Your graduate programs should be thriving, but if you’re relying on outdated outreach tactics, you’re leaving enrollments on the table. Today’s grad students expect more personalization, relevance, and connection. And if you’re not aligning with their needs, another institution will. The only way to meet them where they are is by asking the right questions and getting real answers. That’s exactly what Collegis Education and UPCEA did, and now we’re pulling back the curtain to share what we found.
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This story will be updated.
President Donald Trump is planning to sign an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to close the agency, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported.
The president’s order—scheduled to be signed at 2 p.m. in the Oval Office—is the first step in carrying out his controversial campaign promise to abolish the 45-year-old department. A draft of the order provided to Inside Higher Ed criticizes the department for spending “more than $1 trillion without producing virtually any improvement in student reading and mathematics scores.” Trump’s press secretary called reports about the order “fake news.”
Education advocates have already shown staunch opposition to the executive action. The American Federation of Teachers, a key higher ed union, was one of the first groups to pipe up when the news broke Wednesday evening, calling the order a government attempt to “abdicate its responsibility to all children, students and working families.”
“The Department of Education, and the laws it is supposed to execute, has one major purpose: to level the playing field and fill opportunity gaps to help every child in America succeed,” union president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “No one likes bureaucracy, and everyone’s in favor of more efficiency, so let’s find ways to accomplish that. But don’t use a ‘war on woke’ to attack the children living in poverty and the children with disabilities, in order to pay for vouchers and tax cuts for billionaires.”
The president and his allies have promoted the idea of dismantling the agency since the early days of his 2024 campaign, saying the department has grown too big and interferes in matters best left to local and state authorities. They also argue the agency’s existence violates the Constitution (because the document doesn’t mention education) and is a prime example of federal bloat and excess.
Read More on Trump’s Plans to Break Up the Department
Such an order has been rumored for weeks, and higher education officials have been nervously waiting for the shoe to drop since McMahon was confirmed by the Senate Monday afternoon. But the secretary backed plans to break up or diminish the department at her confirmation last month, and shortly after taking office, she wrote to agency staff about their “momentous final mission,” which includes overhauling the agency and eliminating “bureaucratic bloat.” She never did directly use the words “dismantle” or “abolish” but pledged to “send education back to the states.”
“As I’ve learned many times throughout my career, disruption leads to innovation and gets results,” she wrote. “We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul—a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great.”
Eliminating the Education Department and sending key programs such as the Office for Civil Rights to other agencies was a key part of the conservative blueprint Project 2025’s plans to reshape education policy in America. But recent public opinion polls have found support for keeping the agency.
One survey conducted by the progressive think tank Data for Progress, on behalf of the Student Borrower Protection Center, a left-wing advocacy group, showed that 61 percent of all respondents “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed the idea of eliminating the department. Another poll from Morning Consult, a data-driven insights company, showed that a large chunk of voters—41 percent—actually want to increase funding to the department.
The order doesn’t mean the department will close tomorrow or even this month, as it calls for the secretary to create a plan to wind down operations. McMahon also told senators during her confirmation that only Congress can shut down the agency altogether.
As talks about the department’s demise ramped up in recent weeks, lawmakers, student advocacy groups, civil rights organizations and left-leaning think tanks warned how destructive dismantling the department could be.
Democrats in the House started pushing back on the idea as early as Feb. 10, when they walked directly up to the department’s front doors and demanded a meeting with then–acting education secretary Denise Carter. Denied entry, they argued the department’s existence is key to supporting students with disabilities and making higher education accessible to all.
That same week, several key senators wrote a letter to the department outlining their “serious concerns” about its actions.
“We will not stand by and allow the impact that dismantling the Department of Education would have on the nation’s students, parents, borrowers, educators, and communities,” the lawmakers wrote.
Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, put out a statement expressing similar concerns for students of color just minutes after McMahon was confirmed. The NAACP played a key role in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools, and has been a longtime advocate for equality and opportunity in education. He said that protecting the Department of Education is critical, since the agency not only funds public schools, but “enforces essential civil rights laws.”
“This is an agency we cannot afford to dismantle,” he said.
On Tuesday morning, EdTrust, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group, said America has reached “a dangerous turning point for public education.”
“Simply put: If we are truly to reach America’s ‘Golden Age,’ we need to build a better, stronger Department of Education, not tear it down altogether,” the organization wrote in a statement.
Kevin Carey, vice president of education at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said in a statement that eliminating the department is a “deeply unpopular idea,” citing the organization’s own new polling data.
The survey found that over all only 26 percent of adults support the department’s closure. And though the Trump administration says it is carrying out the will of the people who elected him to office, barely half of Republicans want closure. Even fewer members of the GOP support the specific consequences of shuttering the department, like moving federal financial aid to an agency with no experience overseeing the program.
“This is all part of the standard authoritarian playbook for would-be dictators engaged in tearing down democratic institutions,” Carey wrote. Dismantling the department would be “a nihilistic act of civic vandalism, carried out by ideological zealots.”
But Carey and others also note that, ultimately, the Trump administration lacks the legal authority to actually close the Department of Education, making full abolishment more complicated than the president suggests.
Shuttering the agency would require 60 votes in the Senate as well as a majority in the House, as the department’s existence is written into statute. And with a 53-seat majority in the Senate, Republicans don’t currently have the votes unless some Democrats back the plan.
Still, Trump has continued to promote the concept, and red states across the country have backed it. Although the president has not disclosed specific details on how he would try to overcome the political and legal hurdles, higher education policy experts predict he’s likely to leave the skeleton of the department standing while gutting the agency of everything but its statutorily protected duties.
Conservative groups, most notably the Heritage Foundation, have suggested redistributing responsibilities by moving programs to other agencies. For example, the federal student loan system could be moved to the Treasury, and the Office for Civil Rights could be moved to the Department of Justice.
Critics of the idea say that such proposals need more specifics that spell out how exactly the plan would work, what programs would stay, which ones would go away and what agencies would take over the department’s responsibilities.
However, higher ed policy experts from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, say getting rid of the department is “a good idea.” They describe the department as “unconstitutional,” given education is mentioned nowhere in the specific, enumerated powers given to the federal government, and call it “ineffective,” “incompetent,” “expensive” and “unnecessary.”
