Author: admin

  • Higher ed must resist authoritarian rule. It’s the mission.

    Higher ed must resist authoritarian rule. It’s the mission.

    Together, we should be clear on what President Donald Trump is trying to do to higher education.

    Destroy it. Whatever public rationales he or his administration release, the intent of his actions is clear, so if we’re going to discuss responses to those actions, we must remember, always, that Donald Trump is trying to destroy higher education.

    Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times gets it; the rest of us should, too.

    This goal is not new. In 2021 in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, future vice president JD Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance (and Trump) are open admirers of Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, who has subjugated the once-free higher education institutions of his country to his own needs.

    This is the Trump/Vance playbook. The unannounced, unilateral (now paused thanks to court intervention) cuts to NIH grants, and the Dear Colleague letter that goes well beyond, and even actively distorts current law to threaten institutions with punishment for failing to obey, are just the latest attacks in a war that has been going on for quite some time, and not just at the federal level, but in the states as well, as exemplified by Ron DeSantis’s wanton destruction of Florida’s New College.

    Sadly, as callous, counterproductive and wasteful of taxpayer money as it was, DeSantis taking a wrecking ball to New College in order to install his cronies while recruiting enough athletes for three baseball teams—despite New College not being in an athletic conference—was within the power of the state’s chief executive.

    What Trump is doing to higher education institutions is not. It should be unthinkable for institutions to obey diktats that are not only unlawful, but in direct conflict with the purported mission of the institution.

    If any institutional leaders are thinking that if they do just enough compliance with Trump’s demands, he will stop the war, they are kidding themselves.

    How is the rush to declare institutional neutrality to not just words but actions, as enacted by Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier last year, working out? Surely they are feeling secure knowing that they got ahead of the abuse.

    What’s that? That isn’t happening? Turns out Vanderbilt has had to pause graduate student admissions because of concerns about funding. I guess surrendering in advance wasn’t the way to go.

    I used Vanderbilt only because it was a recent, handy example, not the only one. The silence from major, well-resourced higher education institutions is truly deafening.

    Writing at her personal website, Jackie Gharapour Wernz, an education and civil rights attorney, calls the Dear Colleague letter “regulation by intimidation,” which is exactly right. Bending the knee at this moment only demonstrates the effectiveness of intimidation.

    Wernz walks through a number of ways the advisories in the letter go well beyond well-established law, while also making an additional important point: Trump is busy gutting the very agencies that would be able to do the investigation and enforcement of institutions they believe are in violation of legal regulations. This reality, plus the various procedural steps involved in these investigations, suggests that it may be far more advantageous to dig in and run out the clock of this initial flurry, particularly when existing law is clearly on your side.

    But this doesn’t seem to be the strategy for most institutions. They are going to hope this goes away. Trying to make yourself a smaller target doesn’t mean the people intent on destroying you are going to stop attacking.

    Interestingly, the group of higher ed leaders who are … uh … leading belong to the Education for All coalition, primarily consisting of community college administrators. Under the “freedom’s just another world for nothing left to lose” theory, this should not be surprising. Giving in to the Trump administration’s demands to give up on providing educational opportunities to diverse cohorts of students with different desires and needs would be to abandon their work entirely. Their defiance is both principled and practical.

    To me, this suggests that the more prestigious institutions that are cowering in the face of the intimidation perhaps do not see their mission in terms of providing access to all. In a lot of ways, the present situation is primarily revealing that which we already knew—that the interests in diversity, equity and inclusion in elite spaces were a virtue-signaling scrim over the much less savory reality of wealth and exclusion.

    Look, I’m getting worked up here. The truth is, I don’t wish any harm on any higher education institution, but the institutions with the most resources, most power and most influence must step up.

    The present threat goes well beyond an attack on the institutional coffers. These attacks on higher education are part of a much broader push toward authoritarianism as a federal executive (and his minions) direct the actions of formerly free institutions and people.

    The good news is that should institutions stand up for themselves, I think they will find many people standing up with them, including, most importantly, the students. Unfortunately, the longer institutions hesitate to stand for the values they claim to hold, the more distrust they’re sowing with the very constituencies who could save them, who do not want to destroy them, but the opposite, who want to see them thrive.

    The stakes are almost impossibly high. Shouldn’t we act like it?

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  • Higher ed unions rally against Trump’s cuts, layoffs

    Higher ed unions rally against Trump’s cuts, layoffs

    At more than a dozen events across the country Wednesday, workers and faculty at colleges and universities gathered to speak out against what they see as an attack on federal research funding, lifesaving medical research and education. 

    In Washington, D.C., hundreds rallied in the front of the Department of Health and Human Services, while in Philadelphia, hundreds gathered at the office of Senator Dave McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican. Other protests were planned at colleges in Seattle and St. Louis, among others. 

    The rallies were part of a national day of action organized by a coalition of unions representing higher ed workers, students and their allies. The coalition includes the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, Higher Ed Labor United and United Auto Workers, among others.

    Hundreds in Philly braved the freezing temps to rally for our healthcare, research, and jobs! ❄️💪Workers & students from CCP, Drexel, UPenn, Rutgers, Temple, Jefferson, Arcadia, Rowan, Moore—alongside elected leaders & union presidents—made it clear: We won’t back down. #LaborForHigherEd

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    — Higher Education Labor United (HELU) (@higheredlabor.bsky.social) February 19, 2025 at 2:33 PM

    In recent weeks, the Trump administration has proposed capping reimbursements for indirect research costs, laid off hundreds of federal employees and cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion. Most recently, the Education Department gave colleges and K-12 schools until Feb. 28 to end all race-conscious student programming, resources and financial aid. Higher education advocates have called that directive “dystopian” and “very much outside of the law.”

    Colleges and universities sued to block the rate cut for indirect costs, warning it would mean billions in financial losses and an end to some research. Some colleges have already frozen hiring in response, even though the cut is temporarily on hold.

    “If politics decides what I can and cannot study, I’m afraid I will fail the very people who need this research and inspire me to do it,” said Lindsay Guare, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, in a news release about the Philadelphia event. “In an ideal world, I would be fighting to expand support for my science instead of fighting to keep it afloat … The work done in Philadelphia’s institutions doesn’t just lead the world in innovation—it saves lives.”

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  • Lawsuit slaps heart of academic freedom (opinion)

    Lawsuit slaps heart of academic freedom (opinion)

    A lawsuit filed in July against the Columbia University chapter of the American Association of University Professors, along with 20 other organizations and individuals, alleged that our public statements in support of antiwar and pro-Palestinian student protests last spring harmed other students by contributing to the campus shutdown that followed. Unraveling the cynical logic of this claim is for the courts. But what is clear from this lawsuit is that the purpose of such recourse to legal theater is not to ameliorate harm. It is to silence public and academic speech.

    This effort is part and parcel of a broader attack on higher education, one characterized by legislative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion; instruction; and tenure; and an epidemic of jawboning by public officials meddling into curricula, campus programming and even the careers of individual faculty members. Following a series of executive orders from President Donald Trump, colleges and universities across the country now find themselves in the crosshairs.

