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  • Helping faculty build channels to audiences that matter

    Helping faculty build channels to audiences that matter

    Many university public relations strategies are still predominantly built for a traditional media ecosystem that has dramatically changed over the years. As op-ed placements shrink and newsrooms continue to contract, higher education communicators should consider helping faculty build durable, direct publishing platforms through tools like Substack and LinkedIn newsletters.

    Faculty-led content platforms have the potential to:

    • Reach audiences institutional channels may never touch
    • Attract journalists, collaborators and prospective students
    • Add depth, diversity and timeliness to school narratives

    Tim Hussey, Harvey Mudd College’s vice president and chief communications officer, has seen this impact firsthand. His colleague, Professor Josh Brake, authors the Substack, The Absent-Minded Professor.

    “The posts could be reaching students that are interested in the work being done at Harvey Mudd and thus benefit Admissions; they could be reaching faculty at other institutions working in similar spaces and be a vehicle to share best practices and encourage collaboration,” explained Hussey. “This kind of faculty public scholarship truly broadens the reach and impact of the college’s work.”

    Traditional media relations efforts shouldn’t be abandoned but complemented with faculty-led direct publishing and engagement strategies. For many communications departments, this requires a shift from controlling messages to enabling voices; from pitching stories to amplifying scholars; and from measuring success by placements to focusing on sustained reach, relevance and engagement. Below are ways that communicators can enable this shift.

    1. Meet Faculty Where They Are

    We need to be sensitive to faculty members’ existing workloads. Content creation on individual platforms shouldn’t be seen as another obligation. If publishing feels like a chore, it won’t last, and it won’t be good. This shouldn’t be an institutional mandate.

    Support starts with understanding individual goals, motivations and comfort levels. Communications teams act as advisers, not enforcers, respecting academic freedom and autonomy.

    Quanda Hunter is the director of marketing and communications at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. The Ford School has faculty who engage in independent public scholarship through platforms like Substack; Professor Don Moynihan’s newsletter, with over 23,000 subscribers, is one notable example.

    “For those interested in expanding their reach or trying new platforms like Substack or LinkedIn, we’re here to support them, similar to how we’ve always supported them in engaging with traditional media,” said Hunter. “Whether it’s sharing examples, offering advice or brainstorming ideas together, we provide whatever guidance feels most useful. Sometimes it’s just a conversation to help someone think through their approach. Ultimately, we want to lower barriers, build confidence and celebrate faculty efforts in public scholarship, whatever form that may take.”

    2. Encourage Authentic Voice and Personal Perspective

    Substack and LinkedIn Newsletters allow faculty to show how they think, not just what they publish. They can respond quickly to current events and emerging debates. Faculty voices are more compelling and credible when they are not overly branded or mediated.

    Ashley Cimino works with several professors at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business who have vibrant individual publishing platforms: Professor Cam Harvey’s video podcast Through the Noise; Professor Dan Vermeer’s Substack In The Watershed; Professor Sharique Hasan’s newsletter Superadditive; and Professor Scott Dyreng’s Tax Chats Podcast (cohosted with UNC’s Jeff Hoopes).

    “The authenticity of these channels adds depth to how we showcase the diversity of experience and expertise among our faculty,” she said. “Faculty-led content complements our institutional channels by expanding both the volume and the richness of stories we’re able to share.

    “When our faculty communicate directly with their audiences, their passion and individuality come through much more than when it’s filtered through more traditional, branded channels,” noted Hunter.

    Communicators should consider training faculty on how to share their content through such channels. Encouraging this activity can go a long way and training is a critical enabler.

    3. Amplify Content

    Support doesn’t always mean editing or coaching. Sometimes it simply entails helping the content travel. The easiest win-win is amplifying faculty-created content through institutional channels.

    “The Communications Office has been thrilled to help share and promote Josh Brake’s Substack with Harvey Mudd’s audiences on our social media channels, in our internal newsletter, in parent and alumni newsletters and with the media,” Hussey said. “These kinds of personal, first-hand experiences from faculty resonate with our community and can showcase the innovative teaching and learning that is going on every day at the college.”

    Promoting contributions can signal institutional validation and expand reach beyond the faculty member’s existing network.

    “When we share faculty content through our channels, it helps demonstrate impact and expand reach, which can be motivating,” said Cimino.

    Such amplification can play an important role in supporting a culture that normalizes faculty contributions via their own channels. This can build confidence, both for the individual faculty contributor and that individual’s peers from the institution observing from the sidelines. It can help reduce uncertainty and encourage others to experiment in low-risk ways.

    “We share and celebrate their content and achievements across our networks,” said Hunter. “This shows their efforts are valued and can encourage others to explore new ways of engaging.”