The founding fathers chose to exclude dominion over education from the Constitution “because education was believed best left in the hands of parents and civil society—the families and communities closest to the children—and certainly not in a distant national government,” Neal McCluskey, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, wrote in a policy handbook. “Nearly 60 years of experience with major and, until very recently, constantly expanding federal meddling in K-12 education have proved them right.”
Over the past few years, calls for the boycott of Israeli universities have grown louder. This discourse generally entwines two different sets of arguments. The first is an argument about the effectiveness or validity of academic boycotts. The second, because it’s Israel, is about whether Israeli universities are being unfairly targeted due to anti-Semitism. Curiously, what Israeli universities themselves might have specifically done to deserve is often relegated to an afterthought.
My guest today is Maya Wind. She is an Israeli citizen, and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Riverside. She is also the author of Towers of Ivory and Steel, How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, published last year by Verso press. Her book is a direct answer to that last question. The charge sheet that she brings against Israeli universities is a long one. And it should give people pause before thinking that Israeli universities are unproblematic.
Some of you are not going to like this interview. I suspect some will not enjoy the platform given to these opinions. But given the tenor of the times, I very much think it is worth a listen. I think there are two points in particular that are worth thinking about. The first is whether the boycott is about the universities themselves, or about Israel in general. The second is the standard for boycott. Wind makes it clear that she doesn’t see an absolute standard here other than that some oppressed group requests. So, for her, the relative level of complicity of Israeli universities in the dispossession of Palestinians and, say, that of Chinese universities in the repression of Uyghurs is irrelevant because the key factor is that one group asked for the boycott and the other didn’t. It’s about consistent allyship rather than relative guilt. That wasn’t something I had understood beforehand, and I’m guessing it might be new for many of you as well. But maybe it’s best if I let my guest explain things on her own. Over to Maya.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 3.22 | Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities
Alex Usher (AU): Maya, your book lays out the case for sanctions against Israeli universities and for boycotting them. But before we get to that, I want to ask about something you don’t really cover in the book: What’s the evidence that boycotts or academic sanctions are an effective strategy for forcing political change?
Maya Wind (MW): That’s a really crucial question. First, for listeners who may not be as familiar with the context, the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) was first called for by Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005—so, 20 years ago now. The BDS movement, including the call for an academic boycott of Israeli universities, was heavily inspired by the movement against apartheid in South Africa. In that case, the isolation of many apartheid institutions, including universities, played a key role in bringing an end to the apartheid system.
Of course, as academics and students, we are all students of history. If we take seriously the idea that Israel is a settler state and that Israelis are colonizers, then history tells us that colonizers have never initiated the process of decolonization on their own. In every case of settler colonialism, external pressure has been necessary to compel colonizers to participate in that process. The BDS movement is specifically seeking to create that external pressure by building a grassroots international movement to hold the Israeli state—and its universities—accountable.
PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, actually predates the broader BDS call by a year. It was formed in 2004 and, even then—21 years ago now—identified Israeli universities as pillars of the system of racial rule and apartheid. As academics, particularly those in the West, we have an obligation to respond to this call by severing our ties to Israeli universities. Otherwise, we remain directly complicit.
AU: Your charge sheet, if I can put it that way, against Israeli institutions is really threefold. The first major charge—using your words from the epilogue—is that they need to stop denying that their campuses stand on expropriated Palestinian lands and cease to serve as engines of Judaization, colonization, and Palestinian dispossession. What exactly do Israeli institutions do in this regard, and why does it matter so much?
MW: Right. Here, I’m following not only Palestinian civil society and Palestinian scholars but also Indigenous scholars around the world—particularly in settler states—who have long examined the role of the settler university. These scholars have highlighted how universities have often functioned as pillars of ongoing Indigenous dispossession, built on stolen lands that were cleared through genocide. This is part of a broader, global movement, and there is extensive critical scholarship on this issue in other settler states as well.
In the context of the Israeli settler state, “Judaization” is actually the official terminology used by the Israeli government. It refers to a process seen in many settler states: the twin projects of continual removal and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the transfer of Palestinian land ownership to Jewish Israelis, and the ongoing expansion of Israeli frontiers—redistributing the Jewish population across what was historic Palestine.
If we trace the history of Israeli universities, this pattern becomes clear. It starts with Hebrew University, the first university of the Zionist movement, and continues with all the universities established by the Israeli state since then. For example, the University of Haifa is in the Galilee, the region with the highest Palestinian population. Ben-Gurion University is in the Negev, an arid southern region where Jewish Israelis were historically less likely to settle. The most recent university to be accredited, Ariel University, is located in the illegal settlement of Ariel, deep in the occupied West Bank.
For over a century, Israeli universities have been physically designed, built, and strategically located to support the state’s project of Palestinian dispossession, particularly in regions of strategic concern to the Israeli government. Any reckoning with Israeli universities—or settler universities more broadly—must begin with the question of land itself. This is one of the central issues I explore in the book.
AU: Before I go into the other elements of the charge sheet, you’ve used the term “settler” and “settler colonialism” a couple of times. What distinction, if any, do you draw between the need to boycott Israeli universities, as you argue, and the historical case that could be made for boycotting institutions in Canada or the United States? Why sanction one and not the other?
MW: That’s a really important question. The first and primary answer is that the Indigenous population most directly impacted by the violence of these settler universities—in this case, Palestinians—have explicitly called for a boycott. A boycott is not a value; it is a tactic. Indigenous movements around the world have used different tactics to advance decolonization, and these tactics change over time and depend on the specific context.
In this case, more than 20 years ago, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society came together to advance their liberation struggle and issued a call for boycott. They outlined a theory of change, arguing that Western governments—particularly those heavily invested in the Israeli settler state—not only provide arms but also offer diplomatic and legal immunity that allows Israel to continue committing war crimes, including, most recently, the crime of genocide. Given this, they have made it clear that those of us in the international community have an obligation to rise up and pressure our own governments to sever ties and isolate the Israeli regime until the process of decolonization begins and the system of apartheid is dismantled.
This is a grassroots movement, and we do not need to wait for our governments to act.