    The tactic used against us is what is known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). These suits are brought principally not to win in court but to harass and intimidate individuals or groups into curtailing speech. By entangling defendants in costly and invasive litigation—or even just threatening to do so—plaintiffs can frighten those with whom they disagree into silence. In the context of higher education, this comes at an incalculable cost.

    On its own, this lawsuit certainly threatens the speech of Columbia-AAUP. But in the current climate, it also opens a front in the widespread attack on universities as sanctuaries of critical inquiry and reasoned debate. In their mere filing, lawsuits like this one aim especially to chill dissenting speech, including speech that takes place at the intersection of the classroom and the public square. Such legal instruments are a dangerous cudgel that could be used to threaten broad swaths of political and academic speech on American campuses.

    Our chapter has precisely sought to combat this hostile environment in the speech over which we are being sued. In multiple public statements made during the height of the campus protests last spring, we condemned partisan congressional meddling in Columbia’s affairs, arguing that this “undermine[s] the traditions of shared governance and academic freedom.” We called for a vote of no confidence in university leadership, who we believe “failed utterly to defend faculty and students” and “colluded in political interference.” And we affirmed the Columbia Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ subsequent vote of no confidence in our then-president for her “failure to resist politically motivated attacks on higher education,” whereby she endangered students and undermined our rights as faculty.

    In challenging our statements in support of faculty and students, this particular SLAPP targets both our constitutionally protected public speech and our academic freedom. We are fortunate enough to be represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and civil rights firm Wang Hecker LLP, who have filed a motion to dismiss on our behalf that utilizes New York State’s anti-SLAPP law, one of the 35 state-level anti-SLAPP laws on the books across the United States. But the outcome of a SLAPP shouldn’t depend on your counsel, or the state in which you live. Unfortunately, for many faculty and students faced with a SLAPP, the only available option may well be to self-censor.

    Interests committed to the mainstream political consensus have found pro-Palestinian political advocacy on American campuses to be unacceptable. To silence dissent, they have shown themselves willing to use every instrument at their disposal in a manner that recalls the red scares of the early and mid-20th century, when character assassination and blacklists were employed in industry and civil society, including academia. This SLAPP revives such measures, as do the theatrical congressional grillings of college presidents, including our own, and the wave of censorship that has swept over higher education during the course of the past year. In this context, attacks on public speech are also attacks on academic freedom.

    Academic freedom depends essentially upon a social contract that remains under perpetual debate both inside and outside the academy. SLAPPs like this one aim at the very heart of that contract, which accords to academics relative autonomy to explore difficult and often uncomfortable truths on the assumption that those truths will ultimately benefit society. Although the classroom, the laboratory and the library are classic sites for the practice and protection of this freedom, the truths pursued there translate to worlds outside the campus gates. Bullying faculty and students into self-censorship in the public square, SLAPPs seek to further silence and constrain the pursuit of uncomfortable truths in the classroom.

    Scholarly knowledge consists of truth claims, not dicta. Whether exercised in the classroom or in the public square, academic freedom is therefore the freedom to make and to contest such claims. This goes for all sides in a debate, including the debates still quietly raging on our campuses. However, a stark reality disclosed by SLAPPs is that political force is now poised to govern the contest over truth in place of enlightened reason and democratic deliberation.

    If such high-minded concepts as truth claims, enlightened reason and democratic debate seem too lofty for the dirty realism of the day, it is important to remember that these still lie at the core of any academic freedom worthy of the name. Academic freedom is not a narrowly academic matter; it is a matter of determining whether something is or is not true. SLAPPs are designed to decide such questions in advance, in favor of those who can afford the attorneys, or on whose behalf politically motivated law firms work. It is time for us to exercise our freedoms and responsibilities as academics, in defense of our right and that of our students to speak.

    Reinhold Martin is president of the American Association of University Professors chapter at Columbia University, on whose behalf he wrote this piece, and a professor of architecture.

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  • Using school land to fight climate change

    Using school land to fight climate change

    HOUSTON — When Jefferson Early Learning Center first opened on the corner of a busy intersection in the city’s west side in 2022, school officials started receiving calls from irritated residents.

    It wasn’t the increase in traffic or the noise from loud preschoolers that was the source of the callers’ ire.

    It was the wild, unkempt landscaping.

    Residents wanted to know, “‘Why aren’t you cutting the lawn?’ ‘Why aren’t you keeping the grounds?’” recalled Hilda Rodriguez, the assistant superintendent of support services for the Alief Independent School District, home to Jefferson and nearly 50 other schools west of Houston.

    Although Jefferson’s neighbors didn’t know it, the tall grass surrounding the early learning center was part of a larger strategy to mitigate climate-related issues in a county where a major flood occurs nearly every two years and the number of days at or above 95 degrees has increased significantly over the past 25 years.

    In addition to choosing durable, impact-resistant materials to help the school building withstand natural disasters, Jefferson’s designers focused on the surrounding land. They chose to restore much of the ground’s nearly 20 acres to native prairie lands and wetlands, creating a habitat for more than 200 plant and animal species.

    A sign at the front of Jefferson Early Learning Center teaches children about the surrounding land, which was designed to withstand floods and heat. Credit: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

    That sort of habitat is especially beneficial in an area vulnerable to climate change events such as the torrential rains that regularly hit the city, said Melissa Turnbaugh, senior principal at PBK Architects, which designed Jefferson. “By putting in native prairies and grasses, we can now actually absorb three to four times as much water as if we had manicured grass,” she said.

    Experts who study early learning and climate science say there is growing demand for solutions like these to address challenges related to climate change, such as floods, fires and hotter temperatures. Angie Garling, a senior vice president at the Low Income Investment Fund, which runs initiatives to help build and improve early learning facilities, said that when her organization solicited applications from child care programs needing facilities improvements, the vast majority had to do with climate.

    “They were asking for things like HVAC systems, misting systems, air filtration systems, shade structures, turf … because they couldn’t maintain their lawn anymore because the cost of water was too high,” said Garling. Due to the extreme level of climate-related need, LIIF recently partnered with other organizations to launch a program to help fund renovations for child care providers in Harris County, where Houston is located.

    Alief officials have already noticed benefits from the unconventional use of the school land. During the school year, students can walk on trails that weave through the prairie, learning about insects, plants and flowers. The native plants can withstand Houston’s infamous summers, when the average temperature sits above 90 degrees. That saves work, time and money for Alief’s maintenance team, which rarely needs to mow or water the land at Jefferson.

    Over the next few years, Turnbaugh, the architect, hopes the presence of the prairies and grassland — rather than concrete or other surfaces that are known to reflect heat — will pay long-term dividends in “an overall heat-challenged area.”

    “I think we’re going to see that we’re actually cooling the neighborhood,” she said. “I think there’s not only good carbon capture, but we’re actually being good neighbors.”

    Over time, Jefferson’s neighbors have seemed to realize that, said Alief’s Rodriguez. The calls, for the most part, have stopped. “Once they understood, it became very clear to them that this was purposeful.”

    Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at (212) 678-3562 or [email protected].

    This story about climate change solutions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Student mental health difficulties are on the rise, and so are inequalities

    Student mental health difficulties are on the rise, and so are inequalities

    As current discussions around higher education understandably focus on the challenges (especially around funding) that the sector faces, the experience of the nearly three million students attending our universities and colleges can often be overlooked.

    Current students generally benefit from and enjoy their time in higher education, but the national conversation too often ignores the challenges students face and the inequalities that many students experience.

    One area that deserves greater attention is student mental health.

    Correlation

    In a report published today, we find that the proportion of students reporting mental health difficulties has reached 18 per cent, tripling in just seven years. This implies that around 300,000 of the UK’s undergraduate student population is affected by mental health difficulties, a number that has been rising over recent years.

    And the rise in reported mental health difficulties is greater for some student groups than others. Notably, twice as many women as men report mental health difficulties, while rates for LGBTQ+ students are particularly high, rising to nearly one in three for lesbian (30 per cent) and bisexual (29 per cent) students. Higher still are the rates for trans students (around 40 per cent report mental health difficulties) and nonbinary students (over half report mental health difficulties). While sample sizes make it harder to compare trends over time for these groups, the rates of mental health difficulties are shocking, and require action from higher education providers.

    There is an association between socio-economic status and mental health difficulties. Mental health difficulties are directly correlated with higher participation rates: for every POLAR region of higher education participation, the lower the rate of higher education participation, the higher the proportion of people reporting mental health difficulties. Similarly, state educated pupils are more likely to report difficulties than privately educated pupils, indicating a need for greater support for children’s mental health services too.

    Better reporting

    There are some possible explanations for the sharp rise in student mental health difficulties. First, it is important to note that these figures reflect respondents’ self-reported mental health. Compared to a decade ago, there is less social stigma around disclosing and discussing mental health difficulties, and this may mean that previous reporting underestimated the numbers facing difficulties. There has also been a wider rise in mental health difficulties among all younger people, sometimes linked to the cost of living, concerns about the climate crisis or negative experiences on social media and smartphones. Our findings do not allow us to conclude which (if any) of these explanations is driving the rise in mental health difficulties, but given the rate of increase over the last seven years, it is unlikely to be caused by one explanation alone.

    There is one positive finding in the study, namely that over the course of their studies, LGBTQ+ students experience a relative increase in wellbeing. It is important to note that these students still have higher rates of mental health difficulties compared to their peers, but it’s also worth reflecting on the beneficial role that attending higher education can bring. Particularly for younger LGBTQ+ students, higher education may allow them to navigate and affirm their identity in a new way, and find like-minded friends and peers for the first time. Indeed, there may be learning for other organisations and institutions, particularly employers, in thinking about how they enable wellbeing among their recent and future graduate employees.

    Public health

    What, then, can be done to better address student mental health? One important change would be to adopt a “public health” approach to student mental health, and mental health generally. Higher education providers could also ensure that they effectively signpost students to both wellbeing support services and to clinical health services where required. Significantly, given that some students are more likely to experience mental health difficulties than others, providers also need to ensure these services reach everyone, and may need to tailor their services to do so.

    A key recommendation regards students leaving their courses. In the survey, mental health difficulties was by far the most common reason cited for why students were considering dropping out of their course, mentioned almost five times more than the second most common reason (financial difficulties). Providers therefore need to ensure that their retention efforts address mental health while also measuring how wellbeing and mental health support impacts on the likelihood that students complete their courses.

    Providers need to ensure that they are effectively evaluating their wellbeing and mental health services. It is positive that mental health is now seen as an important area for university services, and that social stigma has declined. Tight financial circumstances are increasing pressure on universities, and we all recognise the challenges of meeting every student need. At the same time, foregrounding the interests of students and ensuring their success in higher education requires a more extensive, effect focus on student mental health, not least given the extent of mental health difficulties, and how inequalities both produce and amplify these difficulties, before, during and after students leave higher education.

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  • The government’s in a pickle over fees and funding

    The government’s in a pickle over fees and funding

    We’re increasingly relying on Wales to get intel on where the Westminster government’s thinking is on higher education finance.

    As DK notes elsewhere on the site, Vikki Howells, Minister for Further and Higher Education in the Welsh Government, has announced an additional £18.5m in capital funding for estate maintenance and digital projects to reduce costs, improve sustainability, and enhance the student experience.

    But the other thing that happened was disclosed in the papers outlining the 2024–25 supplementary budget process. That contains a change in the student loan resource budget from £277m in October to £428m now. That feels like a big thing, and it’s worth unpacking why.

    Imagine for a minute that you own a pub, and you let students run up a tab. Then imagine that you expect them to gradually pay you back over decades – “pay us back when you can afford it mate”, or an “income contingent” loan.

    If you were trying to work out how well off you are now by thinking of how much that group of students will pay you back, you’d have to guess how much money they’ll have and when, and how much of that they’ll give you at a given point.

    But you’d need to guess how much that future money will be worth.

    The thing about student loans – and how they’re treated in the national accounts (including the “devolved” national accounts of the nations) – is that that’s broadly how it’s done.

    Before 2020, the government accounted for student loans in a way that understated their real cost. Every loan was recorded in the national accounts as if it would be fully repaid, plus interest.

    But a significant portion of loans would always be written off, but this wasn’t properly accounted for. This made the government’s books look better – despite knowing that many students would never repay in full. That “fiscal illusion” allowed George Osborne to spare higher education from austerity while your local council was cutting bin collections.

    Then ONS forced the government to acknowledge that much of the money lent to students wouldn’t be repaid. The removal of the “fiscal illusion” means that now, every loan is split into two parts – the part expected to be repaid, which is counted as an asset, and the part likely to be written off, which is counted as spending immediately.

    That sounds sensible – it makes the true cost of student loans more transparent in government accounts. But then, things got complicated – because that calculation has to be constantly revised.

    A scenario

    Imagine a student owes you £10,000 in 30 years. How much is that worth to you today? If you expect high investment returns elsewhere, future money is worth less today because you could invest it and earn more. Conversely, if expected returns are low, future money retains more value in today’s terms.

    So if you expect high investment returns elsewhere, you might say: “That £10,000 in 30 years is worth only £3,000 to me today.” If you expect low investment returns, you might say: “That’s still worth £7,000 to me today.”

    And so for the government, the “discount rate” is how they decide how much future student loan repayments are worth in today’s money.

    The higher the discount rate, the less future repayments are worth today and the more expensive student loans appear in the accounts. The lower the discount rate, the more valuable future repayments seem, and the cheaper student loans look on paper.

    Every so often, His Majesty’s Treasury (HMT) revises the discount rate – and a wander down the rabbit hole reveals that it’s gone up again – which means the government is now valuing future student loan repayments less in today’s terms. Hence the change in Wales.

    Why? Because the government’s own borrowing costs have risen.

    Lend us a fiver mate

    The government raises money by selling bonds (gilts), and the interest rates on those bonds (gilt yields) have gone up. Money is loaned to the government but those loaning it expect higher returns.

