Now more than ever, today’s higher ed institutions are prioritizing the fundamental on-the-job skills students will need to thrive in their future careers. In fact, according to our 2024 Graduate Employability report, 69% of education institutions are facilitating internships, cooperative education programs and work-related learning opportunities to provide students with practical experience.
Experience MindTap with GitHub
With that in mind, we’d like to share exciting news for computer science instructors hoping to equip their students with real-world career experience. Over the last several months, we’ve made key improvements to MindTap with GitHub Codespaces. GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform to build, scale and deliver secure software, allowing your students to practice and code in an actual platform that’s used by coding professionals. By integrating GitHub Codespaces with MindTap, students can complete their coding assignments in an authentic coding lab environment, anytime, anywhere.
MindTap with GitHub Codespaces not only facilitates learning and practice, but also ensures that your students are well prepared as they enter the job market. By actively using industry-standard coding tools, computer science students gain valuable coding experience and proficiency, positioning them to seamlessly transition into their desired careers.
Significant improvements and updates
1. Two Critical Functionality Updates:
Review Mode lets you review student work directly in MindTap, eliminating the need for students to bundle and share their work.
Auto-Grading Functionality has been reinstated for those of you using the following Web Programming titles:
Since each title has a mix of auto-graded, manually graded and practice labs, we suggest you search the Cengage Instructor Center for your title to get the latest list of labs, available under the Resources tab.
2. Better Support for Introductory-Level Students — Based on Customer Feedback:
We’ve made updates to existing instructions and feedback, including providing additional information where needed.
UX/UI Enhancements, such as the minimization of select popups, help students focus on the salient parts of the experience.
We added prerequisite assignments that aim to familiarize students with the GitHub experience. These assignments are available in the Getting Started Folder in the MindTap learning path.
Additional Reviews and Quality Assurance were implemented overall to address errors.
3. Companion Tab New Features:
Pagination allows your students to easily navigate through tasks within an assignment. With just a few clicks, they can jump to the exact page they’re searching for.
Selective File Execution is specific to programming languages titles (Python, C++, Java and C#), and gives students the option to select and run code on a specific file.
Reset Exercise Button gives students the option to reset their progress, providing them with a fresh version of the assignment.
Sidebar Updates include the new Task Summary button, which gives students the completion status of their tasks, as well as the new run code button, which has been updated from a lightning bolt icon to a standard play button icon.
4. Support Resources:
All Getting Started resources for students are now available in the Getting Started folder within the learning path of your MindTap course. You can also locate this content in our Student Help and Instructor Help guides.
A Comprehensive List of Labs associated with your title is now available in the Cengage Instructor Center, under the Resources tab. Download the document, “List of Labs – Grading Type” for a categorization of labs based on grading type: auto-graded, manually graded and practice.
We’ve enhanced program speed to one third of the original run time, restoring performance to 2023 levels.
Prep your course with GitHub Readiness Checklist
Not sure where to begin? Best Practices for Setting Up GitHub in MindTap provides you with an actionable checklist of preliminary tasks to complete as you navigate through course preparation. In addition, you’ll find various linked resources including a list of available titles with GitHub lab activities, a step-by-step video showing how to create your GitHub account, needed technical requirements and more.
At News Decoder we publish stories intended to help young people understand the wider world they live in. To do that we look for stories in places that are underreported and on problems that many people in many places are struggling to solve.
But we don’t expect our readers to read these stories the second we publish. Young people are busy and teachers might want to focus a class on a particular topic weeks if not months after we publish. So our stories are meant to be “evergreen.”
That’s a journalism term to mean that a story is about something that isn’t just happening now. It will still be relevant a year from now or two or three years in the future.
But it is a challenge to write a story that will grab readers’ attention now and still be worth reading a year from now.
The prize is that you get new readers all the time. We have stories on News Decoder that reappear on our most-read list years after we originally published them as the topics become hot and people search for information on them.
Make your story “evergreen”.
So how do you make a story that isn’t necessarily time-sensitive grab a reader’s attention and at the same time be relevant for those who come to it much later? We’ll show you.