AU: That’s a useful clarification. The second area where you’re most critical is the cooperation between universities on one hand and the military, Shin Bet, and other security services on the other. You write about how the connection between university research and the military in Israel is somewhat different from how it operates in the United States or other countries, partly because research institutes in Israel cooperate so directly with the security sector. What does this military cooperation look like in practice? And is it just about research, or is there also an academic programming element?
MW: Right. This is a very important question because the collaboration between Israeli universities, the security state, and the military industry is incredibly deep and comprehensive. We see this in several ways.
First, Israeli universities function as military bases by designing and operating specialized, degree-granting programs tailored for security state personnel, including the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet), Israeli police forces, and soldiers. These are the same forces that have engaged in decades of daily violations of Palestinian rights and international law. This is well documented, and these academic programs actively train soldiers and security personnel to refine their operations.
One example is Hebrew University, where the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies trains soldiers in the Intelligence Corps, providing them with linguistic and regional expertise to improve their surveillance of the Palestinian population. This training directly contributes to the creation of target banks for airstrikes in Gaza, as we have seen over the past 16 months. That is just one of many examples.
Another form of cooperation is research and institutional collaborations. The Institute for Criminology at Hebrew University and the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University work closely with military and security state experts to produce scholarship that advances security operations. Their research informs policy recommendations for the Israeli security establishment.
A third example is the close ties between universities and military industries. It is not widely known that major arms manufacturers like Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Elbit Systems—the largest suppliers to the Israeli military and major global exporters of weapons—were actually founded on Israeli university campuses. These companies develop and refine their technologies by testing them in occupied Palestinian territories, violating international and human rights law daily. They then market these products globally as “battle-proven.” To this day, Israeli universities serve as critical laboratories for these industries.
In all of these ways, it is impossible to understand the Israeli security state and military-industrial complex without examining the role of the Israeli university system.
AU: The third charge you discuss is that Israeli universities are not academically neutral—that they do not provide all staff and students with equal opportunities to be protected from outside influence or to thrive academically. We often hear that Israeli universities do not discriminate, but you have a different perspective.
MW: Yes. One of the things that really struck me while researching and writing this book was the extensive scholarly work that already exists on this issue. I conducted an ethnography of Israeli universities, spending significant time across Israel’s eight major public universities. I spoke with and accompanied Palestinian student organizers, and I interviewed both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli faculty and staff.
What stood out to me—both in my fieldwork and in my background research—was just how much has already been written about this. There is a rich body of scholarship, not only in Hebrew and Arabic but also in English, often published in leading peer-reviewed journals in Europe and North America. Palestinian scholars, both in Palestinian and Israeli universities, have extensively documented the constraints on knowledge production, the marginalization of Palestinian critical epistemology, and the challenges of producing anti-colonial scholarship within the confines of the Zionist university system. They have also written in detail about the systematic discrimination Palestinian students face and their experiences within these institutions.
Yet, despite this extensive scholarship, I find that it is largely unread in Western academic communities. This raises important questions about why we, in the West, have failed to engage with this work and why we have instead accepted the narratives presented by Jewish Israeli university administrators and scholars, who often portray Israeli universities as beacons of democracy. In reality, this has never been the case, and Palestinians have been documenting and writing about these inequalities for a very long time. I cite much of this work in my book, and I also corroborated it through my own interviews.
What I found was not only that Israeli universities are embedded within and implicated in a broader system of apartheid, but also that Palestinian student organizing and political activism on campuses are violently suppressed. This suppression has intensified over the past 16 months, as Palestinian scholars and students speak out against the genocide and mobilize for Palestinian liberation on Israeli campuses.
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AU: Maya, you’ve discussed issues at several institutions across Israel. You’ve specifically singled out Ariel University for its role in normalizing the occupation and Hebrew University for its failure to protect academic freedom. Are there any institutions that stand out to you as having a better record than others? Is there one that you might say should not be subject to a boycott?
MW: The call for an academic boycott was laid out by Palestinian civil society and Palestinian scholars. Just last year, in 2023, this call was reiterated by not only the Union of Palestinian Faculty and Employees but also by every single Palestinian student union at every Palestinian university. They reaffirmed their call for us to enact the academic boycott.
This is a call coming from Palestinian civil society, and as it is worded, it applies to all complicit Israeli universities. In the course of my research, I found that every single Israeli university is deeply implicated in the structures of occupation and apartheid. Not one is exempt.
At this time, the call remains for a boycott of all Israeli universities, and I hope my book helps to substantiate why that is necessary.
AU: It sounds to me like the Palestinian call is really about Israel as a whole, rather than specifically about Israeli universities, right? And I have to say, when I read the chapter on the relationship between universities and the military, I thought to myself: I can’t imagine a university in any country—let alone one as highly militarized as Israel—saying no to providing academic training for military officers.
Universities are instrumental to the state, right? So when we talk about disapproving of university policies, aren’t we really talking about disapproving of Israeli state priorities? Is there any way an individual Israeli institution could change this if it wanted to?
MW: I think that’s a really critical question. We have to understand—and take seriously—that settler states, systems of violence, and even genocide do not reproduce themselves automatically. These are systems of violence that are upheld by a vast network of institutions, including many in civil society. It is not just the military, not just the security state, and not just military industries. A whole host of public institutions—what we often think of as civil society institutions—lend themselves to this violence of elimination. This case is no different.
But what we also have to recognize is that it is not just the institutions—it is the people within them who sustain and reproduce these structures. There is the active labor of thousands of Israelis, across hundreds of institutions, including universities, who are making this violence possible.
What I want to emphasize here is that Israeli academics have tried very hard to have it both ways. The call for an academic boycott has been underway for more than two decades, and one of the main arguments used by Israeli university administrators and academics who oppose it is that they cannot possibly be held accountable for the crimes of the Israeli state—if such crimes even exist, as is still debated within Israeli universities. They claim that it is unjust to hold them responsible for what the state is doing.
But at the same time, when they are confronted—particularly over the last year—by thousands of students, faculty, and staff participating in the boycott, pointing out that they are directly complicit in apartheid and now genocide, these same university administrators and Israeli academics respond in exactly the opposite way. They say precisely what you just said: Of course, we are embedded in the state. Many of our students are soldiers. Why wouldn’t we cooperate with the state we are a part of?