    Because the government is borrowing more money, lending to it is riskier. Inflation is higher, so investors want more interest to protect the value of their money. And there’s more economic uncertainty, so investors demand higher returns to compensate for potential risks.

    Then, as other investment options become more attractive, the government needs to offer better rates to compete for investors’ money. All of that combined makes investors ask for higher interest rates when lending to the government.

    So the government now pays more to borrow money. Then when it lends it out, like those lending to the government, it expects higher returns to match its increased costs. That makes the government value future student loan repayments less in today’s money. It’s like saying, “If I’m paying more to borrow, I need to earn more when I lend.”

    As a result, the government sees student loans as less valuable now, even though students will still repay the same amount in the future – and so when that discount rate changes, it suddenly makes loans look more expensive in government accounts.

    So what?

    In theory, if the interest rate on student loans goes up, expected total repayments grow faster. It should make the loan book appear more valuable today – because the government would record a lower upfront cost for issuing the loans.

    Then if it wanted to reduce the reported cost of student loans, you’d think they would increase interest rates, which lowers the “cost” of issuing loans in the accounts. Graduates would pay more, but in the government accounts, loans would look cheaper to taxpayers.

    But in 2023, Rishi Sunak’s reforms actually lowered interest rates for new students – from RPI+3% to RPI. This means future repayments won’t grow as quickly, so the value of the loan book shrank. Why did he do that with no obvious political benefit?

    The weird thing is that lowering interest rates on student loans can actually make them look less expensive for the government in the short term, even though the actual long-run costs have increased.

    That’s because the government only records the part of loans that won’t be repaid as a cost upfront, while treating the rest as an asset. Because lower interest rates mean students are expected to repay less overall, the unpaid portion of loans (write-off) shrinks – so the immediate cost to the government looks smaller.

    But because the government borrows money to fund these loans, and its own borrowing costs are rising, a big financial hit comes later when it earns less from student loan interest while still paying more to finance the system.

    And when the Treasury gets round to noticing that second part, it adjusts the discount rate – and then the hit appears in the accounts. Cheers, Rishi.

    As IFS says, all of the above means that the official statistics are likely constantly understating the true cost of the student loans system to the taxpayer:

    The ONS [government accounts] measure focuses only on the share of loans that is not repaid in full and thus misses the spread between government borrowing costs and student loan interest rates, which is now expected to be negative.

    And that all then ends up having implications for future reform.

    What next?

    The Russell Group’s spending review submission doesn’t touch on any of this. Nor does Guild HE’s. Universities UK’s submission is silent on it too.

    But Rachel Reeves has set a spending envelope. Her new Public Sector Net Financial Liabilities (PSNFL) measure is a broader measure of government debt that includes both traditional borrowing (like gilts) and other financial commitments, including student loans.

    It differs from the old Public Sector Net Debt (PSND) because PSND only counts traditional government borrowing, whereas PSNFL includes all financial assets and liabilities – including the value of student loans.

    So increasing the value of student loans – tuition or maintenance – would classify these loans as financial assets under PSNFL. But the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) says that practices like that might hide underlying fiscal risks, because loans are recorded as assets regardless of the probability of repayment. If a big(ger) portion of these loans is not repaid that would hit the public finances.

    Providing bigger (tuition or maintenance) grants instead of loans would result in immediate government expenditure, increasing the deficit in the short term. That could conflict with the government’s fiscal mandate to achieve a balanced or surplus current budget by 2029–30. Grants don’t add to future liabilities, but they do directly impact day-to-day spending, making it harder to adhere to Reeves’ fiscal rules.

    Government investment in university infrastructure – like funding for new buildings and research facilities – is capital expenditure, typically financed through borrowing. Under current fiscal rules, the government has to ensure that Public Sector Net Financial Liabilities (PSNFL) fall as a share of the economy by 2029–30. Investments like that might be crucial for long-term growth, but increased borrowing adds to public debt. So to stay within fiscal limits, the government has to manage the spending to prevent an unsustainable rise in its future financial liabilities.

    Politically, it may also want to consider relieving the pressure on young/new graduates – by raising the repayment threshold, or introducing stepped repayments. But then to pay for any or all of the above, it would need to introduce steeper interest rate bands so that higher earners pay more, have a higher repayment rate for higher earners, or look again at early repayment penalties to maintain long-term repayment contributions. And they would all bring political costs.

    The iceberg and the tip

    And that’s the irony. When the last government gave a (graduate) tax cut to higher earners by cutting interest to RPI, the idea was that they would pay no more, no less than the “real” cost of their HE – and that was paid for by lower earners paying more back, rather than having profit from higher earners subsidising lower earners.

    But once the cost of borrowing the money to loan to students starts to exceed inflation, the government loses money on every loan. That’s why from a government point of view, aligning student loan interest rates with the government’s long-term borrowing costs would make more sense.

    Having interest rates that are significantly lower than the government’s borrowing costs results in an expensive subsidy spent on the rich – it benefits higher earners who would repay their loans even with higher interest rates. Low-earning graduates, who are less likely to repay their loans in full, get no benefit.

    So the rich either pay upfront through the great boomer wealth transfer, or go into the loan scheme and pay less than the loan costs. While everyone, and everything, else suffers.

    Just like the student housing problem, financing things through borrowing is fine when the costs of borrowing are low, and crucially lower than inflation. But once that becomes your default way of financing something, it’s like an iceberg – at the tip you have the tuition fee, below that there’s the value of maintenance, below that is the terms you offer for paying you the money back that you lend out, but what ends up driving everything deeper down is the cost of borrowing it to lend out in the first place.

    Put another way, and to return to the pub, what I didn’t say at the start was that you as the landlord of the Dickinson Arms used to be able to borrow money at low rates to buy stock, pay staff, and maintain the premises. You offered loans or credit to regulars who weren’t able to pay immediately, figuring that the low cost of borrowing made it a sustainable business model. You offered affordable pints and generous credit terms, confident that the costs of borrowing were lower than the rate of inflation.

    But the cost of borrowing is up. Each barrel of beer bought on credit now costs you more to finance than it did before. You continue offering low-interest loans to your punters, but the true cost of financing is being hidden beneath the surface, gradually growing into a larger financial burden. And at some stage, the pub becomes insolvent. That’s the real problem the government faces now over HE reform – one that spending review submissions from sector bodies really did need to address.

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  • What’s next in equality of opportunity evaluation?

    What’s next in equality of opportunity evaluation?

    In the Evaluation Collective – a cross-sector group of like-minded evaluation advocates – we have reason to celebrate two related interventions.

    One is the confirmation of a TASO and HEAT helmed evaluation library – the other John Blake’s recent Office for Students (OfS) blog What’s next in equality of opportunity regulation.

    We cheer his continued focus on evaluation and collaboration (both topics close to our collective heart). In particular, we raised imaginary (in some cases…) glasses to John Blake’s observation that:

    Ours is a sector founded on knowledge creation, curation, and communication, and all the skills of enquiry, synthesis and evidence-informed practice that drive the disciplines English HE providers research and teach, should also be turned to the vital priorities of expanding the numbers of students able to enter HE, and ensuring they have the best chance to succeed once they are admitted.