1. Take the time and space to explain events and their context. This way readers in the future will understand what the heck you are talking about. Right now a lot of people are talking about DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative created by U.S. President Donald Trump and led by the world’s richest person Elon Musk. But two years from now who knows? DOGE might be all but forgotten.
2. Connect what is happening now to universal concepts. Musk and DOGE are systematically going through the U.S. government laying off thousands of people and cutting funding to thousands of programs. These moves are affecting programs that involve food, health, housing, travel, education and recreation. Those are topics people are always concerned about and interested in. Chances are, a year from now a top news event will concern the government and one of those things and your story will connect to it.
3. Connect what is happening now to events in the past. In this way you show your audience how the past repeats and how the present is affected by what has happened before. For readers coming in much later they can start connecting what happened when the story was first published to what is happening in their world when they read it.
For the past year, we’ve been republishing articles that connect to something happening now. We call it our Decoder Replay. On 19 February, for instance, we republished a story about how China censors mentions of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre that occurred in 1989 because now a Chinese artificial intelligence program called DeepSeek seems to negate any reference to Tiananmen Square.
The week before we republished a story from 2020 about the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in fighting the Covid pandemic. Then U.S. President Donald Trump had denounced the WHO. We connected it to now President Trump pulling the United States out of the WHO.
One of the reasons many people feel disconnected from news articles is that the articles focus on “news” — what is happening now even when such things don’t have much relevance in people’s lives — isolated crimes that happen far away, for example.
So next time you decide to take on a hot topic, think about the readers who come to the story six months from now, or a year from now. How might the story resonate with them?
In England the use of the title ‘university’ is regulated by law, a duty which now lies with the regulator, the Office for Students (OfS). When a new institution is created, or when an existing institution wishes to change its name, the OfS must consult on the proposed new name and may or may not approve it after consideration of responses to the consultation. The responsible agency for naming was once simply the Privy Council, a responsibility transferred to the OfS with the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. For existing older universities where legislative change is needed, the Privy Council must also still approve, but will only do so with a letter of support from the OfS. The arrangements were helpfully summarised in a blog by David Kernohan and Michael Salmon of Wonkhe on 8 April 2024, before most of the recent changes had been decided.
That which we call a university would probably not smell quite as sweet if it could not use the university title, and with its new power the OfS has made a series of decisions which risk putting it in bad odour. In July 2024 it allowed AECC University College to call itself the Health Sciences University. Although AECC University College was a perfectly respectable provider of health-related courses, this name change surely flew in the face of the many larger and prestigious universities which had an apparently greater claim to expertise in both teaching and research in health sciences. The criteria for name changes are set out by the OfS: “The OfS will assess whether the provider meets the criteria for university college or university title and will, in particular: … Determine whether the provider’s chosen title may be, or may have the potential to be, confusing.” It is hard to see how that criterion was satisfied in the case of the Health Sciences University.
Even worse was to come. In 2024 Bolton University applied to use the title University of Greater Manchester, despite the large and looming presence of both Manchester University and Manchester Metropolitan University. And the OfS said yes. If you google the names Bolton or Greater Manchester University you may even find the University of Bolton Manchester, which is neither the University of Bolton nor the University of Manchester, but is “Partnered with the University of Bolton and situated within the centre of Manchester” – indeed, very near the Oxford Road heartland location of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan universities.
This is rather more confusing and misleading than University Academy 92, founded by a group of famous football team-mates at Manchester United, formed in August 2017 and based near Old Trafford. Wikipedia says that “the approval by the Department of Education (DoE) to allow UA92 the use of ‘University Academy 92’ was questioned with critics claiming the decision to approve the use of the name makes it ‘too easy’ for new providers to use ‘university’ in a new institution’s name”. This criticism continues to have some merit, but a high-profile football-related initiative, now broadened, is perhaps less likely to cause any confusion in the minds of its potential students. It may be significant that it was created at the same time as the HERA legislation was enacted, with government perhaps relaxing its grip in the last exercise of university title approval powers before the Privy Council handed over to the OfS. UA92 was and continues to be a deliverer of degrees validated by Lancaster University. In 2024 the OfS the University of Central Lancashire applied to be renamed the University of Lancashire, despite the obvious potential confusion with Lancaster University. And the OfS said yes.
