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  • SCOTUS Ruling Has “Bleak Implications” for Researchers

    SCOTUS Ruling Has “Bleak Implications” for Researchers

    Researchers will have to challenge grant terminations in federal claims court.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images

    Hope is fading that federally funded researchers whose grants were terminated by the National Institutes of Health earlier this year will be able to resume their work as planned.

    On Thursday, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that any legal challenges to the grant terminations should be litigated in the Court of Federal Claims, not the federal district court system they’ve been moving through for months.

    It’s the latest twist in federally funded researchers’ legal fight to claw back nearly $800 million in medical research grants—though accounting for the multiyear grants that the NIH is refusing to fulfill puts that figure closer to $2 billion—the NIH terminated for running afoul of the Trump administration’s ideological priorities. Many of the grants funded programs that advanced diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and research projects focused on topics such as LGBTQ+ health, vaccine hesitancy and racial disparities.

    Researchers sued the NIH in April and got a win in June when a federal district court judge in Massachusetts ordered the agency to reinstate the grants immediately. Although the NIH has since reinstated many of those grants, Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University and former lawyer who’s been tracking grant cancellations, told Inside Higher Ed that after Thursday’s ruling those reinstated grants will “almost certainly” be re-terminated. If that happens, “I don’t think they’ll get their money back.”

    That’s in part because the Supreme Court said researchers will have to re-file their lawsuits in federal claims court, which generally doesn’t have the power to issue injunctive relief that could keep grant money flowing during the litigation process. And it could take months or even years for the claims court to decide if researchers are owed damages.

    “Nobody has that kind of time. The nature of research is that you can’t just stop and restart it many months later,” said Delaney. “Folks have already had to do that once and many aren’t able to—they’ve had to lay off staff and lost contact with study participants. This additional delay probably renders the research unviable going forward.”

    Trump ‘Always Wins’

    Delaney is among numerous experts and advocates who say the decision is both a blow to the scientific research enterprise and the latest evidence that the Supreme Court is inclined to interpret the law to favor the Trump administration’s whims.

    “Make no mistake: This was a decision critical to the future of the nation, and the Supreme Court made the wrong choice,” the Association of American Medical Colleges said in a statement. “History will look upon these mass NIH research grant terminations with shame. The Court has turned a blind eye to this grievous attack on science and medicine, and we call upon Congress to take action to restore the rule of law at NIH.”

    Jeremy Berg, who served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that while “many (but not all) grants from the lawsuits that had been terminated have been reinstated at this point,” the big question the Supreme Court’s ruling raises now “is whether NIH will start to re-terminate them.”

    Although a 5-4 majority did agree on Thursday that the district can review NIH’s reasoning for the terminations and kept in place a court order blocking the guidance that prompted the cancellations, Berg said the mixed ruling is “potentially very damaging” because redirecting the case to a different court means “the stay blocking the required reinstatements could go into effect.”

    He added that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent sums up his interpretation of the ruling’s implications. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: That one, and this Administration always wins.”

    That’s how Samuel Bagenstos, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Michigan and former general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services, interpreted the decision, too.

    “The message the courts sent yesterday is very strong that they are going to let the Trump administration shut down the grants right now and remit grantees to the really uncertain process of going to the Court of Federal Claims and potentially getting damages in the future,” he said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed Friday.

    “But that’s really cold comfort for the grantees,” Bagenstos added. “If they can’t get the grants restarted right now, they probably can’t continue their research projects, and the prospect of maybe getting damages in the future doesn’t keep those research projects alive. It’s a bad sign for the entire research community.”

    The NIH is far from the only federal agency that has canceled federal research grants that don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideologies. The National Science Foundation, the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Humanities are all facing legal challenges in federal district courts after freezing or canceling grants.

    And the Supreme Court’s ruling on the NIH’s terminations has implications for those cases, as well.

    “The message seems to be pretty clear that if you have an ongoing grant that’s been terminated and you want to go to court to keep the money flowing, you’re out of luck,” Bagenstos said. “It’s got very bleak implications for all researchers who are depending on continuing the flow of federal grants.”