    Questions to Consider

    Next time you are asked to pitch a piece of research and you reach out to 100 journalists with a beautiful personalized message and get no feedback, consider how you and your colleagues might adapt. Ask:

    1. How might we help faculty reach audiences directly, rather than relying solely on traditional media intermediaries?
    2. Which faculty voices and perspectives could benefit from greater visibility through personal platforms?
    3. Which faculty members are already creating content that could be amplified more intentionally?
    4. What training or light-touch support could lower barriers for faculty interested in publishing directly?
    5. How might we measure success beyond media placements to incorporate faculty-driven platforms that connect to our big-picture goals?

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  • An ambitious International Education Strategy

    An ambitious International Education Strategy

    Over the weekend, HEPI published a blog on fraud risk within universities and a two-part series (Sunday and Monday) on the LLE. Find the first here and the second here.

    This blog was kindly authored by Rod Smith, Group Managing Director for International Education at Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

    International education is changing, as is the UK’s education sector’s global potential. The International Education Strategy has recognised that. 

    The shift in emphasis from inbound international student recruitment to broader forms of education exports is smart. It may also ultimately strengthen UK universities and their internationalism over the long term. 

    To date, the UK’s international education strategy has primarily skewed towards international student recruitment. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see more attention on other parts of the sector. But this is not either / or: the broader focus can benefit higher education. 

    The UK has an enormous opportunity to scale-up its impact in international education. The new strategy better captures the full extent of the UK’s capability in international education: from early years to lifelong learning. We can use that ability to strengthen our higher education sector, our economy, and our place in the world. 

    Global investment in education is growing – from $5.9 trillion in 2018 to an estimated $10 trillion by 2030. The new £40 billion target for UK education exports is reasonable and, if anything, modest. We should be fighting for a larger slice.  

    New campuses and new delivery models for higher education will form an important part, but it’s about so much more than that. 

    When I talk to education ministers, officials, school leaders and, most importantly, parents and students outside the UK, it’s startlingly clear that there is an enormous unmet appetite for quality international education. Not simply ‘British’ international education, but something that can adapt to a local context, that we can evolve in partnership to meet local needs and draw on local expertise. I hear this – and a desire for what the UK offers – in hugely diverse regions, whether it’s Bhubaneswar or Mumbai; Vilnius or Madrid; Cape Town or Lagos. The demand for future-facing education, adapting to changing needs in sustainability and climate change, critical thinking or wellbeing is what our sectors do best. 

    This will often lead to local, regional or hybrid in-country and in-UK delivery at all levels. The new strategy is rightly sensitive to these evolving needs. 

    The UK is particularly well-placed to help meet this demand. Our expertise in international curriculum, teaching and learning materials, assessment, world-recognised assessment, and publishing is unparalleled. As EdTech and AI mature, the UK can play a pivotal role in making them work for hundreds of millions of learners of all ages, well before they get to higher education.

    To do so, we must start early. We need a fully integrated International Education Strategy – one that covers every age and stage of a child’s education journey. We need not wait until young people reach an age when they are applying to university.  

    We can – and in many parts of the world, we already do – provide the curriculum expertise and standards that enable local partners to meet their ambition. Meeting such global standards early puts students on a pathway that leads to recognition by universities and employers worldwide. It also equips them for a rapidly changing world, so they are ready to grapple with climate change and a green economy, and have the fundamental skills and knowledge to manage and lead technological transformations. 

    As we look at the UK’s whole approach to international education, we can be more ambitious. We should think about how the UK’s unique capability can serve and influence students long before they are even considering university. 

    How can we better help create an incredible pipeline of young people who will always retain a connection to the UK, whether they ever study or work here or not? How can we become better known as partners, collaborators and innovators at a time of global growth in education demand and investment?    

    Sir Steve Smith and his team have provided the vision. It’s up to all of us working in international education to help realise it..

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  • The Hickson review on university-investor links makes the case for commercialisation as a team sport

    The Hickson review on university-investor links makes the case for commercialisation as a team sport

    At the bottom of page fifteen of his new independent report commissioned by UKRI on university and investor links Tony Hickson Chief Business Officer, Cancer Research UK and Cancer Research Horizons, writes that:

    Innovation and economic growth is a team sport from end to end, involving individual researchers, institutions, investors, supporting infrastructures as well as agencies, government and philanthropy.

    A good idea without any funding or support will never make any impact. A bad idea with funding and support will fail. Accepting innovation and growth as a “team sport” means prioritising the growth of the ecosystem over yet another debate on equity, and it means shifting the collective behaviours of investors, businesses, universities, and researchers, rather than rehashing the forever debate on how to make academics more entrepreneurial (whatever that means.)

    One way or another

    On the face of it this is a report that follows the likes of McMillan, Dowling, Rees, and Tracey in wrestling with how to get good ideas out of universities and into the economy.  In the context of UKRI’s significant change of approach toward more explicitly supporting economic growth this review feels like it has been published at exactly the moment it has an audience willing to listen and able to act. It is a review which does not seek to just engage with the economy as it is but position the partnership between universities, governments and their agencies, and investors, as a force for shaping the economy itself.