It was not ever thus. The Privy Council would consult and take serious account of responses to consultation, especially from existing universities, as it did after the Further and Higher Education 1992 when 30 or so polytechnics were granted university title. A massive renaming exercise was carefully managed under the Privy Council’s watchful eye. As someone centrally involved in one such exercise, at Bristol Polytechnic, I know that the Privy Council would not allow liberties to be taken. The renaming exercise naturally stretched over many months; the Polytechnic conducted its own consultations both among its staff and students, but also much more widely in schools and other agencies across the South West region. Throughout that period, in a longstanding joke, the Polytechnic Director playfully mocked the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University by suggesting that the polytechnic might seek to become the ‘Greater Bristol University’. It was a joke because all parties knew that the Privy Council, quite properly, would never countenance such a confusing and misleading proposal.
How would that name change play out now? In the words (almost) of Cole Porter: “In olden days a glimpse of mocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.”
Rob Cuthbert is the editor of SRHE News and Blog, and a partner in the Practical Academics consultancy. He was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor and professor of higher education management at the University of the West of England.
We’re rounding up recent stories, from a letter attempting to prohibit colleges’ diversity initiatives to an analysis of graduates’ earnings over time.
As mass layoffs and suspended grant reviews at National Institutes of Health sow more chaos for the nation’s once-cherished scientific enterprise, a federal judge is set to hear arguments Friday morning on whether to extend a temporary block on the NIH’s attempt to unilaterally cut more than $4 billion for the indirect costs of conducting federally funded research at universities, such as hazardous waste disposal, laboratory space and patient safety.
If the cuts move forward, they will “destroy budgets nationwide,” higher education associations and Democratic attorneys general, along with medical colleges and universities, argued in court filings this week. “But the consequences—imminent, certain, and irreparable—extend far beyond money, including lost human capital, shuttering of research projects and entire facilities, stalling or ending clinical trials, and forgoing advances in medical research, all while ending the Nation’s science leadership.”
The NIH refuted that claim in court filings, arguing that the plaintiffs “do not establish that any irreparable impacts would occur before this case can proceed to the merits.”
Friday’s hearing comes two weeks after the NIH’s Feb. 7 announcement that it will cap indirect research cost rates at 15 percent, which is down from an average rate of 28 percent, though some colleges have negotiated reimbursement rates as high as 69 percent.
The National Institutes of Health is one of the largest sources of funding for research at the universities and colleges and has supported breakthroughs in medical technology and treatments for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. In fiscal year 2024, the agency sent about $26 billion to more than 500 grant recipients connected to colleges. About $7 billion of that went to the indirect expenses—a source of funding that universities argue is crucial but still doesn’t cover the full cost of conducting research.
Federal data shows that in fiscal year 2022, universities contributed approximately $25 billion of their own institutional funds to support research, including more than $6.2 billion for the federal government’s share of indirect costs that it did not reimburse.
Nonetheless, Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire bureaucrat President Donald Trump has charged with heading the nascent Department of Government Efficiency, characterized NIH reimbursements for universities for indirect research costs as “a rip-off.” Meanwhile, the academic research community warned that such drastic cuts—which Trump failed to get congressional approval for during his first term—would hamper university budgets, local economies and medical breakthroughs.
Within days of NIH’s directive, a federal judge put the rate cut on hold after 22 state attorneys general sued the agency, joined by numerous higher education research advocacy organizations, including the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the American Council on Education. Across three separate lawsuits, they argued NIH doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally change the cap and that its guidance was “arbitrary and capricious,” among other points.
Although the nationwide injunction gave colleges a brief reprieve from the cuts, which briefly took effect Feb. 10, university administrators have spent the last two weeks sounding the alarm about the estimated losses and other impacts. Some Republicans in Congress have also opposed the plan, saying it violates language in federal legislation that bars NIH from modifying indirect costs.