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  • Federal Grants for Area Studies and Foreign Language at Risk

    Federal Grants for Area Studies and Foreign Language at Risk

    For 67 years, the Department of Education has administered grants to universities to create centers devoted to foreign languages and area studies, a field focused on the study of the culture of a particular area or region. Now, those centers are under fire by the Trump administration, which has not released the funding the grantees expected to receive in July.

    The grants support what are known as National Resource Centers, which were originally developed as a national security tool to help the U.S. increase its international expertise in the midst of the Cold War and the aftermath of Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. Since then, their purpose has shifted with the times, now focusing not only on producing scholars but also on community outreach and collaboration with K–12 schools.

    The office responsible for administering the grants—International and Foreign Language Education—was dissolved and its entire staff laid off as part of the March reduction in force at the Department of Education. But it seemed IFLE’s programs, which were authorized under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965, would live on; they were moved under the ED’s Office of Higher Education Programs, according to an internal communication shared with Inside Higher Ed at the time.

    Since then, funding has come through “in fits and starts,” Halina Goldberg, the director of Indiana University’s Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute (REEI), told Inside Higher Ed in an email, though ultimately, the center received all its promised funds for fiscal year 2024–25. REEI was part of the first cohort of NRCs and has been continuously funded by the program since then.

    But NRC directors, including Goldberg, are concerned the funds for the upcoming year—the final year of the program’s four-year cycle—may not come through, and that the Trump administration may be planning to demolish the program altogether. NRC leaders have received no notice from ED about whether or when the funds are coming, and some say their contacts at the department have expressed uncertainty about the program’s future.

    The funding cuts appear to be caused by the Office of Management and Budget; records show that the agency has not approved appropriations for programs formerly housed in IFLE, including the NRC program, as well as the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, which fund scholarships and stipends for undergraduate and graduate students studying these disciplines. In total, about $85 million was appropriated for IFLE programs for FY 2025–26, including $60 million for NRCs and FLAS.

    “We’re just kind of in this holding pattern to learn whether our funds are going to be released or not. And there is some time pressure, because if that fiscal year 2025 funding is not allocated by Sept. 30, which is when the fiscal year, the government fiscal year ends, then it’s gone and we’re without funding,” said Kasia Szremski, associate director for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    A Discipline in Crisis

    NRC grant recipients worry about what the funding freeze and potential elimination of the program will mean for the disciplines of foreign language and area studies, which have already taken a beating in recent years; many colleges have eliminated such programs as cost-saving measures— including West Virginia University, which gutted nearly all of its language programs in 2023. More recently, the University of Chicago has paused admissions to all its humanities Ph.D. programs, including a slew of language programs, for the coming academic year.

    Emanuel Rota, a professor in the Department of French and Italian at Urbana-Champaign who leads the university’s European Union Center, said he was already worried about the future of area studies and foreign language education, but “now I’m terribly scared.”

    “I think this seems to be, at this point, slightly part of a trend to provincialize the United States in a way that is troubling for the future of this generation of students, who are, at this point, used to learning from other experiences around the world; knowing about ways of teaching, other ways of learning; establishing collaborations early on; and being able to be multicultural and multilinguistic like their peers around the world,” he said. “And all of a sudden they are told, ‘You only speak one language, you only know one culture and you only know your local environment, and you have to live with that.’”

    It also comes amid efforts to quash other forms of cultural education and intercultural exchange. OMB also recently cut funding from a number of State Department exchange programs, according to Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange, which represents organizations that administer such programs.

    Larger entities like the Fulbright program are being spared, he said, but the cuts include critical programming aiming at increasing STEM education access for girls around the world, fostering intercultural exchange with students in the Middle East, bolstering the study of foreign affairs in the U.S. and more.

    International students and immigration broadly are also being targeted by the Trump administration, which has recently revoked thousands of student visas and increased barriers for overseas students studying in the U.S.

    “I think international exchange programs, mobility, the presence of international students on our campuses have long been something that is supported in a bipartisan way, and that has been played out for decades in tangible ways,” Overmann said. “One would be increases in funding in both Democrat and Republican administrations, as well as Congresses. This is something we have seen transcend party lines and those across the political spectrum see that the mobility of our students, of our young professionals—both Americans going abroad and international students and professionals coming here—is something that supports our national security, our diplomatic interests, our influence around the world and our economy, down to very local levels.”