    That’s a hard YES from us.

    Indeed, there’s little in our Evaluation Manifesto (April 2022) that isn’t thinking along the same lines. Our final manifesto point addresses almost exactly this:

    The Evaluation Collective believe that higher education institutions should be learning organisations which promote thinking cultures and enact iterative and meaningful change. An expansive understanding of evaluation such as ours creates a space where this learning culture can flourish. There is a need to move the sector beyond simply seeking and receiving reported impact.

    We recognise that OfS has to maintain a balance between evaluation for accountability (they are our sector regulator after all) and evaluation for enhancement and learning.

    Evaluation in the latter mode often requires different thinking, methodologies and approaches. Given the concerning reversal of progress in HE access indicated by recent data this focus on learning and enhancement of our practice seems even more crucial.

    This brings us to two further collective thoughts.

    An intervention intervention

    John Blake’s blog references comments made by the Evaluation Collective’s Chair Liz Austen at the Unlocking the Future of Fair Access event. Liz’s point, which draws on a soon to be published book chapter, is that, from some perspectives, the term intervention automatically implies an evaluation approach that is positivistic and scientific – usually associated with Type 3 causal methodologies such as randomised control trials.

    This kind of language can be uncomfortable for those of us evaluating in different modes (and even spark the occasional paradigm war). Liz argued that much of the activity we undertake to address student success outcomes, such as developing inclusive learning, teaching, curriculum and assessment approaches is often more relational, dynamic, iterative and collaborative, as we engage with students, other stakeholders and draws on previous work and thinking from other disciplinary area.

    This is quite different to what we might think of as a clinical intervention, which often involves tight scientific control of external contextual factors, closed systems and clearly defined dosage.

    We suggest, therefore, that we might need a new language and conceptual approach to how we talk and think about evaluation and what it can achieve for HE providers and the students we support.

    The other area Liz picked up concerned the burden of evaluation not only on HE providers, but also the students who are necessarily deeply integrated in our evaluation work with varying degrees of agency – from subjects from whom data is extracted at one end through to co-creators and partners in the evaluation process at the other.

    We rely on students to dedicate sufficient time and effort in our evaluation activities. To reduce this burden and ensure we’re making effective use of student input, we need better coordination of regulatory asks for evaluation, not least to help manage the evaluative burden on students/student voices – a key point also made by students Molly Pemberton and Jordan Byrne at the event.

    As it is, HE providers are currently required to develop and invest in evaluation across multiple regulatory asks (TEF, APP, B3, Quality Code etc). While this space is not becoming too crowded (the more the merrier), it will take some strategic oversight to manage what is delivered and evaluated, why and by whom and look for efficiencies. We would welcome more sector work to join up this thinking.

    Positing repositories

    We also toasted John Blake’s continued emphasis on the crucial role of evaluation in continuous improvement.

    We must understand whether metrics moving is a response to our activity; without a clear explanation as to why things are getting better, we cannot scale or replicate that impact; if a well-theorised intervention does not deliver, good evaluation can support others to re-direct their efforts.

    In support of this, the new evidence repository to house the sector’s evaluation outcomes has been confirmed, with the aim of supporting our evolving practice and improve outcomes for students. This is another toast-worthy proposal. We believe that this resource is much needed.

    Indeed, Sheffield Hallam University started its own (publicly accessible) one a few years ago. Alan Donnelly has written an illuminating blog for the Evaluation Collective reflecting on the implementation, benefits and challenges of the approach.

    The decision to commission TASO and HEAT to develop this new Higher Education Evidence Library (HEEL), does however, beg a lot of questions about how material is selected for inclusion, who makes the selection and the criteria they use. Here are a few things we hope those organisations are considering.

    The first issue is that it is not clear whether this repository is merely primarily designed to address a regulatory requirement for HE providers to publish their evaluation findings or a resource developed to respond to the sector’s knowledge needs. This comes down to clarity of purpose and a clear-eyed view of where the sector needs to develop.

    It also comes down to the kinds of resources that will be considered for inclusion. We are also concerned by the prospect of a rigid and limited selection process and believe that useful and productive knowledge is contained in a wide range of publications. We would welcome, for example, a curation approach that recognised the value of non-academic publications.

    The contribution of grey literature and less formal publications, for example, is often overlooked. Valuable learning is also contained in evaluation and research conducted in other countries, and indeed, in different academic domains within the social and health sciences.

    The potential for translating interventions across different institutional and sector contexts also depends on sharing contextual and implementation information about the target activities and programmes.

    As colleagues from the Russell Group Widening Participation Evaluation Forum recently argued on these very pages, the value of sharing evaluation outcomes increases the more we move away from reporting technical and statistical outcomes to include broader reflections and meta-evaluation considerations, the more we collectively learn as a sector the more opportunities we will see for critical friendships and collaborations.

    While institutions are committing substantial time and resources to APP implementation, we must resist overly narrowing the remit of our activities and our approach in general. Learning from failed or even poor programmes and activities (and evaluation projects!) can be invaluable in driving progress.

    Ray Pawson speaks powerfully of the way in which “nuggets” of valuable learning and knowledge can be found even when panning less promising or unsuccessful evaluation evidence. Perhaps, a pragmatic approach to knowledge generation could trump methodological criteria in the interests of sector progress?

    Utopian repositories

    Hot on the HEELs of the TASO/HEAT evaluation library collaboration announcement we have put together a wish list for what we would like to see in such a resource. We believe that a well-considered, open and dynamic evaluation and evidence repository could have a significant impact on our collective progress towards closing stubborn equality of opportunity risk gaps.

    Submission to this kind of repository could also be helpful for the professionalisation of HE-based evaluation and good for organisational and sector recognition and career progression.

    A good model for this kind of approach is the National Teaching Repository (self-upload, no gatekeeper – their tag line “Disseminating accessible ideas that work”). This approach includes a way of tracking the impact and reach of submissions by allocating them a DOI.

    This is an issue that Alan and the Sheffield Hallam Team have also cracked, with submissions appearing in scholarly indexes.

    We are also mindful of the increasingly grim economic contexts in which most HE staff are currently working. If it does its job well, a repository could help mitigate some of the current constraints and pressures on institutions. Where we continue to work in silos there is a continued risk of wasting resources, by reinventing the same intervention and evaluation wheels in isolation across a multitude of different HE providers.

    With more openness and transparency, and sharing work in progress, as well as in completion, we increase the possibility of building on each other’s work, and, hopefully, finding opportunities for collaboration and sharing the workload, in other words efficiency gains.

    Moreover, this moves us closer to solving the replication and generalisability challenges, evaluators working together across different institutions can test programmes and activities across a wider set of contexts, resulting in more flexible and generalisable outcomes.

    Sliding doors?

    There are two further challenges, which are only nominally addressed in John Blake’s blog, but which we feel could have significant influence on the sector impact of the repository of our dreams.