‘Irreparable Injury’?
In its motion for the dismissal of the injunction filed on Feb. 14—a day before the NIH fired some 1,000 workers—lawyers for the agency argued that the federal district court “lacks jurisdiction” over the case and only federal claims court should hear the case, because the plaintiffs “are effectively seeking damages for breach of contract—the regulations incorporated into their grant agreements.” They also claimed that the NIH “ran afoul of no statute” and that the plaintiffs “have failed to show that they would suffer an irreparable injury” without a temporary restraining order.
“Where declarants assert that reducing funds is likely to harm research or clinical trials,” the motion said, “they generally do not assert that those harms are imminent as opposed to eventual reductions in their capacity that would occur from sustained diminished funding after a ruling on the merits.”
The motion went on to claim that the NIH’s capping of indirect cost rates seeks to “further its mission of advancing public health in a manner reflecting wise stewardship of the public money entrusted to it,” claiming that indirect costs are “difficult” for NIH to oversee. “To be clear, the Supplemental Guidance will not change NIH’s total grant spending; rather, it simply reallocates that grant spending away from indirect costs and toward the direct funding of research.”
But that’s not how the NIH publicly framed the indirect cost cap in a post on the social media site Musk owns that said the policy change will “save more than $4B a year effective immediately.”
And in a response filed earlier this week, the plaintiffs argued that the NIH’s policy change “bears no rational connection to NIH’s stated goal” in its court filings, because nothing in the NIH’s notice to cap indirect costs “directs more money to direct expenses.” The response also argues that the NIH has not provided adequate evidence to support its assertions that indirect costs are “difficult to oversee” and implored the court to reject the NIH’s attempt to “deprive Congress of its power of the purse.”
Mass Layoffs, Grant Reviews Still Suspended
While the temporary injunction has halted the rate cap for about two weeks, it hasn’t stopped Trump and Musk from destabilizing federal science agencies in other ways. Over the past week, thousands of mostly probationary employees—ranging from top-ranking agency officials to grant administrators who help grantees ensure their projects are compliant with federal regulations—across numerous science agencies, including the NIH, the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lost their jobs.
“The majority of what people who work for those agencies do is get the grant money out the door,” said Carrie Wolinetz, a science and health policy consultant who worked for the NIH between 2015 and 2023. “Because the layoffs took place across job categories, any of those critical positions could be affected. It’s hard to imagine that’s not going to have some impact on the ability of those agencies to fulfill its mission of getting those grants out the door.”
And even before the layoffs and indirect cost cap directive, the NIH had already derailed its operations by temporarily pausing communication and grant reviews last month. Although the courts put those orders on hold, Nature reported Thursday that nearly all NIH grant-review meetings remain suspended.
When the reviews finally do resume, the process will likely face even more challenges with fewer agency employees.
“The fewer people, the greater the bottleneck,” Wolinetz said. “Uncertainty itself causes delays. When people are confused, afraid and worried after watching their colleagues being dismissed, all of that just causes a slowing down of the entire system.”
On Wednesday, hundreds of scientists, federal workers and their supporters rallied outside of Department of Health and Human Services headquarters in Washington, D.C., wielding signs with phrases such as “Leash That DOGE,” “Fight for Science” and “America Needs NIH Scientists” and speaking out against cuts to science funding. (The rally was part of a national day of action to oppose the research funding cuts and layoffs.)
Hundreds of protesters gathered in front of HHS headquarters Wednesday.
“It is important that we understand exactly what is at stake right now,” Kailyn Price, a neuroscience doctoral student at George Washington University, told the crowd. “Cutting indirect costs is like telling a football team to do their work with only the players and the coach—no lights for the field, no physical therapist for the players, no water for the showers.”
She said casting indirect costs as an unchecked and unnecessary burden on taxpayers is all part of the government’s plan to turn the American public against scientists and their work.
“They want you to be angry and misinformed, incensed and ignorant,“ Price said. “Trump and his unelected billionaire backers want you to look at the people like us—making $20, $30, $40,000 a year, working late nights through the weekends because we believe that much in the work that we do—as the enemy.”