    This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted NRCs. In 2018, during his first administration, ED criticized a Middle Eastern studies consortium at Duke University and the University of North Carolina for delivering programs it alleged had “little or no relevance to Title VI.” The programs under scrutiny included a conference about “Love and Desire in Modern Iran” and another focused on film criticism in the Middle East.

    “It was probably a harbinger of what’s happening now,” said Brian Cwiek, a former IFLE program officer who lost his job when the office was dissolved. “I think that’s really where a lot of the same folks became intent on shutting down this same program.”

    Area studies funding is also singled out in Project 2025, an agenda developed by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration is following closely.

    “Congress should wind down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities (Title VI of the HEA), which, although intended to serve American interests, sometimes fund programs that run counter to those interests,” Project 2025 reads. “In the meantime, the next Administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.”

    Outreach at Risk

    Although funding may still come through before the September cutoff date, some centers are already feeling the pressure.

    At the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, which is home to two National Resource Centers, Kathi Colen Peck was responsible for administering an NRC-funded program focused on providing faculty development to professors at community colleges in upstate New York. Although the center has funding sources outside of ED, the community college program was almost entirely funded by an NRC grant.

    The program involved bringing international speakers—a dance instructor from Benin, for example—to give workshops in community college classrooms, as well as administering a fellowship for community college professors to create curricular projects.

    Once it became clear this year’s funding wasn’t going to become available when expected, Peck was laid off and the partnerships with community colleges for the upcoming academic year had to be discontinued.

    “The intention of [the outreach program] is really to sort of bridge resources and help the community college faculty have connections to the area studies expertise at, for example, Cornell. They’re able to leverage resources at Cornell where they wouldn’t necessarily have access to that in any other circumstances,” she said. “It’s really about trying to help the community college faculty internationalize their curricula.”

    At other campuses, cultural events and educational programs that NRC leaders say are immensely valuable to their communities could be on the chopping block. Hilary V. Finchum-Sung, the executive director of the Association for Asian Studies, said that the University of Michigan’s Korean Studies center, for example, hosts a free Korean film series at an off-campus theater that is open to members of the public. It’s an opportunity for members of the Ann Arbor community to see a film they likely never would otherwise—and to glean something new about a culture that they might be unfamiliar with.

    On the flip side, NRC programs can sometimes give immigrants a rare chance to connect with their culture on American soil. Szremski, of UIUC’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, said the center has partnered with local libraries to hold a Latin American Story Time Program for about 15 years. At these events, they read children’s stories in English and Spanish, but also in other Latin American languages including Portuguese, Guaraní, Q’anjob’al, and Quechua.

    “This is particularly important in Champaign and Urbana, because even though we’re in central Illinois, we have a very large and very vibrant Latino community, many of whom are native speakers of Indigenous languages,” she said.

    Once, after a Latin American Story Time event, a library worker once told her, an older woman “came up to her in tears because she was a native Guaraní speaker and had never thought [she would] hear her native language again, really, now that she was living in the United States.”

    Cwiek noted that some faculty positions may also be at risk without NRC funding; though the grants usually cover only a small portion of a professor’s salary, that portion may be the difference that allows a college to offer certain world languages.

    Scholarship Uncertainty

    Students are also in imminent danger of losing scholarships due to the funding pause. Graduate students relying on Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships to fund their education in the new academic year still don’t know whether they will receive that money. Szremski said on Friday that one incoming fellow recently made the choice to withdraw from UIUC and instead study in Colombia for the upcoming academic year due to funding fears. With UIUC’s academic year beginning this week, others were forced to make the decision about whether to come to campus without knowing if they would receive the scholarships they’d been promised. Across the university’s NRCs, 53 students are awaiting FLAS funds.

    Other universities are in a similar position. At Cornell, 18 students will be impacted if the money doesn’t come through, according to Ellen Lust, the director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies and a government professor.

    These fellowships provide the cultural awareness, understanding and skills that the U.S. “has relied on to be a world leader. Students who benefited from NRC support have gone on to join the US Foreign Service, engage in international business, and educate new generations of global citizens. They have conducted international collaborations and research that that ultimately benefit Americans,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

    While the stipends allocated to undergraduate students are not as sizable as those for graduate students, Szremski said those recipients have told her they may have to take out private loans or start part-time jobs to fill the gap created by the missing FLAS money.