They often go even further, offering justifications for genocide and apartheid. So they cannot have it both ways. Either they defend themselves by claiming they are not at all accountable and cannot be implicated in what the state is doing, or they admit that they are, in fact, part of the state—at which point they must also take responsibility for their role in sustaining its system of oppression.
AU: One argument that emerged in Canada over the last few months—particularly around the end of the encampment at the University of Windsor, if I’m not mistaken—was that the university agreed to boycott Israeli universities as part of a resolution. In response, some argued—I can’t remember if it was Michael Geist or Anthony Housefather in the House of Commons—that if you boycott Israeli institutions but not universities in other countries guilty of similar actions, then that is antisemitic.
For instance, many of the same criticisms you make about Israeli universities—such as failing to uphold free debate and cooperating with the military—could likely be made about Chinese universities in relation to the government’s policies in Xinjiang or Tibet. What do you make of that argument? Should we also be boycotting Chinese universities? And if not, why not?
MW: Boycotts—whether organized by unions or any other group—are always made in response to a call. It is not up to us to unilaterally decide to boycott a university system. That decision belongs to the communities directly impacted by the violence of that university system. When such a call is made, it is then up to the international community to assess whether the institutions in question are, in fact, complicit—and to decide whether to participate in the boycott.
To my knowledge, there has been no such call from other Indigenous communities in similar contexts. There could be, and if there were, I think many of us would absolutely consider participating. But this argument is ultimately a distraction—one that is often pushed by Israel and its Zionist supporters to divert attention from the central issue at hand. The reality is that Palestinians have called for a boycott. Now, it is up to us to assess whether that call is justified and whether we will comply
AU: You wrote this book prior to October 7, 2023. What has changed since then, both in terms of how Israeli universities behave and in terms of the boycott movement?
MW: Over the past 16 months, we have seen a devastating acceleration of a project that has spanned over a hundred years. Genocide is structural to the Israeli state, just as it is to settler states elsewhere. For two decades, Palestinian civil society has been telling us that various institutions in Israeli society have long served as part of the infrastructure laying the groundwork for the genocide we have witnessed unfold over the last 16 months—part of the Israeli state’s long-term project to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the Palestinian people.
My book, which I submitted to the press shortly before this latest acceleration of the genocide began, details many of the ways in which universities are implicated. But it should come as no surprise that this is a structural problem. Israeli universities have continuously worked in service of the state, uninterrupted and ongoing, from before the state’s founding to the present moment—including this phase of the genocide.
Over the last 16 months, Israeli universities have continued to develop weapons and technologies used against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. They have continued training soldiers and producing Hasbara—Israeli state propaganda—to shield Israel from international criticism. In fact, Israeli universities have actively intervened to prevent academic boycotts from being implemented on Western campuses, smearing student, faculty, and staff organizers, and in some cases, calling for them to be forcibly dispersed. They have also played a direct role in producing legal scholarship to aid the Israeli state in resisting the genocide case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.
Beyond this, universities have provided tangible benefits to soldiers, offering course credit, scholarships, and special privileges for those returning from Gaza. In countless ways, Israeli universities remain embedded in the infrastructure of violence that sustains the Israeli state, even as that state now stands on trial in the highest courts in the world for genocide.
If you’re asking what has changed, I think the biggest shift is that more people have now come to recognize what Palestinians have been calling for over the past 20 years: the urgency of intervention. There is an increasing recognition that international civil society must take action and stand with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation—and participate in the broader project of decolonization. That is a significant development in the global movement for Palestinian liberation, and we will continue to build on it.
There is no going back.
AU: Maya, thanks so much for joining us today.
MW: Thank you.
AU: And that just leaves me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, as well as you—our viewers, listeners, and readers—for tuning in. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. Folks, please subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education.
Join us again next week when I’ll be joined by Hilligje van’t Land. She’s the Secretary General of the International Association of Universities, located in Paris, and she’ll be talking about the joys of running the world’s oldest transnational university organization. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
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Postcard views, luxurious watches, delicious cheese and chocolate — the country that comes to mind is idyllic Switzerland in central Europe.
But this seemingly perfect country comes at a price: its high cost of living. According to Coop and Carrefour, two leading supermarket chains in Switzerland and France, one chocolate bar in Switzerland costs more than one and a half times as much as the same chocolate bar in neighbouring France.
“The price of chocolate with regards to its quality in Switzerland is fair and for me worth paying,” said Andrina Deragisch, a 17-year-old student of Kantonsschule Zürich Nord, a Swiss high school.
Chocolate’s price is affected by various factors, most importantly the price of the cocoa bean. Nowadays that is at an all-time high due to climate change, plant-affecting pests in Africa and East Asia and packaging prices and taxes. Its price is four to five times higher than a year ago, according to Migros, the second-largest retail company in Switzerland. But what makes the difference in Switzerland?
“The most significant factor is the labour,” says Richie Gray, global head of SnackFutures, the Corporate Venture Capital Hub of Mondelez that invests in businesses in the snack industry.
Workers in Switzerland are paid well, which makes them able to keep up with the high cost of living. This leads to a high-end price of chocolate in comparison to neighbouring countries. To avoid such high labour costs, Mondelez moved Toblerone’s production to Slovakia in 2023, imitating various international companies such as Nestlé and Barry Callebaut, that have shifted a great part of their production operations to Eastern Europe and Asia.
According to the 2017 “Swiss Manufacturing Survey“ from the University of St. Gallen, 46% of the interviewed firms are considering outsourcing parts of their manufacturing operations to China, Germany or Eastern Europe.
As a result, the Swiss manufacturing industry is seeing rising unemployment; the number of jobs has already fallen by 10% since 1990, and lower taxes from the international companies to Swiss authorities. In further development this leads to reduced purchasing power of customers and state incomes, weakening the country’s economy.
According to data from the Federal Statistical Office and the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies, the average Swiss person earns a little over 6,750 Swiss francs (CHF) monthly whereas in France, average wages are about 2,570 CHF a month. Switzerland counts as one of the best-earning countries in the world, creating a high-quality of life for its population.
According to Human Development Reports, Switzerland’s Human Development Index placed first among the whole world, providing wealth, comfort, material goods and exceptional healthcare and education.