    It is less a guide on how to do commercialisation more of a prospectus on how to build a more prosperous country with universities at its heart.

    The review is entirely explicit that this isn’t just about changing how universities work (albeit there are far reaching proposals on forcing universities to disclose IP policies, incentivising entrepreneurial activity, and new formula funding for proof-of-concept work) . Taking a good idea to a funded proposition depends on the effective interaction between the production of knowledge, the availability of capital, infrastructure (including business support), the availability of talent, and proper policy and regulation. It is how all the actors work together that can make the ecosystem successful.

    The analysis presented here is that parts of the ecosystem are working well. The UK government has been successful in continually funding high-quality research and producing the kind of stable investment environment through HEIF and other funds that businesses enjoy. The parts not working so well include the availability of specialist capital, regional distribution of research, the diversity of institutions and topics being funded, the lack of specialist support in some areas, and the lack of investor expertise or understanding in some fields.

    The better ecosystem is therefore about making all of the players within it coalesce around clear goals with clear incentives and better support. As respondents to the field work highlighted the UK is not large enough to try to succeed at everything nor is it small enough to coalesce assets around a few key areas. Clearer goals and more targeted support requires better relationships between universities and investors.

    Living in the real world

    As any frequent attendee of university-business collaboration events will tell you, universities are often called slow moving, bureaucratic, not entrepreneurial enough, or otherwise shielded from how the real world works. There is an analysis of university commercialisation that suggests that if universities acted more like businesses they would be better at attracting more investment. This analysis is unhelpful in placing the focus on one actor within a complex ecosystem and underplays the extent to which the stability of universities, and therefore the investment certainty they can bring, is actually their greatest contribution to the ecosystem.

    It turns out UK universities are already pretty good at commercial activity. The UK is second only to the US in terms of value generated from university spin-outs. The UK is a leader in the number of venture capital exits (against behind the US). And university spin-outs are showing growth in venture capital investment at later stages where later stage investment more broadly is growing at a slower rate.

    The university-investor relationship is also more complicated than is often assumed. For a start, there is no single approach to commercialisation and there is no single kind of investor. Commercialisation might include spin-outs but it also includes consultancy, licensing, partnerships, and start-ups. Venture capital may be the single most popular kind of funding (excluding grants) but the landscape includes family offices, government, private equity, university affiliated funds, and others.

    There is also a difference between universities being able to produce economic goods and those economic goods being deployed in the right places, at the right time, to the maximum impact. Hickson’s report highlights that proof of concept funding is hard to come by, specialist support for specific deep-tech sectors is limited, and the availability of capital for certain areas can be limited.

     

    Call me

    In his foreword Hickson writes that “There is no shortage of good ideas and the long-held myth that the UK excels at research but struggles with commercialising ideas out of academia is increasingly outdated.”

    Dispelling this myth requires more work to support access to finance (and the right kind of finance), improving university-investor relationships and mutual understanding, reframing how success is recognised within universities, and improving the shared the capacity of universities and investors to work together. The opportunity is for universities to not only seize the mantle of economic growth but to increase their own impact through research.

    There is a lot to like in the review but it is perhaps strongest in being clear that all actors have a role in university-investor supported economic growth. UKRI, as the commissioners of this work, has already committed to looking at unlocking pension capital, supporting sector-specific accelerators, more regionally focussed funding interventions, and working with partnerships to expand specialist training. The success of a proposal to shift the university-investor ecosystem depends on how the ecosystem responds. If UKRI can set out a ten year vision with new metrics for commercial activity, while strengthening the national innovation economy, and nudging capital markets to more closely align with university needs, then this review could come to be seen as a turning point for the whole sector.

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  • The missing infrastructure of racial equity in doctoral education

    The missing infrastructure of racial equity in doctoral education

    Across the sector, the persistent underrepresentation of Black students in doctoral study is well known, and yet progress remains painfully slow.

    The explanations are familiar – lack of belonging, limited access to networks, uneven supervisory cultures, and structural barriers that shape everything from application confidence to funding success. What is less clear is what effective, scalable solutions look like in practice.

    The Accomplished Study Programme in Research Excellence (ASPIRE) offers one. Over three cohorts, ASPIRE has supported 59 Black students to develop the confidence, research skills, and networks needed to enter postgraduate research. Fifteen have secured and started fully funded PhD places across UK institutions.

    To put that in context – sector data consistently shows that Black applicants are significantly less likely than their white peers to progress to funded doctoral study, often by a margin of 20–30 percentage points. Against this backdrop, ASPIRE’s progression rate is not just impressive; it is structurally significant.

    The programme, therefore, raises a pressing question for the sector – what would doctoral education look like if mentorship, belonging, and culturally literate support were treated as core academic infrastructure rather than discretionary extras?

    A different kind of intervention

    To understand ASPIRE’s impact, it’s necessary to examine what lies beneath its surface – the philosophical and pedagogical foundations that shape how students are engaged. ASPIRE doesn’t operate within deficit narratives.