    The future of these grants remains unclear. The Senate’s appropriations bill maintains funding for IFLE programs, so even if the funding doesn’t come through this year, the program may be able to resume the following year.

    But if the NRC and FLAS programs are shuttered permanently, the effects will “be felt for generations to come,” wrote Lust.

    “Our current and future students are the foreign service officers, intelligence analysts and CEOs of the future,” she wrote. “Within a generation, US citizens will be ill-equipped to live, work and lead in a global world. They will be outmatched by those from other countries, who speak multiple languages, understand diverse cultures and have built relationships across borders. Ultimately, these policies weaken the US’ global position and will make America less secure and prosperous.”

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  • Fewer Young People See Math Skills as Very Important in Work

    Fewer Young People See Math Skills as Very Important in Work

    Higher education stakeholders have noted that math anxiety can hold students back from pursuing some disciplines or major programs, but a new analysis from Gallup finds that young Americans over all place less importance on math skills compared to the general population.

    While over half of all Americans rate math skills as “very important” in their work (55 percent) and personal (63 percent) lives, only 38 percent of young people (ages 18 to 24) said math skills are very important in their work life and 37 percent in their personal life, according to a December survey of 5,100 U.S. adults.

    The survey highlights generational divisions in how math skills are perceived, with adults older than 55 most likely to see math as very important compared to younger adults, and Gen Z least likely to attribute value to math skills.

    To Sheila Tabanli, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, the low ratings point to a lack of perceived connection between math skills and career development, despite the clear correlation she sees.

    Tabanli said it can be hard to convince many Gen Z and Alpha students that math content is necessary for their daily lives, in part because access to information is so convenient and they can perform calculations on their phones or online.

    “We need to transition from focusing too much on the concept, the domain, the content—which we do love as math people, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it for a living—but students don’t see that connection [to employable skills],” Tabanli said.

    When asked how important math skills were for the majority of the U.S. workforce, 40 percent of young adults rated having math skills as very important—the lowest rating of nine skills evaluated, including reading, language, technology and leadership, according to Gallup.

    Young people also rated the importance of math skills for the general workforce, as compared to their own lives, the lowest of all age cohorts. Adults ages 55 to 64 (71 percent) and 65 and older (68 percent) were most likely to say math is a very important skill for the general workforce.

    Most career competencies that colleges and universities teach, such as those by the National Association for Colleges and Employers, focus on broader skills—including critical thinking, leadership, communication and teamwork—as essential for workplace success. Math can teach students how to solve problems and engage with difficult content, which Tabanli argues are just as important for an early-career professional.

    One reason a young adult might not rate math skills highly is because many students face undue math anxiety or a skepticism about their own ability to do math, falling into the belief that they’re not “math people,” Tabanli said.

    In response, Tabanli believes professors should help students apply computational skills to their daily lives or link content to other classes to encourage students to invest in their math learning. While this may be an additional step for a faculty member to take, Tabanli considers it a disservice to neglect this connection.

    Professors can also strive to make themselves and the content more human and approachable by sharing information about their lives, their careers and why they’re passionate about the subject, Tabanli said.

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  • Howard President Steps Down, Former President Appointed Interim

    Howard President Steps Down, Former President Appointed Interim

    Vinson has led the Washington, D.C., HBCU since 2023.

    Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images

    Howard University president Ben Vinson III will step down Aug. 31, two years after assuming the role and two weeks after the start of fall classes, university officials announced Friday. Former Howard president Wayne A. I. Frederick will serve as interim president. 

    “It has been an honor to serve Howard,” Vinson said in a statement. “At this point, I will be taking some time to be with my family and continue my research activities. I look forward to using my experiences as president to continue to serve higher education in the future.” 

    University officials declined to comment about why Vinson is leaving only two years after he took up the helm. During his tenure, the Washington, D.C.–based HBCU became an R-1 research institution and brought on several high-profile faculty, including journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and historian Ibram X. Kendi. The university also hosted Kamala Harris’s election night watch party.