High productivity and competitiveness shape the Swiss labour market, said Christian Gast, chief economist at Swissrock, an asset management company based in Zurich. “Switzerland is considered to be fully employed, with only 1.3% of the entire population having no job,” he said.
The demand for labour results in high pay. Moreover, when people earn more, they have more money to spend on products like chocolate.
Another factor is the strong Swiss franc. The European Central Bank reports that the exchange rate between the Swiss franc and the euro has constantly increased from 0.87 EUR per Swiss franc in 2018 to around 1.06 EUR per Swiss franc today.
“If you’re coming from another country, you need more of your own currency to buy a Swiss franc,” Gast said.
But what makes the Swiss currency so strong?
“Our fiscal policy is strongly regulated,” Gast said. “This means the expenses of the government are largely balanced with its incomes.”
If there is a stable relationship between expenses and income, there is little debt result and interest rates remain low. This makes Switzerland attractive to international investors. Purchases are made within the country, boosting its economy and simultaneously its prices.
However, where does Switzerland’s well-working economy with excessive prices for services and products originate from? The small country in the heart of Europe with no environmental advantages developed into a financial powerhouse with banks as its mines.
According to the Swiss Bankers Association, Swiss banks held over a quarter of all assets present in all the banks across the globe in 2018. This means that 27.5% of global revenue, amounting to US.$6.5 trillion was stored in Swiss banks.
“There are barely any countries with more international banks than Switzerland,” Gast said. Since World War II, countless wealthy people have chosen to store their money in Swiss banks as Switzerland has a proven track record for its secrecy, neutrality and stable political system.
But wouldn’t there be frustration towards such high living costs among the population? On average, prices in Switzerland are 58.4% times higher than in the rest of the countries in the European Union. Consider that in the United States, Donald Trump won a second term as president in part because he promised lower prices and affordable living costs. However, Swiss people tend to accept the high prices in the country since the quality of life is also so high.
Additionally, the inflation rates in Switzerland are low — the price level has been relatively constant or only increasing minimally. According to the Federal Statistical Office, inflation rates were only at 1.1% in 2024, whereas in the United States it was at 2.9% in December 2024. People in the United States are displeased with the sudden higher prices which means they want a solution to solve this. At the same time, Swiss people have not experienced a drastic change and therefore are not as keen to make prices lower.
As Swiss people consume around 10kg of chocolate per person each year, there’s no doubting its popularity. We are both very fond consumers of Swiss chocolate and eat at least one bar of chocolate a week. The sweetness and comforting feeling of chocolate melting on your tongue is a sensation nobody can resist.
Legal challenges to the Education Department’s guidance ordering colleges to rescind all race-based programming are piling up.
A week after the American Federation of Teachers sued the Trump administration over the guidance, the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit that seeks to restrain the department from enforcing the Feb. 14 letter.
Similar to the AFT lawsuit, the NEA argues that the letter and its threat to cut federal funding would hamper public schools’ function as “the nation’s ‘nurseries of democracy.’” The NEA lawsuit was filed in the New Hampshire federal district court, while the AFT’s challenge is in Maryland district court.
“The Trump administration is threatening to punish students, parents and educators in public schools for … fostering inclusive classrooms where diversity is valued, history is taught honestly, and every child can grow into their full brilliance,” Becky Pringle, president of the NEA, said in a news release. “We’re urging the court to block the Department of Education from enforcing this harmful and vague directive and protect students from politically motivated attacks that stifle speech and erase critical lessons.”
NEA alleges that the Dear Colleague letter “imposes vague and viewpoint discriminatory prohibitions,” “invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement,” and causes “substantial, irreparable harm.”
The NEA wants the court to declare the letter contrary to constitutional rights and place a permanent restraint on the department, preventing it from enforcing the letter’s orders.
In the New York Times obituary of Peter Elbow, the giant of composition studies, he is said to have “transformed freshman comp,” which he definitely did, but also, maybe not?
Even as someone who has done his fair share of thinking and writing about teaching writing, I did not realize that his landmark book, Writing Without Teachers, was first published all the way back in 1973. For sure, the approach to writing he advocated for in Writing Without Teachers and subsequent books challenged the prevailing dogma of academic writing by emphasizing freedom, student agency and audience above correctness and authority, but to consider the full import of Elbow’s message and compare it to what happens in writing classrooms, it’s tough to see a full “transformation” at work.
At the time I started teaching freshman composition as a graduate TA (1994), I had never heard of Peter Elbow, and none of the people tasked with preparing me for the job introduced me to his work. In fact, I would not encounter Elbow until 2001, when I expressed frustration with teaching through the lens of rhetorical “modes” and how I wished that I could get students writing more freely and authentically because I was tired of reading performative B.S. written for a grade.
“You should try Peter Elbow,” I was told. I did, and it was like the clouds suddenly parted and I could see the sun for the first time. Anyone who teaches writing as a process, who uses peer review and reflection, is working from Elbow-ian DNA. This surely fits any definition of transformation, doesn’t it?
But also, why was I not introduced to Peter Elbow as a beginning writing teacher? Why, at the time I did discover him, were departments still teaching rhetorical modes, or composition as (essentially) essays responding to literature?
In hindsight, I can tell that Elbow’s views on writing must have had a significant impact on the kind of writing I was asked to do in school and how I did it. I’ve written extensively how my grade school teachers of the 1970s privileged creativity and writing problem solving over correctness, engendering a lifelong curiosity about how writing works.
But by the time I was a teacher, it seems as though whatever transformation Elbow had caused had been beaten back, at least to some degree. Focus on process and revision remained, but this process was deployed in the making of very standard, significantly prescriptive artifacts that were easy to explain, straightforward to grade—as they fit established rubrics—and (at least in my experience) largely uninteresting to read and (in the experience of many students) uninteresting to write.
It isn’t surprising that attempts at giving students room to maneuver, which make it difficult to compare them to each other or standards of sufficiency, are resisted by those who prefer order to exploration. The most popular composition textbook of recent years is They Say/I Say (well over a million copies sold) a book that literally coaches students to write using Mad Libs–style templates to imitate forms of academic writing, under the theory students will learn academic expression through osmosis.
Having tried this book for half a semester, I understand its appeal. It’s really just a more refined version of the prescriptive process I used in the 1990s teaching rhetorical modes. If your primary goal is to have students turn in an artifact that resembles the kind of writing that would be produced through a scholarly process, it is very handy.