    First, effective knowledge management is essential – how will time-pressed practitioners find and apply relevant evidence to their contexts? The repository needs to go beyond storing evaluations to include support to help users to find what they need, when they need it, and include recommendations for implications for practice.

    Second, drawing on the development of Implementation Science in fields like medicine and public health could help maximize the repository’s impact on practice. We suggest early consultation with both sector stakeholders and experts from other fields who have successfully tackled these knowledge-to-practice challenges.

    At this point in thinking, before concrete development and implementation have taken place, we have the potential for a multitude of possible future repositories and approaches to sector evaluation. We welcome TASO and HEAT’s offer to consult with the sector over the spring as they develop their HEEL and hope to engage in a broad and wide-ranging discussion of how we can collectively design an evaluation and evidence repository that is not just about collecting together artefacts, but which could play an active role in driving impactful practice. And then we can start talking about how the repository can be evaluated.

    John Blake will be talking all things evaluation with members of the Evaluation Collective on the 11th March. Sign up to the EC membership for more details: https://evaluationcollective.wordpress.com/

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  • Seton Hall sues its former president

    Seton Hall sues its former president

    A year after being sued by ex-president Joseph Nyre for alleged breach of contract and retaliation, among other claims, Seton Hall University has hit back with its own legal action against the former leader.

    In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of New Jersey, the university accused Nyre of “illicitly accessing, downloading, maintaining, and later disseminating confidential and proprietary documents, as well as documents protected by the attorney-client and work product privileges, and information after his departure as President of the University.” Those documents led to critical reports about the university’s current president, Monsignor Joseph Reilly.

    Alongside Nyre, the lawsuit also names John Does 1–10, referring to them as “persons who are in possession of documents unlawfully maintained, retrieved, accessed, and/or downloaded.”

    In a statement to Inside Higher Ed, a Seton Hall spokesperson wrote that Wednesday’s filing “makes clear that confidential documents were utilized with sections selectively released, causing damage to the University and its leadership and painting a false narrative about Monsignor Reilly.” Reilly has been accused of failing to report allegations of sexual misconduct and thus violating the university’s Title IX policies.

    An attorney for Nyre blasted the lawsuit as a “cover-up” by Seton Hall.

    A Legal Clash

    Nyre led Seton Hall from 2019 to 2023, when he stepped down unexpectedly.

    The former president later sued Seton Hall, alleging he was pushed out by the Board of Regents amid conflict with then-chair Kevin Marino, whom Nyre accused of micromanagement, improperly involving himself in an embezzlement investigation at the law school and sexually harassing the president’s wife, Kelli Nyre, among other claims. Marino, who is no longer a board member, was not named as a defendant in Nyre’s lawsuit, and an investigation found no evidence of sexual harassment.

    While Seton Hall is defending itself against Nyre’s lawsuit, it also threw a legal counterpunch in suing the ex-president. The university alleges that its information technology team confirmed that Nyre had improperly accessed materials after his departure, and in doing so, he violated confidentiality provisions in his employment and separation agreement.

    Specifically, Nyre is accused of improperly downloading confidential documents that were later provided to Politico. Those files—some of which were also obtained by Inside Higher Ed—seemed to indicate Reilly, the current president, overlooked instances of sexual harassment while rector and dean of the university’s graduate seminary from 2012 to 2022.

    However, one of the leaked documents in question—a letter from a Board of Regents member to Reilly in February 2020 that said he had violated university Title IX policies through his inaction—was an unsent draft, university officials previously told Inside Higher Ed.

    Seton Hall officials said in the lawsuit that though the Politico reporter never disclosed who provided him with the documents, “it was clear that [Nyre], directly or indirectly, was responsible” for the leak of confidential information to the news outlet between December and February. Seton Hall accused Nyre of trying to “create a false impression about” Reilly, arguing he acted in “bad faith and malicious intent” by not disclosing that the February 2020 letter was never sent.

    The allegations against Reilly have prompted calls for transparency from state lawmakers and Democratic governor Phil Murphy, who called on the university to release an investigative report that allegedly cleared Reilly. Seton Hall has thus far declined to do so, citing the need to protect the confidentiality of participants who voluntarily cooperated with the investigation.

    The allegations against Reilly come as the university is only a few years removed from the sprawling sexual abuse scandal involving former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who sat on both of Seton Hall’s governing boards. Investigators determined in a 2019 university report that McCarrick “created a culture of fear and intimidation” and “used his position of power as then–Archbishop of Newark”—which sponsors Seton Hall—“to sexually harass seminarians” for decades. (McCarrick was defrocked but avoided criminal charges due to a dementia diagnosis.)

    As part of the lawsuit, Seton Hall is seeking a temporary restraining order to stop Nyre from allegedly sharing more documents. University officials argued in court filings that Seton Hall stands to “suffer irreparable harm” from further leaks, which “cannot be adequately compensated” monetarily.

    “The nature of the harm is such that it affects the university’s ability to maintain the confidentiality of sensitive information, which is crucial for its operations and reputation,” filings read. “Moreover, to the extent that documents to which defendant has access are protected under [the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] or Title IX, the disclosure of such documents would directly implicate the right of students and their parents to control the disclose [sic] of such confidential educational records as well as the confidentiality rights of university employees.”

    Pushback

    In a statement to Inside Higher Ed, Nyre attorney Matthew Luber called the lawsuit “a desperate, retaliatory ploy designed to silence a whistleblower and distract from the university’s own corruption and misconduct.”

    Luber did not specifically address the allegations that Nyre had inappropriately leaked confidential documents but accused Seton Hall of ignoring red flags in hiring Reilly and overlooking Title IX infractions.

    “Let’s be clear: Dr. Nyre was not at Seton Hall when Monsignor Reilly engaged in misconduct, nor when the board knowingly violated its own policies and Title IX to install him as President,” Luber wrote. “But he was the one who warned university officials about Reilly’s disqualifying history during his presidential search—warnings that were deliberately ignored by board leadership. Instead of addressing their own failures, Seton Hall is now attempting to smear and intimidate Dr. Nyre.”

    As of publication, a judge has not set to a hearing to consider the request for a restraining order.

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  • Ilya Shapiro is back . . . with a new book — First Amendment News 458

    Ilya Shapiro is back . . . with a new book — First Amendment News 458

    I never intended to become a poster boy for cancel culture. Nor do I intend to let those four months of Georgetown farce define my life or career. But I’m using this chance to expose the institutional rot in academia and trace it to the illiberal winds blowing across America.

    Those words are from Ilya Shapiro’s latest book, about which more will be said in a moment. But a few “set up” words first.

    Today, Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute and director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. And as before, Shapiro continues to file briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Ilya Shapiro speaking at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr.com)

    But his today comes against the backdrop of a quarrelsome yesterday involving a ‘cancel culture’ dispute at Georgetown Law School where he was slated to work with Professor Randy Barnett and others at the School’s Center for the Constitution. But things started to go south after Shapiro wrote that “we’ll get lesser black woman” instead of Biden’s pick of Judge Sri Srinivasan. He later apologized. Following a four-month law school investigation, Shapiro was reinstated, only thereafter to resign on June 6, 2022:

    After full consideration of the report of the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action (“IDEAA Report”), and upon consultation with counsel, family, and trusted advisers, it has become apparent that my remaining at Georgetown has become untenable. Although I celebrated my “technical victory” in the Wall Street Journal, further analysis shows that you’ve made it impossible for me to fulfill the duties of my appointed post.