    But the past year has also brought its share of challenges. In May, the Trump administration proposed cutting Howard’s federal funding by $64 million in fiscal year 2026, bringing it back to its 2021 funding level. Over the summer, the administration took heat from students over surprise bills that appeared on their accounts when the university transitioned to a new student financial platform, and some students turned to crowdfunding to pay those bills. 

    “On behalf of the Howard University Board of Trustees, we extend our sincere gratitude to Dr. Vinson for his service and leadership as president,” board chair Leslie Hale said in a statement. “We extend our very best wishes to him in his future endeavors.”

    Frederick, who served as president of Howard from 2014 to 2023, will remain interim president while the board conducts a nationwide search for a permanent replacement.

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  • Letter From a Region of My Mind

    Letter From a Region of My Mind

    Working in journalism left Inside Higher Ed’s co-founder Doug Lederman little time to read for anything but information, so last summer, when he stepped away from 90-hour workweeks, he told me he wanted to watch less Netflix. I said, “Friend, you came to the right place.” Recommending reading is pretty much the only area where I can make solid contributions these days.

    I started Doug out with things I knew he’d like. Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding was an early favorite. I moved him along to Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, James (Percival Everett, not Henry), Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and loaded him onto the Louise Penny train.

    But just before I headed to D.C. last March for his official farewell party, I assigned him a novel I’d been wanting to reread and liked the idea of book-clubbing with him: John Williams’s beautiful and heartbreaking Stoner. I’ve often given Doug a hard time about—well, everything—but especially the fact that he’s never actually been in higher ed. He’s only peered in from outside with a reporter’s magnifying glass, exposing our flaws and fault lines, doing his essential duty as a journalist.

    When Doug asked me to work with him as a thought partner to create a newsletter for upper-level administrators, he wanted to bring tough love to leaders. He confessed to having a case of the fuck-its, disappointed that higher ed has been so slow to change and unwilling to take responsibility for some missteps. As we know, disappointment can only come from love, and is much harder for recipients to bear.

    I responded in my typically tactful fashion, asking him, “Who the fuck are you to have a case of the fuck-its? Do not speak to me of the fuck-its! Have you had to read millions of pages of academic monographs? Have you heard academics complain that their names were too small on book covers? Have you denied thousands of qualified applicants admission to their dream college, or sat through interminable Faculty Senate meetings group-copyediting policies? Have you taught classes that flop or graduate students who just can’t?”

    In other words, I told the co-founder of IHE he had little idea what it was like to be in higher ed, especially from the perspective of a faculty or staff member. Given his role and prominence in the industry, Doug’s attention is always sought after, a high-value treat. In our world, he is beef jerky, not a Milk-Bone.

    I thought it time for him to use his leisure reading to get a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be a regular professor. Not an oversize character like Morris Zapp (my old boss, Stanley) or even Lucky Hank Devereaux (or Lucky Jim).

    Stoner follows the fictional life and career of an English professor at the University of Missouri in the early part of the last century. Early in the novel, and just before the sinking of the Lusitania, the sharpest of a group of three young academics asks his fellows, “Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University?”

    Mr. Stoner “sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive.” Mr. Finch, with his “simple mind,” sees it as “a kind of spiritual sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter.” Finch goes on, naturally, to become a dean.

    But they are both wrong, claims the character named Masters. The university ”is an asylum …. a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, the otherwise incompetent.” His self-diagnosis: ”I’m too bright for the world, and I won’t keep my mouth shut about it.” He concludes, ”But bad as we are, we’re better than those on the outside, in the muck, the poor bastards of the world. We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it.”

    The book, published in 1965, presents characters that feel so current and vibrant you can imagine having a cocktail with them. In the times we now find ourselves, Stoner may become popular again—but not for all the right reasons.

    I have friends who have long said they’re done reading things by dead white men. When Doug and I were in college, that was pretty much the entire curriculum, with the exception of the 19th century gals, an Emily Dickinson here, a Frederick Douglass there. This reluctance is understandable, given how long the canon excluded previously silenced voices. Yet, I don’t discriminate. Stoner offers profound insights into institutional structures that persist today.

    These thoughts were on my mind as I finished my reread just before our flight to D.C. to celebrate Doug’s retirement next chapter, where institutional structures of a different kind awaited us in marble and glass.