And the federal workers who remain at the agencies that support university research may not be there for long, either.
“Messaging from the agency is changing on a daily basis. Everyone is internally freaking out,” one still-employed NIH scientist told Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity. “I’m applying for other jobs, and most people are hedging their bets and sending out other applications, assuming they could get let go.”
The chaos at the NIH, including the firings and the potential for billions in funding cuts, means “there just won’t be the same number of scientists coming out of American universities,” the NIH researcher said. “On the bright side, though, there is the rest of the world.”
The cuts “are also adversely affecting important agency functions, such as support for research security at universities,” Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the AAU, said in an email.
“Cutting key research security offices at the NSF and NIH will make it more difficult for universities and our science agencies to implement new congressionally mandated research security requirements aimed at protecting sensitive information and data from competitors at a crucial time when we are trying to stay at the forefront of global scientific leadership.”
The public two-year college in Virginia, established in 1960 as an extension campus of William & Mary, has always been governed by its parent institution’s Board of Visitors. Now both houses of the State Legislature have passed a bill that establishes an independent, nine-member Board of Visitors for Richard Bland—a longtime goal of the college’s administrators.
The legislation now awaits Governor Glenn Youngkin’s signature.
“Governor Youngkin has demonstrated his commitment to growth and prosperity in Petersburg, and his support of RBC’s independence will add to that legacy,” said Richard Bland president Debbie Sydow.
While the college has always operated independently of William & Mary, efforts to set up its own board have been ongoing for over a decade.
Sydow called the new legislation “momentous, especially as RBC is poised to deepen and expand its strategic partnerships.”
Native American education advocacy groups are calling on the Trump administration to spare Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute from employee cuts, after the Office of Personnel Management ordered federal agencies to lay off most probationary employees.
The two tribal colleges are the only ones operated by the Bureau of Indian Education rather than tribal nations, making them vulnerable to the administration’s federal workforce reductions.
At Haskell Indian Nations University, about 40 people have already lost their jobs across campus departments, out of about 160 employees, according to a Monday letter from the Haskell Board of Regents to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The board urged in the letter that the university be exempt from the staff cuts. The Lawrence Timesreported that the institution has had to postpone or cancel some campus events. Meanwhile, roughly 20 employees were laid off at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, out of a staff of about 100, according to Indian Country News.
Pearl Yellowman, the former vice president of operations at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, who was recently laid off, told the Native American news outlet that one department has only a single employee left.
“Our students are going to say, ‘Where’s my instructor?’ ‘What happened to my class?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Is my future of being a student OK here?’ ‘Where’s my tutor?’ ‘What happened to this person?’ ‘Are my scholarships in jeopardy?’ ‘Is my financial aid in jeopardy?’” Yellowman told Indian Country News.
Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, said in a news release that “there are legitimate concerns that workforce reduction at these institutions will eliminate vital services and much-needed educational programs the students need to complete their degree programs.”
Jason Dropik, executive director of the National Indian Education Association, emphasized in the release that the Bureau of Indian Education has a “federal trust obligation to educate Native youth.”
“Significant workforce reductions will negatively impact students and have long-term educational consequences for our Tribal Nations,” he said.
For Haskell, this isn’t the first time the university’s status as a federally run tribal college has been a source of tension. Kansas lawmakers have recently debated about whether Haskell should be under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Education at all.
U.S. senator Jerry Moran and Representative Tracey Mann of Kansas announced plans late last year to propose legislation to remove federal control of Haskell, arguing the institution would be better run by a new university Board of Regents. The plan, backed by the then-president of the Haskell board, came after a tense congressional hearing regarding student and employee complaints about the university, which were revealed in a report by the bureau.
After the recent staff cuts, Dalton Henry, president of the Haskell Board of Regents, recognized these policymakers and the Bureau of Indian Education for “working to reduce the impact of these changes.”
“We are grateful for their attention to this issue,” Henry said in a news release.
The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology has dropped diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility from its accreditation criteria and supporting documents, a move made in response to federal pushback on DEIA, according to an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed.