    Instead, it draws on Ubuntu and Omoluabi, African philosophies centred on dignity, community, and moral responsibility. These frameworks shape the programme’s relational ethos and challenge the assumption that doctoral preparation is purely technical.

    Students engage in conversations about identity, cultural capital, and the unspoken rules of academic life. They are supported not only to strengthen their research skills but to negotiate the power structures and tacit expectations that often make postgraduate pathways opaque.

    If doctoral education operates through a web of unwritten norms and relationship-dependent opportunities, ASPIRE works because it makes those norms visible and negotiable.

    The power of community

    Evaluation data from surveys, listening rooms, interviews, and reflective journals consistently show that community is ASPIRE’s most transformative asset. Participants describe the programme as the first academic space where their ambitions felt ordinary rather than exceptional, and where their experiences were understood without explanation.

    Belonging here isn’t incidental – it’s deliberately engineered. Structured dialogue, peer networks, and proximity to senior academics and funders help demystify postgraduate research and broaden students’ sense of possibility.

    For Black students who frequently encounter isolation or racialisation, belonging is not a soft outcome. It is the baseline condition for academic persistence and success.

    While ASPIRE’s impact on students is clear, its organisational implications demand equal attention. This is where the programme shifts from a developmental intervention to a diagnostic tool.

    ASPIRE’s anti-racist workshops for supervisors and senior leaders encourage institutions to interrogate their own cultures – assumptions about potential, inconsistencies in supervisory practice, and structural barriers that shape admissions and retention. In demonstrating what effective support looks like, ASPIRE simultaneously exposes what institutions have failed to provide.

    Over to the sector

    ASPIRE shows that genuine transformation requires relational, cultural, and structural work. Three implications are unavoidable:

    • Personalised, culturally literate mentorship needs to be mainstreamed, not siloed into pilot projects.
    • Belonging should be recognised as an academic outcome, not an intangible bonus.
    • Equity work must move from the margins to the centre of policy and practice, particularly in how institutions recruit, train, and support supervisors.

    If the sector is committed to reshaping who becomes a researcher, it can’t keep treating programmes like ASPIRE as exceptional stories. They are evidence. Evidence of what works, evidence of what has long been missing, and evidence of what institutions could choose to implement now.

    And with that evidence now on the table, the question is no longer whether transformation is possible. The real question is whether universities are willing to confront the inequities they have long normalised – or whether they’re content to let programmes like ASPIRE do the work their systems should already be doing.

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  • Not introducing a special administration regime for English higher education providers will be a missed opportunity

    Not introducing a special administration regime for English higher education providers will be a missed opportunity

    Just over a year ago, I wrote about why the higher education sector needed a special administration regime. Much has happened since then, but it now appears that such a regime will not be implemented.

    I will endeavour to explain below how this has come about – and why I think it is missed opportunity.

    Last summer, the House of Commons Education Committee called for evidence on financial distress in the HE sector and my firm gave written evidence. I also gave oral evidence to the committee in October on why a special administration regime was required.

    At the end of November, the Minister for Skills gave evidence to the committee and suggested that a HE provider could trade through a compulsory liquidation.

    The committee queried that and wrote to the minister, asking her to clarify her comments. The minister’s response has recently been published.

    In the response it is suggested that an HE provider, assuming that they are not a company, could be traded through compulsory liquidation, in combination with the appointment of a special manager (usually an accountant), as has happened in insolvency processes of national importance like Carillion, Thomas Cook, British Steel and, more recently, Liberty Steel.

    The price of support

    However, this still leaves the other areas where a special administration regime, akin to that in the FE sector, could benefit the HE sector, as I set out in my original article.

    In a compulsory liquidation, the insolvency legislation currently offers no additional protection or priority to students, above and beyond their claims as unsecured creditors.

    In the minister’s oral evidence to the committee, she said that the government would support students in respect of the insolvency process of a HE provider – but stopped short of saying that it would support the organisation itself.

    On a previous assignment we acted on a couple of years ago, a conservative value was put on claims of £50,000 per student on a disorderly close down of a HE provider, for the inconvenience of a shut down, the need to find another course with another provider, probably having to restart their course, and lost time in the job market. That is a total cost of £500m for a provider with 10,000 students.

    It remains to be seen, because it has never been done, whether compulsory liquidation and appointment of special managers, in respect of a HE provider, can avoid a disorderly shut down.

    Strengthening governance

    The government’s white paper majors on governance, and recent events in the sector have demonstrated the need for good and strong governance in financially distressed situations. Trustees need the legislation to help them meet these requirements.

    As I have said previously, the vast majority of HE providers are not companies, and therefore it is not clear whether the Companies and Insolvency legislation apply to them. It is possible that a university could be wound up by the court as an unregistered company and, if so, then these pieces of legislation would apply. In those circumstances, the trustees could be personally liable if they fail to act in the best interest of creditors and/or do not have a reasonable belief that the HE provider could avoid an insolvency process.