    We had half a day before the event and my husband, Toby, and I wanted to be tourists. It had not been my intention to speed-walk through four museums in five hours. (Toby could spend hours in front of one painting, but he loves me and is a good sport.)

    My childhood consisted of trips downstate to see grandparents in New York City, which often involved visits to museums. A favorite was the one that hosted the squid and the whale. Unconsciously, I bought into the primate visions described by Donna Haraway about hierarchies—her critique of how science museums construct narratives of power and evolution that shape our understanding.

    Fifty years later, I was eager to see what had changed. We started at Natural History, moved on to American History, then African American, and ended up at the Holocaust. In March 2025, this journey was not, it won’t surprise you to learn, an uplifting experience. The museums, like higher education itself, told a complex story of American identity that is now under dire threat.

    I sped through to parse the presentation. How did the curators choose to tell the stories, some of which I know well, and which, as an adult, I would always prefer to read? Since I began my career publishing books in American history at Oxford University Press, I’ve imbibed a decent amount of quality scholarship.

    When I became an acquisitions editor at Duke University Press in 1991, I was intrigued by the work of scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, Derrick Bell and other theorists who used narrative to examine how our legal system perpetuated structural inequalities. Most people weren’t reading law journals back then, and it took a while for those ideas to make it into the mainstream

    Academe cranked open the curriculum to face historical truths not always self-evident: We are a country built on a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. At times we fell short of the mark, but the arc of the universe is long, and we were taught the direction in which it bends.

    Except. The rise to power documented in that last somber building we visited reads to me like a blueprint for what’s happening today. Before I could remember not knowing it, my father drilled into me that what it means to be a Jew is there’s always someone who wants to put you in an oven. That was made tangible by the numbers I saw tattooed on the arm of Great-Grandpa Max.

    How much longer will busloads of boisterous students milling around these repositories of culture be able to learn our history? When will the whitewashing take hold so that the ideas contained in the curators’ vision—in the works we’ve published since the latter part of the last century—are mummified?

    One of many chilling moments: coming on a small story I knew from the film Who Will Write Our History? Historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939 to document unprecedented actions. He collected materials, placed them in milk cans and buried them throughout the city. The archive known as the Oneg Shabbat is housed in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem.

    It was impossible in March not to feel that my colleagues at IHE and other media outlets are busting their butts at a similar task: chronicling the last days of an era of inclusion.

    How long before these exhibits come down, replaced by gold toilets in buildings repurposed for hotels and casinos?

    Just as the bright shining moment of Camelot disappeared for a previous generation, many of us already look back on Hamilton with nostalgia. A too-quick tour of museums in our nation’s capital filled me with love for America and the things that made us great. When I left, all I felt was grief. What happens if we don’t rise to today’s challenge?

    This sobering experience in D.C. brought me back to my conversation with Doug about higher education’s resistance to change. A reading of Stoner should not feel as resonant and familiar as it does. Little about faculty structure and the ethos of academe has evolved in the last century.

    Walking through those endangered halls of American memory, what Doug has long been saying to leaders is urgent: We need more than just better storytelling about higher education—we need to fundamentally reimagine it. And we need to do it now.

    The buried milk cans of our moment will someday be unearthed. The articles, reports and assessments documenting higher education’s struggles will serve as testimony to what we did—or failed to do—in this critical period. My only hope is that they’ll reveal how colleges and universities finally broke free from institutional inertia to continue to do the work of educating our citizenry toward truth and justice for all.

    Note: This reflection was published March 22, 2025, as an issue of The Sandbox. I wanted to share it as part of my new column here for two reasons (and with apologies to subscribers). First, if you’ve been reading the news, you’ll see that I wish I’d been wrong. Just a week after this first came out, the dismantling began. And now we’re seeing a scrubbing of our nation’s history in essential cultural institutions and not just in D.C.

    Also, I got a ton of responses from readers thanking me for putting them onto Stoner. So now, you’re welcome, friends.

    Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed and the co-founder of The Sandbox, a weekly newsletter that allows presidents and chancellors to write anonymously. She is also a professor of creative writing and the author of books on weirdly diverse subjects. Reach her here with questions, comments and complaints compliments.