“Recognizing the heightened scrutiny of higher education and accreditation—including recent directives and legislation in the United States—the ABET Board of Directors recently approved the removal of all references to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) from our accreditation criteria and supporting documents,” officials wrote in the email.
ABET did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
The move comes as President Donald Trump has turned campaign trail rhetoric against DEI into policy, issuing an executive order early in his term that took aim at what the administration called “illegal” DEI initiatives without specifying what would violate federal civil rights laws.
“These changes were made in response to the significant challenges many institutions, academic programs, and industry partners face in implementing and sustaining DEIA initiatives,” ABET officials wrote in the email announcing changes to their accreditation criteria.
The paper, which examined about 750 responses across two different studies, claims to be the first to identify factors associated with an increased likelihood of harassing scientists.
Researchers tested their theories by offering participants a bonus payment of 1 pound ($1.27), which they could gift to themselves or donate to the Union of Concerned Scientists, and by asking them to sign a petition against the harassment of scientists.
Out of the total of £359 ($455) offered, participants opted to donate £69.79 ($88). The study found that political ideology was the best predictor for who would donate, with right-wing individuals contributing less.
The paper also asked those taking part to express their aggression by sticking pins in a digital voodoo doll of a stereotypical scientist—an “old-age male with a lab coat and equipment.”
Participants were asked to “release negative energy” by clicking their mouse, with a higher number of “pins” indicative of more aggressive behavior. It found significant positive correlations with five variables—conspiracy mentality, science cynicism, relative deprivation, threat and attitudes toward harassment.
Lead author Vukašin Gligorić, a Ph.D. researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, said across the two studies, distrusting worldviews, political ideology and perception of threat were associated with more approving attitudes toward harassment of scientists.
In addition, perceiving scientists as threatening, as well as dark personality traits, such as psychopathy and narcissism, contributed to approving harm.
The paper concluded that highlighting reasons why people should trust scientists and not be threatened by them is the most promising way to counter such behavior.
And he said that changing these attitudes will be challenging, because scientists are viewed as part of the “establishment,” which many people around the world are dissatisfied with.
“To address this, I believe scientists should engage more directly with the public … rather than for private or corporate interests, which erode trust.
“Ultimately, people are cynical about the political and economic systems we live in, and they sometimes blame scientists as part of that system. Therefore, scientists should also be critical of and work to improve the system itself.”
While some higher ed associations and universities have responded with lawsuits, college presidents, for the most part, have watched in relative silence. Some have released statements on changes to their institutions’ federal funding or diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, but those announcements have mostly been vague, with little mention of the political forces driving the changes. Few college leaders have publicly criticized the president’s efforts to overhaul the sector to match his vision.
The muted or mostly nonexistent response comes as campuses have increasingly grappled with how to navigate political events since last spring’s pro-Palestinian protests, when students demanded their leaders speak up about the war between Israel and Hamas. That seems to have quelled interest in taking institutional positions. Any pushback college leaders voiced during Trump’s first term has been largely replaced by silence.
The Presidents Speaking Up
Still, there have been some notable exceptions to the trend.
Michael Roth at Wesleyan University and Patricia McGuire at Trinity Washington University—two notoriously outspoken presidents—are among those who have voiced alarm about Trump’s attacks on the sector.
Roth has written op-eds calling on his fellow college presidents to “weigh in when they see the missions of their institutions” and the health of their campus communities “compromised.” He also shared his thoughts on speaking up at the American Council on Education conference last week, noting that he tries “not to speak about the president directly” but rather the need to stand up for institutional values when they are threatened by external forces, such as Trump.
McGuire remains an outspoken presence on social media and in interviews.
Other leaders have spoken forcefully to their constituents about Trump’s interference.
Following a recent and widely panned Dear Colleague letter that declared race-conscious programming, resources and financial aid illegal, Case Western Reserve University president Eric Kaler wrote in a message to campus that “this expansion to include all aspects of campus life appears to be a gross overreach of the Supreme Court decision and may be challenged in the legal system.” He added that the university “will remain firmly committed to our core values.”