If the goal is to get students to think like scholars or go through a process that requires them to wrestle with the genuine challenges of academic inquiry and expression, it is a lousy choice. These are simulations of academic artifacts, predating the simulations now easily created by large language models like ChatGPT.
The orderly logic of “schooling” seems to repeatedly win over the mess and chaos of learning. Elbow argued that discovery and differentiation was the highest calling of the learning process, and that writing was an excellent vehicle for fulfilling this calling. This requires one to get comfortable with discomfort. For some reason this is serially viewed as a kind of threat to school, rather than what it should be, the focus of the whole enterprise.
The New York Times obituary calls Elbow’s approach a “more reflective and touchy-feely process,” which I read a signal as to the lack of rigor of the approach, but in truth, it’s the opposite. There’s nothing particularly rigorous about compliance, particularly when enforced by an authority above with all the power, like a teacher wielding their grade book.
As I’ve found over and over in my career, including weekly in this space for the last 13 years, there is nothing more demanding than being asked to deliver a thought that could only come from your unique intelligence. There is also nothing more interesting for both the writer and the reader.
Ultimately, I evolved in ways that make me not quite a full Elbow-ian. The experiences in The Writer’s Practice are structured in ways that do not quite square entirely with Writing With Teachers, though even as I write this sentence, I cannot help but note that calling the assignments in the book experiences, and the fact that I wrote the book in such a way that it could be engaged in the absence of a teacher, suggests that maybe the gap isn’t as wide as I perceive.
While I was working on the manuscript of what would come to be called More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, I would play around with possible titles, as the title on the proposal—“Writing With Robots”—was used for the purpose of getting attention for a book proposal, not something that genuinely reflected the sentiments of the book I planned to write.
One of the titles I considered was “Everyone Should Write,” a reference to one of Elbow’s later collected volumes, Everyone Can Write.
One of the gifts of the existence of large language models has been to demonstrate the gap between machine prose and that which can be produced by a unique human intelligence. In a way, this only revalidates Elbow’s original insights of Writing Without Teachers, that we, as humans, have a higher purpose than producing school artifacts for a grade.
I’m not giving up hope that we can accept this gift.
According to 2024 general election exit polling, 42 percent of voters with college degrees voted for now-President Donald Trump, compared to 56 percent of those without college degrees. Asked how they feel about this growing education gap in the electorate—what researchers call the diploma divide—25 percent of college and university presidents say they’re very or extremely concerned about its implications for their institution.
More say they’re highly concerned about the growing divide’s impact on higher education in general (58 percent) and on American democracy (64 percent). That’s according to a new analysis of findings from Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Presidents, completed with Hanover Research.
Presidents also offer a scathing review of how higher education has responded to this divide thus far: Just 3 percent think the sector has been very or extremely effective, versus not at all, somewhat or moderately effective. The leaders have a similarly dismal view of how higher education is responding to declining public confidence: A mere 1 percent, rounded up, think it has been highly effective. Much larger shares of presidents think higher education has not been at all effective in responding to the public confidence crisis, with presidents of private nonprofit institutions especially likely to say so, or to the growing education divide in the electorate.
Experts say that the diploma divide can’t be decoupled from the public confidence crisis, and that both have implications for the intensifying debate over, and presidential communication about, higher education’s value—especially in this political moment.
Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Presidents was conducted with Hanover Research starting in December and running through Jan. 3. The survey included 298 presidents of two- and four-year institutions, public and private, for a margin of error of 5 percent. Download a copy of the free report here, and check out reporting on the survey’s other findings, including what presidents really think about faculty tenure and student mental health, and their expectations for the second Trump administration.
On Wednesday, March 26, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a webcast with campus leaders who will share their takes on the findings. Register for that discussion here.
“Presidents should be making very clear and very concrete what the practical benefits of their university are, not just for the students that attend that university but for the community, the state at large,” said Joshua Zingher, an associate professor of political science and geography at Old Dominion University who studies elections and political behavior, including the diploma divide. “Thinking about the long-term development of the U.S. as a science power or a technology power is very much a story of the university.” He noted that football games at the University of Iowa, in his home state, pause after the first quarter so that fans can wave to patients in the campus children’s hospital—an example of how society depends on thriving colleges and universities, and how cuts to university research and other funding have ripple effects.
Matt Grossman, professor of American politics and public policy and director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, who co-authored the 2024 book Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, agreed there is reason for presidents to be concerned about the diploma divide, in that the “analogies are not great.” Just think of the politically polarized trust in so-called mainstream media, an institution in which both Democrats and Republicans were once largely confident.
But whereas Zingher said that presidents might have to “take a position” at some point, even if many loathe being seen as political figures, Grossman pointed to existing public polling linking declining confidence to concerns about ideological bias within institutions, at least among Republicans. So Grossman said he was surprised by how few presidents in IHE’s annual survey most attribute declining trust to concerns about ideological bias (11 percent). About double that share say concerns about ideological bias are very or extremely valid (22 percent).
Grossman explained that higher education has always been culturally liberal, but as social and cultural issues become more central to how people vote, it’s harder for institutions to “be above the fray.” Indeed, higher education is now a wedge issue. As for how campus leaders should respond to the diploma divide, Grossman said, “The first step would be a realization that they know that they are facing these complaints.”
Presidents of private nonprofit institutions are somewhat more likely than their public counterparts to express the highest level of concern about the divide’s impact, including on higher education in general. Region also appears to matter, with presidents in the South least likely to worry about the divide. Regarding its impact on American democracy, for example, some 45 percent of presidents in the South are very or extremely worried, versus 62 percent of those in the Midwest, 73 percent of those in the West and 75 percent in the Northeast.
The widening diploma divide means that voters without a college degree are increasingly likely to vote Republican and those with a degree are increasingly like to vote Democratic. With the Republican Party growing more critical of higher education, this has real consequences for college and university missions and budgets.
But Keith Curry, president of Compton College and chief executive of the Compton Community College District, emphasized that educating students, including about voting, transcends politics: “It’s important that as leaders we’re bipartisan, and to focus on helping students register to vote and participate in the [democratic] process. They have to understand the issues and how to gather the information. They make their own decisions.”