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  • After Hechinger story, Illinois passes law requiring hospitals to connect parents of premature infants with life-changing therapies

    After Hechinger story, Illinois passes law requiring hospitals to connect parents of premature infants with life-changing therapies

    Illinois hospital staff will soon be required by law to refer parents of severely premature infants to services that can help prevent years of intensive and expensive therapy later, when the children are older. The new law follows reporting from The Hechinger Report that exposed how hospitals often fail to connect many eligible parents to these opportunities for their children after they leave neonatal intensive care units.

    Earlier this year, Hechinger contributor Sarah Carr wrote about how, across the country, far too few parents are made aware of the kinds of therapies their babies are entitled to under federal law. Such early intervention services can ultimately reduce the need for these children to require costly special education support as schoolchildren. 

    Carr noted: “Federal law says children with developmental delays, including newborns with significant likelihood of a delay, can get early intervention from birth to age 3. States design their own programs and set their own funding levels, however. They also set some of the criteria for which newborns are automatically eligible, typically relying on qualifying conditions like Down syndrome or cerebral palsy, extreme prematurity or low birthweight. Nationally, far fewer infants and toddlers receive the therapies than should. The stats are particularly bleak for babies under the age of 1: Just 1 percent of these infants get help. Yet an estimated 13 percent of infants and toddlers likely qualify.”

    After the Hechinger Report story was published, Illinois state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr authored legislation to require that hospitals distribute materials informing parents of premature and low birth weight babies about their eligibility for early intervention therapies. The bill also required that hospitals make a nurse or physical therapist available to explain these rights to families.

    Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

    “The problem is that these families often don’t know about these services,” Yang Rohr said last spring, after her chamber passed the bill. “So this bill improves that early intervention process by requiring NICU staff to share information about these services and requires hospital staff to write a referral to these programs for families that are eligible.”

    Illinois Representative Janet Yang Rohr Credit: ILGA

    Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed that bill into law earlier this month. It takes effect in January. 

    Carr also wrote: “The stakes are high for these fragile, rapidly growing babies and their brains. Even a few months of additional therapy can reduce a child’s risk of complications and make it less likely that they will struggle with talking, moving and learning down the road. In Chicago and elsewhere, families, advocates and physicians say a lot of the failures boil down to overstretched hospital and early intervention delivery systems that are not always talking with families very effectively, or with each other hardly at all. ‘They really put the onus of helping your child get better outcomes on you,’ said Jaclyn Vasquez, an early childhood consultant who has had three babies of her own spend time in the NICU.”

    “Early intervention is life-changing for many families, as these programs provide critical services and therapies as children develop,” Illinois state Sen. Ram Villivalam said when the bill was sent to Pritzker. “But, these services can only benefit those they are able to reach, which means uplifting the program and expanding its outreach to those who need it is imperative.”

    Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at [email protected].

    This story about premature infants 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.

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  • The resumption of student loan payments means students will need new policies — and our help

    The resumption of student loan payments means students will need new policies — and our help

    After a three-year pause prompted by the pandemic, the clock on student loan repayments suddenly started ticking again in September 2023, and forbearance ended last September. For millions of borrowers like Shauntee Russell, the resumption of payments marked a harsh return to financial reality.  

    Russell, a single mother of three from Chicago, had received $127,000 in student loan forgiveness through the SAVE program, and had experienced profound relief at having that $632 monthly payment lifted from her shoulders. SAVE exemplified both the transformative power of debt relief and the urgent need to continue this fight — but now SAVE has been suspended. 

    Such setbacks cannot be the end of our story, as I document in my forthcoming book. The resumption of loan payments, while painful, must serve as a rallying cry rather than a surrender. We stand at a critical juncture. The Supreme Court’s devastating blow to former President Biden’s initial forgiveness plan and the ongoing legal challenges to programs like SAVE have left 45 million borrowers in a state of financial limbo. The fundamental inequities of our higher education system have never been more apparent.  

    Black students graduate with nearly 50 percent more debt than their white counterparts, while women hold roughly two-thirds of all outstanding student debt — a staggering $1.5 trillion that continues to grow. These aren’t just statistics; they represent systemic barriers that prevent entire communities from achieving economic mobility. 