    [ . . . ]

    I cannot again subject my family to the public attacks on my character and livelihood that you and IDEAA have now made foreseeable, indeed inevitable. As a result of the hostile work environment that you and they have created, I have no choice but to resign.

    Ilya Shapiro resigns from Georgetown following reinstatement after 122-day investigation of tweets

    News

    After a more than four-month investigation that led to his reinstatement last week, Ilya Shapiro resigned today from Georgetown University Law Center.


    Read More

    In the midst of the controversy, FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein wrote:

    Shapiro’s targeting marks the 10th attempt to get a professor sanctioned for ideological reasons at Georgetown University since 2015. Five attempts have been successful, with sanctions involving investigation, resignation, suspension and termination. . . . Higher education’s credibility rests on the public belief that it is a place where all sides of every argument are subject to robust debate, disputation and discussion. If it becomes clear that these discussions are impossible on campuses, the reputation of higher education — and the shared world of facts it was intended to create — will suffer.

    And now on to Shapiro’s new book. It is titled “Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites” and it’s already getting ample notice from publications ranging from The Volokh Conspiracy to the Hugh Hewitt show, including a recent podcast exchange with Nico Perrino on “So to Speak”:


    The publisher’s summary:

    In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now it produces window-smashing activists.

    When protestors at Columbia broke into a building and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.”

    Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect opponents. Now those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. Rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will soon:

    • Be America’s judges, DAs, and prosecutors
    • File and fight constitutional lawsuits
    • Advise Fortune 500 companies
    • Hire other left-wing diversity candidates to staff law firms and government offices
    • Run for higher office with an agenda of only enforcing laws that suit left-wing whims

    In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty — it’s institutional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investigation eventually cleared him on a technicality but declared that if he offended anyone in the future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be subject to the inquisition again. Unable to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

    This cannot continue. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the illiberal takeover of legal education is transforming our country. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.

    A few selected quotes:

    • Is there anything we can do to stop or reverse . . . ill liberal tendencies? Should we — those of us who care about universities’ traditional truth-seeking mission and law schools’ commitment to the American constitutional order — just throw up our hands, gird our loins, and regroup to fight elsewhere? Surely we need to develop novel responses to heterodox challenges, ones that involve culture, legislation, and institution building.
    • The real issue here is taking exclusionary action — real discrimination, not a mere assertion that someone’s position on Israel (or anything) is ‘harmful’ or denies someone’s right to exist.
    • More than a 100 institutions have endorsed a version of the Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago (known as the Chicago Statement), which is the gold standard. The problem is that, as I experienced personally, so many of these speech-and-expression policies aren’t worth the paper (or pixels) they’re written on, falling by the wayside when seeming to conflict with the demands of DEI.
    • Cancellation victims, and others who make national news are the tip of the iceberg. As we see from survey results, self-censorship pervades academia, detracting from any intellectual mission, to say the least. Knowledge is never developed, and many old-school professors leave academia entirely — such as the famed First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh’s move from the UCLA school of law to the Hoover Institution and the early retirement of five right-of-center law professors from the University of San Diego (which used to be a bastion of originalism). Universities are at best failing to resist these illiberal forces and at worst encouraging them.

    Shapiro’s four main recommendations in “Lawless”: 

    1. Abolish DEI bureaucracies
    2. End mandatory diversity training
    3. Stop political coercion
    4. End identity-based preferences.

    Related


    WATCH VIDEO: Gaza protesters disrupt UC Berkeley dean’s party, triggering responses over free speech.

    Forthcoming book on ideology, science, and free speech

    Cover of Lawrence M. Krauss' book "The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process"

    An unparalleled group of prominent scholars from wide-ranging disciplines detail ongoing efforts to impose ideological restrictions on science and scholarship throughout western society.

    From assaults on merit-based hiring to the policing of language and replacing well-established, disciplinary scholarship by ideological mantras, current science and scholarship is under threat throughout western institutions. 

    As this group of prominent scholars ranging across many different disciplines and political leanings detail, the very future of free inquiry and scientific progress is at risk. Many who have spoken up against this threat have lost their positions, and a climate of fear has arisen that strikes at the heart of modern education and research. Banding together to finally speak out, this brave and unprecedented group of scholars issues a clarion call for change.

    “Higher education isn’t what it used to be. Cancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book. This collection of essays tells of threats to open inquiry, free speech, and the scientific process itself. A much-needed book.” — Sabine Hossenfelder, Physicist and Author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions

    Campus speech conflicts continue

    Campus free speech podcasts

    What is academic freedom? With Keith Whittington

    In recent weeks, the Academic Freedom Podcast has released two new episodes focusing on campus free speech issues.

    First up was a conversation with Timothy Zick, the John Marshall Professor of Government and Citizenship at William & Mary Law School. He is the author most recently of Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protests. The episode focuses on the law surrounding public protests on and off college campuses.

    Next was a conversation with Jennifer Ruth and Michael Berube about their recent book, It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. They are both long-serving leaders in the American Association of University Professors, and the book develops a provocative proposal for patrolling the acceptable boundaries of extramural speech by university faculty.

    More to come.

    White House Associated Press controversy

    The White House barred a credentialed Associated Press reporter and photographer from boarding the presidential airplane Friday for a weekend trip with Donald Trump, saying the news agency’s stance on how to refer to the Gulf of Mexico was to blame for the exclusion. It represented a significant escalation by the White House in a four-day dispute with the AP over access to the presidency.

    The administration has blocked the AP from covering a handful of events at the White House this week, including a news conference with India’s leader and several times in the Oval Office. It’s all because the news outlet has not followed Trump’s lead in renaming the body of water, which lies partially outside U.S. territory, to the “Gulf of America.”

    Volokh weighs in on AP exclusion controversy

    [1.] The Administration has no First Amendment obligation to provide any press conferences or interviews. The question, though, is whether, once it starts doing that, it may exclude the press based on its viewpoint, or on its supposedly unfair coverage, or on its use of terms that are seen as expressing a viewpoint.

    [2.] It seems pretty clear that government officials can choose — including in viewpoint-based ways — whom they will sit down with for interviews. The President may choose to give interviews to journalists whose views he likes, and to refuse to speak with those whose views he dislikes. Indeed, a government official may even order employees not to talk to certain reporters, without thereby violating the reporters’ rights. Baltimore Sun v. Ehrlich (4th Cir. 2006).

    [ . . . ]

    [3.] It also seems pretty clear that government officials, even in large press conferences, can choose to ignore questions that express views they dislike, or to ignore questioners who have expressed those views. . . 