For what it’s worth, faculty members in a fall poll by IHE and Hanover overwhelmingly said that they planned to encourage students to vote in the 2024 election. But just 2 percent planned to tell students to vote for a particular candidate or party.
Jay Akridge, trustee chair in teaching and learning excellence, professor of agricultural economics and former provost at Purdue University, offered a slightly different take. Calling the diploma divide “concerning,” he said it might “make higher ed think more about students with parents who did not go to college and how to better serve this group of first-generation students.”
If not concerns about ideological bias, to what do presidents most attribute declining public confidence in higher education?
From a list of survey options, the plurality (49 percent) cite concerns about the value of a college education and/or whether college is worth it. A less common choice: concerns about lack of affordability, including high tuition (18 percent). And very few presidents point to concerns about whether colleges are adequately preparing students for the workforce (7 percent).
Some differences emerge by institution type, with public presidents more likely to cite concerns about whether college is worth it than their private nonprofit peers (54 percent versus 43 percent, respectively). But presidents of private nonprofits are somewhat more likely to blame concerns about affordability (22 percent versus 15 percent of public institution presidents).
As for whether presidents think that such concerns are actually founded, half say that concerns about affordability are very to extremely valid, with presidents at public institutions (57 percent) significantly more likely to say so than those at private nonprofits (39 percent).
And while very few presidents over all (1 percent) most attribute declining public confidence in higher education to concerns about equity, including access and outcomes for historically underrepresented groups, a quarter (26 percent) think that such concerns are highly valid. The same goes for higher education being disconnected from society (24 percent say this is highly valid)—something that’s arguably linked to the diploma divide, as well.
Just 15 percent of presidents say the value question is highly valid. Some 40 percent say it’s not at all valid, while an additional 46 percent rate it as somewhat or moderately valid.
In IHE’s 2024 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers with Hanover, 94 percent of CBOs somewhat or strongly agreed that their institution offers good value for what it charges for an undergraduate degree. Just 9 percent of CBOs said their institution charges too much for an undergraduate degree.
As for the student perspective, in IHE’s 2024 Student Voice survey series, most current two- and four-year students agreed that they’re getting a valuable education. But they were much less likely to agree that their college was affordable.
Martha Snyder, partner at HCM Strategists, says the education firm’s own U.S. polling and other research has found a general, even bipartisan belief “that education beyond high school in some form or fashion is necessary and important for longer-term economic viability, prosperity and longer-term job security.” But—similar to the Student Voice findings—the “disconnect tends to be in accessibility and affordability.” That is, even as Americans may understand the long-term value of higher education, it is undercut by the immediate challenges of paying for it—especially when weighed against the opportunity cost of not working, or perhaps not working as much, while pursuing a degree.
Snyder says this also points to a need for institutional transparency on cost of attendance and for better presidential communication as to why higher education works the way it does.
“Think about the notion of a credit hour, right? The complex way that pricing happens is not easily understood by students and families. And even though net price has fallen, well, what is net pricing?” she said. “So there’s another disconnect in how we are communicating the information we’re providing to individuals about the opportunities, about the pathways and about what the end result is, in terms of career opportunities and career advancement.”
Akridge, of Purdue, also noted the gap between the relatively large share of presidents who think concerns about the value of a degree are driving declining public confidence and the relatively small share who point to concerns about whether or not colleges are adequately preparing students for the workforce, as these two points are connected. Moreover, he said, there “are plenty of valid questions raised by employers about whether or not college graduates are ready for the work world.”
In just one example, a recent survey of U.S. employees and human resources leaders by Hult International Business School found that 85 percent of recent graduates wish their college had better prepared them for the workplace, and 75 percent of HR leaders say most college educations aren’t preparing people at all for their jobs. There’s a lot to mine here‚ some of it probably generational (Gen Z employees aren’t necessarily mangers’ favorites, and they have their own expectations about work).
Employer-led skills training has long been on the decline, as well. In any case, Akridge said that given employer perceptions about lack of preparation, “presidents are missing an opportunity—the so-called skills gap is an issue they can take action to close. And this is an issue where such actions will be well received by the public and will make a great story to tell.”
Akridge and David Hummels, professor of economics and dean emeritus at Purdue, last fall launched “Finding Equilibrium: Two Economists on Higher Ed’s Future,” a Substack newsletter seeking to inform the value conversation. It has offered a number of ideas for improving the career readiness of college graduates, including elevating teaching and learning as a priority through curricular and co-curricular design, innovation and delivery; rethinking organizational structures and student support with a focus on career readiness; and strengthening connections and feedback loops with employers. Akridge and Hummels have also written about how the economic case for college remains strong and how the price students actually pay to attend college has fallen.
Hummels told Inside Higher Ed that presidents are especially well positioned to share this kind of information with the public, to address the value debate head-on: “They are not passive actors. They need to get out in their communities and around their states, talking to high schools and chambers of commerce and the like, making the case that college is affordable with grant aid. That the return on college is large and positive when you take challenging courses of study and make the most of co-curricular opportunities.”
The big asterisk here is that completion rates hover in the mid–60 percent range for four-year institutions. Students pursuing more expensive college options but moving into lower-wage jobs is another problem. So it’s also “clear higher ed does not work for everyone,” Akridge said. “We don’t create value for all students.” And how to get better remains “an essential question.”
Curry, president of Compton College, said he has no doubts about higher education’s value, but that affordability is a highly valid concern at his institution.
“We have students who are thinking about, ‘Do I buy a book for math class, or do I get food?’ They have to make some real decisions based off of their current finances about to going to college. It is not just the tuition cost. It is the total cost of education—what does that look like?”
Similarly, students are weighing the cost of working versus going to college. This means that they have to be able to see higher education’s value in real time, Curry said. One way the college is helping students understand this is with program maps that list careers, salaries and other opportunities connected to various areas of study.
For Hummels, affordability also points right back to the diploma divide in terms of future funding for higher education. If a majority of voters without a college education vote for one party and express a growing conviction that college is not worth it, he said, “then it becomes easier to cut back on Pell Grants, on subsidized student loans, on state support for universities.”
The impacts of these cuts would be felt most strongly by lower-income and lower-education households, he continued, and “the lack of support becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. College will become out of reach for these households.”