    Such lack of clarity is the last thing trustees need in a financially distressed situation where personal liability may be an issue.

    A special administration regime, applying the Companies and Insolvency legislation to all HE providers, regardless of their constitution or whether they are incorporated, would allow trustees to have a much clearer idea of the risks that they are taking, and the approach that they should follow to protect stakeholders.

    Using the compulsory liquidation/special manager route does not achieve that clarity, without the introduction of further legislation.

    A missed opportunity

    In addition to there being no viable insolvency process for the majority of HE providers, there is also no viable enforcement route for secured lenders. That is a bad thing because, if secured lenders have no route to recovering their money, then they are not going to be incentivised to lend more into the sector.

    As I observed to the committee, there is no appetite by lenders to instigate an insolvency process against a HE provider – but knowing they could, I believe, will encourage lenders to lend into the sector.

    There is an attempt in the sector to argue that an insolvency process, for those HE providers that are not companies, is not required. I think that that is a very optimistic view, because it relies on two large assumptions.

    Firstly, that underperforming providers can merge with other providers to cut their overhead costs and avoid an insolvency process, and secondly, whether in respect of a merger or otherwise, someone will fund substantial amounts of money to avoid a provider insolvency process. The minister has already confirmed that that will not be the DfE/Treasury.

    Another argument against special administration is that it will result in a number of HE insolvency processes. There is no evidence to support that, and the experience in the FE sector is the exact opposite.

    Compulsory liquidation/special manager may be the new administration for HE providers, but, as set out above, there is so much more that a special administration regime could achieve, and I believe that a failure to implement such legislation will be a missed opportunity.

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  • The Federal Bureau of Investigation (of protected speech)

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (of protected speech)

    Last Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel announced an investigation into Signal group chats that Minnesotans are using to track ICE activity. Independent journalist Cam Higby spurred the move with an X thread that appears to show users of the encrypted messaging app reporting ICE sightings and sharing license plate numbers of agency vehicles. What the thread doesn’t show is evidence of a crime.

    Patel claimed sharing such information is illegal if it “leads to a break in the federal statute or a violation of some law,” adding, “you cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps or puts law enforcement in harm’s way.” Border czar Tom Homan sounded even more certain. Asked about the chats later that week, he said, “I’m not going to show our hand. But they’ll be held accountable. Justice is coming.” 

    But speech does not lose constitutional protection simply because it might lead others to break the law. That was true when progressive commentators warned about “stochastic terrorism” — the idea that conservative rhetoric on hot-button issues incites violence against minority groups — and it’s true now. There isn’t even evidence in the leaked Signal chats that anyone did use the information to commit a crime. 

    Consider the relevant First Amendment exceptions. True threats are serious expressions of intent to physically harm a specific person or group. Incitement is speech intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action. Conspiracy consists of an agreement to commit a specific crime and an overt act toward carrying it out. Aiding and abetting involves intentionally and substantially assisting a specific criminal act. None of these categories covers the mere sharing of information that others can use — and have been using — for lawful purposes, such as protesting, observing, or documenting public law enforcement activity. Higby’s X thread shows nothing more.

    As the Supreme Court put it, “The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”

    Of course, anyone who assaults a federal agent or physically interferes with an enforcement operation can and should be prosecuted. But, absent evidence of conspiracy or aiding and abetting, as those terms are actually defined under the law, that crime does not retroactively strip speech of First Amendment protection. Google Maps isn’t culpable if someone uses it to vandalize an ICE facility or an abortion clinic. 

    What they’re actually doing is taking words that sound like they describe crimes and quietly stretching their meanings until they cover a wide range of protected activity.

    It’s possible to imagine circumstances in which anti-ICE activists’ speech would lose constitutional protection. For example, if two people share an ICE agent’s whereabouts and agree to meet there to assault the agent, then start taking action toward committing that crime, they would be guilty of conspiracy. Outside such narrow circumstances, however, the First Amendment protects sharing information about enforcement, much as millions of drivers do every day when they report police locations on apps like Waze.

    These First Amendment exceptions are narrow and precise by design. They capture a sliver of speech that is inseparable from criminal conduct, without giving the government sweeping power to suppress dissent.

    The FBI’s investigation fits a broader pattern. The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to go after Americans for protesting, monitoring, or speaking about immigration enforcement. Officials frame these threats as crackdowns on “doxxing,” “impeding,” or “obstructing” federal agents. What they’re actually doing is taking words that sound like they describe crimes and quietly stretching their meanings until they cover a wide range of protected activity, hoping that the scary labels will blunt any pushback or skepticism.

    This tactic is an example of what my colleague Angel Eduardo calls “linguistic parasitism” — the “stealth-redefinition or expansion of a word, phrase, or concept’s meaning while seizing upon its common meaning to elicit the desired response.” But this administration isn’t eliciting the desired response from civil libertarians. Every time an official says “doxxing” or “impeding,” I hear the voice of Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” When you drill down, you realize these accusations often refer to activities like filming ICE agents and posting photos and videos of them online.

