investigative collaboration with MuckRock dedicated to publishing police misconduct files from departments throughout New York State. He has previously written for New York magazine, VAN Magazine, and New York Focus. Sussman covers policing and prison abuses as well as sexual misconduct. He has experience doing extensive public records reporting both domestically and abroad.
This free workshop will bring together student journalists from across the country to learn how to assert their right to press freedom.
Sussman began as a student journalist at the University of Michigan, where he founded and directed The Michigan Daily’s investigative section, Focal Point. While at the Daily, Sussman used public records to break stories numerous stories about sexual harassment allegations and the university’s use of non-disclosure agreements to silence former employees.
Sussman’s experience leveraging the law to build an impressive portfolio, first as a student and now as a professional reporter, makes him well-suited to speak to student journalists getting ready to embark on their own careers.
We still have a handful of spots available for student journalists who want to hear from Sussman, meet fellow journalists from other schools, and learn about using the law in their newsrooms. Make sure you register here. This conference is free for accepted students and includes meals and a $350 travel stipend. Additional travel scholarships are available by application.
Our team is excited to hear what Sussman has to say to the next generation of journalists, and we look forward to welcoming students from across the country to Philadelphia this summer!
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House Introduces Bipartisan Paid Leave Legislative Proposal – CUPA-HR
by CUPA-HR | May 13, 2025
On April 30, Representatives Stephanie Bice (R-OK-5) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA-6) introduced the More Paid Leave for More Americans Act, the result of more than two years of work by the House Paid Family Leave Working Group, which Bice and Houlahan co-chair. The package consists of two parts: the Paid Family Leave Public-Private Partnerships Act and the Interstate Paid Leave Action Network (I-PLAN) Act.
The Legislation
The first bill of the package — the Interstate Paid Leave Action Network (I-PLAN) Act — would create a national framework “to provide support and incentives for the development and adoption of an interstate agreement that facilitates streamlined benefit delivery, reduced administrative burden, and coordination and harmonization of State paid family and medical leave programs.” It is intended to help resolve the confusion and inconsistencies across the state programs, in particular for the distribution of benefits to workers who work across state lines. The network will also work to identify best practices from existing state paid leave programs, help states harmonize their policies and resolve conflicts with other states’ programs, and help employees access their benefits.
The second bill — the Paid Family Leave Public-Private Partnerships Act — would establish a three-year pilot program in which the Department of Labor would provide competitive grants to states that establish paid family leave programs that meet certain criteria. To qualify, states would be required to partner with private entities via Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) and participate in I-PLAN. The state programs would be required to offer at least six weeks of paid leave for the birth or adoption of a new child and provide a wage replacement rate between 50% and 67% depending on the income of the individual. Individuals at or below the poverty line for a family of four must receive 67% of their wages, while individuals earning more than double the poverty line for a family of four must receive 50% of their wages. The maximum benefit a worker can receive is 150% of a state’s average weekly wage.
Looking Ahead
Bice and Houlahan are optimistic about the package’s prospects, as both bills do maintain bipartisan support and President Trump has indicated an interest in pursuing a federal paid leave program. That said, it is uncertain if and when the House and Senate labor committees would take up these bills for a markup, which is the first step in getting the bill to a floor vote. CUPA-HR will continue to keep members apprised of updates related to this bill and other paid leave proposals that emerge from Congress.