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. 

    The students I interviewed while reporting on this crisis reveal the human cost of inaction. They include Maria Sanchez, a nursing student in St. Louis who skips meals to save money and can only access textbooks through library loans.  

    Then there is Robert Carroll, who gave up his dorm room in Cleveland and now alternates between friends’ couches just to stay in school.  

    These students represent the millions who are working multiple jobs, sacrificing basic needs and seeing their dreams deferred under the weight of financial pressure. 

    Yet what strikes me most is their resilience and determination. Despite these overwhelming obstacles, these students persist, driven by the same belief that motivated civil rights leaders like Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. — that education is the pathway to economic empowerment and social justice. 

    The current political landscape, with Donald J. Trump’s return to the presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress, presents unprecedented challenges. Plans to dismantle key borrower protections and efforts to eliminate the Department of Education signal a dark period ahead for student debt relief.  

    But history teaches us that progress often comes through sustained grassroots organizing and innovative policy solutions at multiple levels of government and society. 

    State governments have an opportunity to fill the federal void through programs like Massachusetts’ Student Loan Borrower Bill of Rights and Maine’s Student Loan Repayment Tax Credit. 

    Universities must step up with institutional relief programs, as my own institution, Trinity Washington University, did when it settled $1.8 million in student balances during the pandemic. 

    The Black church, which has long understood the connection between education and liberation, continues to provide crucial support through scholarship programs. Organizations like the United Negro College Fund, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education remain vital pillars in making higher education accessible. 

    Still, individual, institutional and state efforts, while necessary, are not sufficient. We need comprehensive federal action that treats student debt as what it truly is: a civil rights issue and a moral imperative. The magnitude of the crisis — it affects Americans across every congressional district — creates unique opportunities for bipartisan coalition building. 

    Smart advocates are already reframing the narrative by replacing partisan talking points with economic arguments that resonate across ideological lines: workforce development, entrepreneurship and American competitiveness on the world stage.  

    When student debt prevents nurses from serving rural communities, teachers from working in underserved schools and young entrepreneurs from starting businesses, it becomes an economic drag that affects everyone.  

    Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from 4 campuses 

    The path to federal action may require creative approaches — perhaps through tax policy, regulatory changes or targeted relief for specific professions — but the political mathematics of 45 million impacted voters ultimately makes comprehensive action not just morally necessary, but politically inevitable.  

    Student debt relief is not about handouts — it’s about honoring the promise that education should be a ladder up, not an anchor weighing down entire generations; it’s about ensuring that Shauntee Russell’s relief becomes the norm, not the exception. The fight is far from over.  

    The young activists I met at the March on Washington 60th anniversary understood something profound: Their debt is not their fault, but their fight is their responsibility. They carry forward the legacy of those who came before them who believed that access to education should not depend on one’s family wealth, and that crushing debt should not be the price of pursuing knowledge. 

    The arc of history still bends toward justice — but in this era of political resistance, we must be prepared to bend it ourselves through sustained organizing, innovative policy solutions and an unwavering commitment to the principle that education is a right, not a privilege reserved for the wealthy. 

    The resumption of payments is not the end of this story. It’s the beginning of the next chapter in our fight for educational equity and economic justice. And this chapter, like those before it, will be written by the voices of the millions who refuse to let debt define their destiny. 

    Jamal Watson is a professor and associate dean of graduate studies at Trinity Washington University and an editor at Diverse Issues In Higher Education. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about student loan payments was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly 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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  • Bringing C.H.A.O.S to Chaos: Syllabi with an AI Usage Policy – Faculty Focus

    Bringing C.H.A.O.S to Chaos: Syllabi with an AI Usage Policy – Faculty Focus

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  • Bringing C.H.A.O.S to Chaos: Syllabi with an AI Usage Policy – Faculty Focus

    Bringing C.H.A.O.S to Chaos: Syllabi with an AI Usage Policy – Faculty Focus

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  • Jennifer Westacott on economic roundtable – Campus Review

    Jennifer Westacott on economic roundtable – Campus Review

    Universities should offer shorter, cheaper and more accessible courses that recognise prior learning to help boost Australia’s productivity, Canberra’s economic roundtable has agreed.

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