    A month after President Trump’s inauguration, Homan asked the Justice Department to investigate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for “impeding” law enforcement by releasing a webinar and flyer explaining people’s constitutional rights during ICE encounters. Last July, after CNN reported on ICEBlock — an app that lets users report ICE sightings due to concerns over the agency’s “alleged civil rights abuses and failures to adhere to constitutional principles” — Homan again urged DOJ to investigate whether CNN was illegally impeding law enforcement by reporting on the app. ICEBlock itself later disappeared from the App Store, and Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledged that the DOJ has “demanded” the tech company remove it — a textbook example of jawboning.

    In August, ICE tagged the Department of Justice in a repost of a Libs of TikTok’s post accusing Connecticut Rep. Corey Paris for “doxxing ICE’s live location” and demanding prosecution. What had Paris done? He announced on Instagram that he received reports of ICE activity in his district and urged residents to “remain vigilant” and “seek out trusted legal and community resources if needed.” Paris ultimately was not charged with a crime for noting that law enforcement activity was taking place somewhere in a 2.5-square-mile area. 

    This isn’t just about opposition to ICE. It’s about the right of every American to criticize, discuss, protest, observe, and document what the government is doing.

    Given this pattern of  threats and rhetoric, it’s no surprise that incidents keep emerging in which federal agents confront and threaten protesters and observers for exercising their First Amendment rights. In one recent video, a masked ICE agent told a woman recording him that he was photographing her car because “we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

    Maybe the FBI’s Signal investigation will quietly fade away. But the chilling effect will remain. It was bad enough when, during Joe Biden’s presidency, the FBI pressured social media companies to censor protected speech deemed dangerously misleading. Now the bureau is treating protected speech on an encrypted messaging app as grounds for criminal investigation. 

    This isn’t just about opposition to ICE. It’s about the right of every American to criticize, discuss, protest, observe, and document what the government is doing, regardless of who is in power or what the cause is. 

    The government can punish violence. It can punish actual obstruction. What it cannot do is erase the line between criminal conduct and free speech. Once that line disappears, no one’s rights are safe. 

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  • The paper was her lifeboat — UMD called it interference 

    The paper was her lifeboat — UMD called it interference 

    Riona Sheikh walked onto the University of Maryland’s campus her freshman year not knowing a soul. “I was a little lonely,” she recalls. It was September 2024, and the Maryland native didn’t have a large wave of high school classmates who’d joined her at UMD. These were uncharted waters. 

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    In high school, Sheikh had been on the student paper, and she thought joining one at UMD could be her lifeboat. She saw the diverse array of student-run outlets on UMD’s campus staffed with journalists from a range of backgrounds: La Voz Latina, The Black Explosion, Mitzpeh, The Diamondback. The tradition of starting independent publications had run strong at UMD for decades. Her desire for community and passion for journalism could be melded together, she realized. What was stopping her from creating her own? 

    A month later, she founded Al-Hikmah, the campus’s first Muslim student newspaper. At first, she thought the idea would flounder. “I had zero confidence in starting it, but I did it anyway,” she remembers. She sent interest forms out to other students still feeling unsure. But within a year, they had a 16-member staff and an established digital presence. 

    Drawing on her experience as a high school student journalist, Sheikh wanted her tenure as founder and editor-in-chief to prioritize editorial independence. Her high school journalism teachers had generally been open to letting the students report on broad swaths of topics — until  Oct. 7, 2023, that is. After the attacks, they said the school paper wouldn’t report on any aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “because it’s too controversial,” Sheikh recalls them telling her. Al-Hikmah would be different: students would be able to report on events even if they were controversial. 

    It took almost exactly a year for Sheikh to be proven wrong. 

    On Oct. 21, Sheikh and one of her Al-Hikmah colleagues, Rumaysa Drissi, decided to cover protests outside of Jimenez Hall, where Students Supporting Israel were hosting an event that featured Israel Defense Forces soldiers. Prior to the event, Sheikh and Drissi had asked SSI if they could report on the event from the classroom and were told no. So they covered the protesters’ response outside, until they noticed protesters entering the building with their signs. Sheikh and Drissi decided to follow to capture first-hand footage and photography of a controversy as it unfolded — Sheikh filming on her cellphone, and Drissi taking photos on her camera. 

    That decision would prove consequential. Sheikh and Drissi were detained alongside two protesters in the building’s hallway, during which time the Al-Hikmah reporters repeatedly stated they were student journalists and offered to call their on-duty editor. 

    Footage from both the reporters and UMPD officers shows that after Sheikh reiterated that she was a student journalist, a UMPD officer responded, “That doesn’t mean anything. You were screaming and disrupting the event.” Despite the cameras capturing the entire interaction, no footage shows either Sheikh or Drissi shouting. 