Some presidents at minority-serving institutions have added their voices to the mix.
David Thomas, president of Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, told CNBC last month that Trump’s attempted freeze on federal funding represents an “existential threat.” He also called out an executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion, telling MSNBC that “we must be a point of resistance to that effort to essentially teach untruths.”
Thomas, who is retiring in June, suggested a second Jim Crow era was coming, which he called “a reaction to the progress of people of color and others who have been disenfranchised.”
Presidential Silence
But as most presidents have remained silent, some critics have blamed institutional neutrality, the concept that universities should refrain from making statements on social or political issues. The movement seemed to boom last year as pro-Palestinian protests spread nationally and students often called on presidents to make public statements.
Roth, speaking at ACE, cast institutional neutrality as “a vehicle for staying out of trouble.”
The American Association of University Professors has also taken a critical view of institutional neutrality, writing in a lengthy statement earlier this month that it “conceals more than it reveals.”
Joan Scott, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study who was part of the AAUP group that crafted the statement on institutional neutrality, is also critical of presidential silence in the face of what she described as an attack by the Trump administration on higher education.
“I think there is no question that the target is the university mission as we’ve known it, and that very few people are speaking up,” Scott said. “And in fact, I would say that institutional neutrality is being used as a kind of protective stance for those administrators who are not speaking up.”
A frequent refrain from campus leaders who have adopted institutional neutrality is that they would speak up when the core institutional mission is threatened, which experts argue is happening. However, most presidents are not speaking up despite perceived threats to the core mission.
Inside Higher Ed contacted 10 universities with institutional neutrality policies, all among the wealthiest in the nation, with multibillion-dollar endowments. Only Yale University provided a statement, though some others shared prior messages from their presidents to the campus communities regarding the federal funding freeze and Trump attacks on DEI. Of those messages, none directly connected their concerns to the Trump administration or said what was driving federal actions.
“The university is working to understand the scope and implications of the recent [Dear Colleague] letter and remains committed to the mission, to the principles of free expression and academic excellence, and to supporting the community,” Yale spokesperson Karen Peart wrote by email. “President [Maurie] McInnis and Provost [Scott] Strobel sent a message to the Yale community that addresses recent developments from the federal government. President McInnis has also shared a message to the community about the university’s commitment to the research mission.”
Yale did not answer specific questions sent by Inside Higher Ed.
Scott believes presidents are conducting a balancing act—one she views as cowardly. She argues that many are more concerned about “short-term risks,” such as an increase to the endowment tax or the loss of federal funding, than “the long-term risk” that “higher education as we’ve known it disappears or is put on hold” through the remainder of Trump’s four-year term.
“What we’re watching is a struggle on the part of university administrators to balance some commitment to the mission—the attacked mission of the university—and some anxiety about the funding that keeps the mission going, even as the mission is being undermined,” Scott said.
Jeremy Young, director of state and higher education policy at PEN America, a free expression group, takes a more charitable view of college presidents remaining mum on Trump’s actions.
Speaking up is fraught with risks, Young argues, ranging from punitive actions by the Trump administration to pushback from trustees. Instead, he thinks leaders should organize a unified sector response.
“If you’re looking to individual presidents to face off against the power of the U.S. government, you’re looking in the wrong place,” Young said.
He believes associations are leading the fight and urges them to collaborate more, arguing that organizations need to stick together to flex collective strength. That’s the only way “higher ed will be strong enough to be able to respond effectively,” he said.
But just because presidents aren’t speaking up doesn’t mean they have to cower, he said.
“I think the one thing that’s easy is that presidents shouldn’t overinterpret the law,” Young emphasized. “They shouldn’t comply in advance. You look at the Dear Colleague letter—it’s very clear in the letter that it does not have the force of law. There is an attempt here to scare presidents, and they should avoid being scared into doing things that aren’t required.”
He stressed the importance of maintaining normalcy and core values on campus. One area where college presidents could improve is on their internal messaging, he said. As political pressures mount on higher ed, it’s vital that administrators communicate with constituents “to reassure them that they have their backs.”