    [4.] This having been said, there are precedents (Sherrill, TGP, and John K. Maciver Inst. for Public Policy v. Evers (7th Cir. 2021)) that recognize a right not to be excluded based on viewpoint from large press conferences that are generally open to a wide range of reporters. Those precedents treat those press conferences more or less like “limited public fora” or “nonpublic fora” — government property where the government may impose viewpoint-neutral restrictions but not viewpoint-based ones.

    [ . . . ]

    [5.] But what about in-between events, which are open only to a small set of reporters? Air Force One apparently has 13 press seats, and I take it the Oval Office is likewise limited.

    [ . . . ]

    [6.] So I think that for Air Force One and Oval Office appearances, the best I can say is that the First Amendment analysis is unsettled.

    FIRE weighs in on AP exclusion controversy

    As one federal court proclaimed, “Neither the courts nor any other branch of the government can be allowed to affect the content or tenor of the news by choreographing which news organizations have access to relevant information.”

    And because denying press access involves the potential deprivation of First Amendment rights, any decision about who’s in or out must also satisfy due process. That means the government must establish clear, impartial criteria and procedures, and reporters must receive notice of why they were denied access and have a fair opportunity to challenge that decision.

    The AP — a major news agency that produces and distributes reports to thousands of newspapers, radio stations, and TV broadcasters around the world — has had long-standing access to the White House. It is now losing that access because its exercise of editorial discretion doesn’t align with the administration’s preferred messaging.

    That’s viewpoint discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional.

    This isn’t the first time the White House has sent a journalist packing for reporting critically, asking tough questions, or failing to toe the government line. During Trump’s first term, the White House suspended CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass after he interrogated the president about his views on immigration. After the network sued, a federal court ordered the administration to restore Acosta’s pass.

    Related

    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sues NBC

    Sean “Diddy” Combs is suing NBC Universal over a documentary that he says falsely accuses him of being a serial murderer who had sex with underage girls as he awaits trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

    The lawsuit filed Wednesday in New York state court says the documentary, “Diddy: Making of a Bad Boy,” included statements that NBC Universal either knew were false or published with reckless disregard for the truth in order to defame the founder of Bad Boy Records.

    “Indeed, the entire premise of the Documentary assumes that Mr. Combs has committed numerous heinous crimes, including serial murder, rape of minors, and sex trafficking of minors, and attempts to crudely psychologize him,” the complaint reads. “It maliciously and baselessly jumps to the conclusion that Mr. Combs is a ‘monster’ and ‘an embodiment of Lucifer’ with ‘a lot of similarities’ to Jeffrey Epstein.”

    Executive Watch


    WATCH VIDEO: Trump says freedom of speech under threat in Europe | AFP

    Secretary Rubio on free speech and the Holocaust


    WATCH VIDEO: Marco Rubio slams CBS journalist for suggesting free speech caused the Holocaust.

    More in the news

    2024-2025 SCOTUS term: Free expression and related cases

    Cases decided

    • Villarreal v. Alaniz (Petition granted. Judgment vacated and case remanded for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam))
    • Murphy v. Schmitt (“The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam).”)
    • TikTok Inc. and ByteDance Ltd v. Garland (The challenged provisions of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.)

    Review granted

    Pending petitions

    Petitions denied

    Last scheduled FAN

    FAN 457: “Timothy Zick’s ‘Executive Watch’: Introduction

    This article is part of First Amendment News, an editorially independent publication edited by Ronald K. L. Collins and hosted by FIRE as part of our mission to educate the public about First Amendment issues. The opinions expressed are those of the article’s author(s) and may not reflect the opinions of FIRE or Mr. Collins.

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  • JD Vance, 60 Minutes, the Associated Press, the FCC, and more

    JD Vance, 60 Minutes, the Associated Press, the FCC, and more

    From JD Vance’s free speech critique of Europe to the
    Trump administration barring the Associated Press from the Oval
    Office, free speech news is buzzing. General Counsel Ronnie London
    and Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere unpack the latest
    developments.

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Intro

    01:49 JD Vance’s speech in Europe

    13:27 Margaret Brennan’s comment on the Holocaust

    15:13 Weimar fallacy

    17:36 Trump admin v. Associated Press

    21:33 DEI executive order

    27:39 Trump’s lawsuits targeting the media

    28:54 FIRE defending Iowa pollster Ann Selzer

    32:29 Concerns about the FCC under Brendan Carr

    44:09 2004 Super Bowl and the FCC

    46:25 FCC’s history of using the “Section 230
    threat”

    49:14 Newsguard and the FCC

    54:48 Elon Musk and doxxing

    59:44 Foreigners and the First Amendment

    01:05:19 Outro

    Enjoy listening to our podcast? Donate to FIRE today and
    get exclusive content like member webinars, special episodes, and
    more. If you became a FIRE Member
    through a donation to FIRE at thefire.org and would like access to
    Substack’s paid subscriber podcast feed, please email
    [email protected].

    Show notes:

    – “Vice President JD
    Vance delivers remarks at the Munich Security Conference

    The White House (2025)

    – “Utterly bizarre
    assertion from Margaret Brennan…
    ” Michael Tracey via X
    (2025)

    – “Rubio
    defends Vance’s Munich speech as CBS host suggests ‘free speech’
    caused the Holocaust
    ” FOX News (2025)

    – “Posting
    hateful speech online could lead to police raiding your home in
    this European country
    ” 60 Minutes (2025)

    – “AP
    reporter and photographer barred from Air Force One over ‘Gulf of
    Mexico’ terminology dispute
    ” AP News (2025)

    – “FIRE
    statement on White House denying AP Oval Office access

    FIRE (2025)

    – “Ending
    radical and wasteful government DEI programs and
    preferencing
    ” The White House (2025)

    – “Meta
    to pay $25 million to settle 2021 Trump lawsuit
    ” The Wall
    Street Journal (2025)

    – “Trump
    settles suit against Elon Musk’s X over his post-Jan. 6
    ban
    ” AP News (2025)

    – “Questions
    ABC News should answer following the $16 million Trump
    settlement
    ” Columbia Journalism Review (2025)

    – “Trump
    v. Selzer: Donald Trump sues pollster J. Ann Selzer for ‘consumer
    fraud’ over Iowa poll
    ” FIRE (2025)

    – “A
    plea for institutional modesty
    ” Bob Corn-Revere (2025)

    – “Telecommunications
    Act
    ” FCC (1996)

    Section
    230
    (1993)

    – “CBS
    News submits records of Kamala Harris’ ’60 Minutes’ spot to FCC
    amid distortion probe
    ” USA Today (2025)

    – “Complaints
    against various television licensees concerning their February 1,
    2004 broadcast of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show
    ” FCC
    (2004)

    – “Brendan
    Carr’s letter to Big Tech CEOs
    ” Brendan Carr via the FCC
    (2024)

    – “NRA v. Vullo
    (2023)

    – “She should be
    fired immediately
    ” Elon Musk via X (2025)

    – “Restoring
    freedom of speech and ending federal censorship
    ” The White
    House (2025)

    – “Protecting
    the United States from foreign terrorists and other national
    security and public safety threats
    ” The White House
    (2025)

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