    Nevertheless, Sheikh and Drissi were handed down student conduct charges from the university, including “intentionally and substantially interfering with the lawful freedom of expression of others” and “engaging in disorderly or disruptive action that interferes with University or community activities.” Their filming and photography — basic newsgathering — was now cloaked in terms of interference and disruption. 

    Reporting reshaped as disruption 

    In December, FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative (SPFI) sent a letter to UMD’s Office of General Counsel, urging the school to drop the charges. SPFI’s letter called on the university to refrain from punishing the journalists who covered the disruptive protest. Student reporters documenting others who may be engaged in misconduct, SPFI argued, shouldn’t be exposed to the same charges, investigations, and punishments as the people they’re covering. So far, the school has refused to drop the charges. 

    An associate general counsel from UMD reasoned that “the students at issue are alleged to have done more than merely cover, as journalists, other individuals’ protest of the SSI event; instead, it is alleged they were aware of and participated in such protest, albeit by recording and planning on reporting on it, rather than waving signs and shouting.” Coverage of a protest, it seems, equals participation in said protest in the eyes of UMD officials. 

    “It’s like we’re being treated as if we just did something else entirely,” Sheikh says. “It makes me worry about our coverage of pro-Palestinian protests in the future.”

    Sheikh and Drissi are awaiting their disciplinary hearings and face the possibility that their coverage will land them with sanctions. 

    ‘A lens that I can keep’ 

    During her sophomore year, Drissi joined Al Hikmah as a writer and photographer. She had always considered herself a creative person — picking up sketching, drawing and, from there, photography. It was photography that stuck. “It connects me to the world and lets me see it through a lens that I can keep,” she says. 

    Leading up to the coverage of the Oct. 21 protest, the Al-Hikmah photographer who originally had been assigned to go expressed their hesitancy. Drissi volunteered instead. “I switched in with them,” she recalls. “I’ll cover this event, because people deserve to see what’s actually happening,” she remembers thinking. 

    To that end, Drissi hasn’t allowed the university’s investigations to stop her reporting. Both she and Sheikh have continued their coverage, which includes community, global, and faith issues. Drissi described covering her community as a “duty” — especially since being detained and placed under investigation. 

    “It feels even more important to me to make sure that student voices are heard,” she says. 

    Al-Hikmah, like its staffers, has no plans of slowing down. The paper is taking additional steps to safeguard its journalists who report on protests, like getting press passes, Sheikh says. In the meantime, Al-Hikmah will keep sailing through uncharted waters. 

    “You’re always going to face obstacles and barriers when you’re carving out a new space, but we have to remember why we’re doing this, and who we’re doing it for.”

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  • Free speech in Trump 2.0

    Free speech in Trump 2.0

    One year into Trump 2.0, we examine the
    administration’s record on free speech and how it compares to the
    president’s campaign pledge to “bring back free speech to
    America.”

    We also discuss recent ICE protests, including the
    right to carry a gun and to film law enforcement, and what these
    encounters reveal about protest rights today.

    Today we are joined by:

    • Clark Neily, senior vice president
      for legal studies at the Cato Institute

    • Timothy Zick, professor of
      government and citizenship at William & Mary Law School and author
      of the new book
      Trump 2.0: Executive Power and the First Amendment

    • Conor Fitzpatrick, supervising
      senior attorney at FIRE

    Zick is also the author of
    Public Protest and Governmental Immunities    ,
    Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protest    , and

    Arming Public Protests    .

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Intro

    01:47 ICE protests:
    Alex Pretti    , filming police, and the right to carry a
    gun

    13:30 How to hold law enforcement accountable

    19:10
    Don Lemon    ‘s arrest

    23:27 Trump’s retribution politics and the “domestic
    terrorist” label

    35:05 FCC pressure and attacks on the media

    39:40 Free speech for noncitizens

    53:49 Attacks on higher education

    58:40 Trump 1.0 vs. Trump 2.0

    01:02:25 What reforms are needed?

    1:09:13 Outro

    Enjoy listening to the 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].

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  • There are three ways to tackle the student loan crisis: one is unwise, one is unaffordable and one is unpalatable. All are unfair.

    There are three ways to tackle the student loan crisis: one is unwise, one is unaffordable and one is unpalatable. All are unfair.

    Author:
    Nick Hillman

    Published:

    HEPI Director Nick Hillman takes a look at the continuing row over whether student loans are turning out to be fair for graduates.

    The weekend media were full (yet again) of the perceived unfairness of Plan 2 student loans. These are the loans taken out by undergraduate students who started their studies in England between 2012 and 2022. They cover both tuition fees and maintenance costs.

    Graduates with Plan 2 loans face a high-ish variable interest rate (6.2% if they are on a salary comfortably over £50,000) and a 30-year payback period before the loans are written off. Plan 2 remains the norm in Wales, where Labour chose not to copy England’s shift to Plan 5 loans (which have no real rate of interest but a 40-year repayment term).