Stacy Bartlett, currently the chief of staff at Point University in Georgia, will become the institution’s president, effective July 1.
Michael Benson, president of Coastal Carolina University, has been named the 27th president of West Virginia University, starting in July.
John Butler, the Haub Vice President for University Mission and Ministry at Boston College, has been appointed the institution’s president, beginning in the summer of 2026.
Elizabeth Cantwell, president of the Utah State University system, has been appointed president of Washington State University, effective April 1.
Sylvia Cox, executive vice president and chief academic officer at Southeastern Community College, has been named president of Rockingham Community College, effective May 1.
Wendy Elmore, currently executive vice president and provost of Lamar State College–Orange in Texas, has been named the institution’s next president, effective June 1.
Andrea Goldsmith, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, will become the seventh president of Stony Brook University, effective Aug. 1.
Adam Hasner, executive vice president of public policy for the Geo Group, has been named president of Florida Atlantic University.
Elizabeth Kiss, who most recently served as CEO of the Rhodes Trust, will become president of Union College, effective July 1.
Michelle Larson, president and CEO of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, has been named president of Clarkson University, effective April 1.
Dean McCurdy, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Ivy Tech Community College, has been named president of Colby-Sawyer College, effective June 1.
Heather Norris, formerly the interim chancellor of Appalachian State University, has been appointed to the position permanently, effective March 1.
Joseph Odenwald, president of Southwestern Michigan College, has been named president of Alma College, effective June 1.
Andrew Rich, dean of the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York, has been appointed president of Franklin & Marshall College, beginning this summer.
Daniel Shipp, the president of Pittsburg State University, has been named president of Maryville University in Missouri, starting in June.
Shane Smeed, president of Park University in Missouri, has been appointed president of Utah Tech University.
Gentry Sutton, currently executive vice president and vice president of advancement at Warner University in Florida, has been appointed president of the institution.
Suzanne Walsh, president of Bennett College in North Carolina, has been named president of City University of Seattle, effective July 1.
Jermaine Whirl, who most recently served as president of Augusta Technical College, has been appointed president of Savannah State University, effective April 1.
When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency set out to slash billions from the federal budget, it puzzled me as to why one of their first targets was an obscure data collection and research agency, the Institute of Education Sciences, a relatively modest operation buried deeply in the corridors of the Department of Education, and indeed one few had ever heard of. Since then, the newly installed secretary of education has ordered a review of all the department’s functions as part of what she ominously called the department’s “momentous final mission.”
A conversation with a trusted colleague helped me understand the cuts to IES, noting that the action should be seen as part of a new breed of autocrats around the world who seek to control information to hide the impacts of their actions from the public. In contemporary authoritarian governments, control of information—or what has come to be known today as informational autocracy—often substitutes for brute force.
Similar to how the Trump administration is seizing control of the White House press pool, canceling contracts for independent, high-quality education research is another way of controlling information. As Democratic lawmakers wrote in a Feb. 21 letter decrying the cuts, “The consequences of these actions will prevent the public from accessing accurate information about student demographics and academic achievement, abruptly end evaluations of federal programs that ensure taxpayer funds are spent wisely, and set back efforts to implement evidence-based reforms to improve student outcomes.”
IES houses a vast warehouse of the nation’s education statistics. Data collected by the agency is used by policymakers, researchers, teachers and colleges to understand student achievement, enrollment and much more about the state of American education. With IES being among the largest funders of education research, cutting it limits public access to what’s happening in the nation’s schools and colleges.
Claiming to eliminate waste and corruption, Musk’s first round of cuts involved canceling what DOGE initially said were nearly $900 million in IES contracts (though, as subsequent reporting has since revealed, DOGE’s math doesn’t add up and the canceled contracts seem to amount to much less). A second round purportedly sliced another $350 million in contracts and grants. It’s unclear how much more is destined to be chopped, since these may only be the first in a series of cuts designed to completely dismantle the Education Department. Though a department spokesperson initially said that the cuts would not affect the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test known as the nation’s report card, and the College Scorecard, which allows citizens to search for and compare information about colleges, we’ve since seen the cancellation of a national NAEP test for 17-year-olds.
In the Obama years, public data helped reveal bad actors among for-profit colleges, which were receiving millions in federal aid while delivering inferior education to poor and working-class students who yearned for college degrees. Since so few actually completed, what many got instead was crushing college debt. Luckily, good data helped drive nearly half of all for-profit programs to shut down. Publicly disseminated data exposes where things go wrong. But you can’t track down con men without evidence.
Ideally, in a well-functioning democracy, with a richly informed public, data helps us reach informed decisions, leading to greater accountability and enabling us to hold officials responsible for their actions. With access to reliable information about what’s happening behind closed doors, data helps us understand what may be going on, even to protest actions we may oppose.
Lately, however, things aren’t looking good. Since Trump and his top officials have slashed race-conscious programs and moved to prohibit funding for certain areas of research, higher ed leadership has remained mostly silent, with only a handful of college presidents protesting. Most have shrunk into the wings, cowed by Trump’s power to defund institutions. It already has the eerie feeling of watching your step.
Shutting down potentially revealing data collection is perhaps the least worrisome page in an autocrat’s playbook. As Trump continues to follow the authoritarian path set by leaders in Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere, we should expect other, more damaging and more frightening higher ed moves that have been imposed by other autocrats—selecting college presidents, controlling faculty hiring and advancement, punishing academic dissent, imposing travel restrictions.
Just a few months ago, there was comfort in knowing everything was there—data on enrollments, graduation rates, participation rates of women and other groups. All very neatly organized and accessible whenever you wanted. Even though some found IES technology old and clunky, it felt like higher ed was running according to a reliable scheme, that you could go online and open data files as in a railroad timetable. Without it, there might be a train wreck ahead and you wouldn’t know it until it was too late. Now these luxurious numbers may soon be lost, with decades of America’s academic history pitched into digital darkness.
It’s frightening to realize that we’ll no longer be operating on solid intelligence. That we’ll no longer have guideposts, supported by racks of sensibly collected numbers to tell us if we’re on the right path or if we’re far afield. Trump’s wrecking ball has smashed our confidence, a confidence built on years of reliable data. We’ll soon be in the dark.