    The first students who took out Plan 2 loans are now graduates in positions of influence, including in Parliament and in the media. They are using this influence to complain about how much money they are having to pay to the Government through income tax, National Insurance and student loan repayments combined – often 51% of salary.

    Many people will feel sympathy for them, both for the large debts detailed on their student loan statements and for the wider ‘failure to launch’ challenges faced by younger people, given the ups and downs of the graduate labour market and high housing costs. But much of the rhetoric on Plan 2 is overblown.

    Some – I stress not all – of the complaints are nothing more than successful graduates wanting someone else to cover their own debts. Intriguingly, given how progressive the loans are, the loudest complaints come from the left – for example, from Oli Dugmore of the New Statesman, Zarah Sultana MP, Nadia Whittome MP and Chris Curtis MP.

    What is to be done? Policymakers tend to work by the rule of three, meaning a tricky policy challenge may only have three possible big solutions. The Pensions Commission, for example, responded to the pensions crisis of the early 2000 by claiming the only options were: later retirement; higher taxes; or more saving.

    The same goes for Plan 2 student loans. There are just three options for tackling the perceived problems, and each is as unattractive as those three pension options. Yet we don’t know which one the complainants would prefer. In other words, those unhappy about Plan 2 loans need clearer answers on how they think the system should be fixed.

    1. One option is to hide the issue by no longer giving access to student loan balances. New graduates don’t worry they will pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in income tax over their careers, as no one ever rolls the total number up. Yet they do worry about comparable student loan payments. We’ve had stealth taxes; in this scenario, student debt would become stealth loans.
    2. Another option would be to reduce student debts. By tweaking the features of Plan 2 loans, such as the repayment thresholds or the interest rate, policymakers could reduce current monthly repayments and / or cut outstanding balances. But someone would have to pick up the tab, including – presumably – those who have not benefited from higher education.
    3. A third option, and the one that has been favoured by policymakers in the past, is to hit graduates harder, so the loans get paid down faster. While comparisons are not always easy, it is thought other countries with student loans have typically had lower repayment thresholds (see page 31). But if you currently dislike watching your total debt grow despite making repayments, you might really hate the larger payments necessary to reduce the total debt even more.

    If policymakers are to fix the supposed problems faced by those with Plan 2 loans, they will have to choose one of these options or a mix of them (or something like them). To me, the first option seems unwise, the second seems unaffordable and the third seems unpalatable. All three seem unfair. It is time for the campaigners to say which they prefer.

    To return to pensions, the Plan 2 protests resemble the failing WASPI campaign by those who say the equalisation of State Pension Ages was so badly communicated that billions in compensation should now be paid. Whether it is WASPI or Plan 2 student loans, people are trying to unwind policies that were specifically designed to aid the bulk of taxpayers.

    Nick Hillman’s previous blog on the row about Plan 2 loans can be read here: Why the current campaign on student loan interest may be misguided, misunderstood and misdirected

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  • NCAN Report Shows Dramatic Increase in Pell Eligibility Rates

    NCAN Report Shows Dramatic Increase in Pell Eligibility Rates

    A 27 percent increase in the number of students qualifying for the maximum Pell Grant shows the FAFSA simplification process paid off, NCAN says.

    Richard Stephen/iStock/Getty Images Plus

    More than 1.5 million additional students were eligible to receive the maximum Pell Grant this academic year compared to the award cycle before the Free Application for Federal Student Aid simplification process was completed, a recent report from the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) shows. That’s a 27 percent jump over the course of two years.

    NCAN contends that the data, which it collected from the Office for Federal Student Aid, proves that despite a difficult launch, FAFSA simplification is paying off. Combined with this year’s increased FAFSA application and college enrollment numbers, it counters the narrative that students and families no longer trust in the value of a college degree, the organization says.

    “Students are showing they value college by their choices. When we reduce barriers to college access and affordability, more students will apply, enroll, and succeed,” Eddy Conroy, NCAN’s senior communications director, told Inside Higher Ed. “We are seeing the promise of FAFSA Simplification made real with increased enrollment, increasing FAFSA completion rates, and more students than ever eligible for Pell Grants.”

    The report also shows that the number of students eligible for the minimum Pell Grant jumped from 18,453 students in 2023–24 to 326,441 in 2025–26. Overall, the number of Pell eligible students went up by about 418,000, or roughly 4 percent.

    Based on strong numbers so far in the 2026–27 college application cycle, NCAN says the nation is on pace for a record application rate among high school seniors. But worries about the future remain.

    Many have voiced concerns that funding for the Pell Grant program—which is likely to remain level for fiscal year 2026—could run out. Even if it doesn’t this year, NCAN warns that overall college prices are rising and, for many students, the current award isn’t enough.

    “A third year of level funding at $7,395 effectively erodes the grant’s value for students,” Louisa Woodhouse NCAN’s senior associate for policy and advocacy said in the report.

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