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Colleges scramble to meet federal anti-DEI deadline

The clock is running out on colleges as they mull how to respond to a sweeping federal order to end all race-based policies and programs.

In the face of an imminent Friday night deadline, college leaders are scrambling to determine how to navigate the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter issued by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which declares all race-based educational programs and policies discriminatory and illegal. When they sent the letter on Valentine’s Day, department officials gave institutions two weeks to comply or face investigations and, possibly, the loss of federal funding.

For many colleges, the challenge is figuring out how to avoid drawing unwanted government attention without abandoning key services for underrepresented students and staff.

Institutions aren’t going to lose federal funding overnight. The investigative process is notoriously lengthy, and the Education Department has never revoked a college’s federal funding over civil rights concerns. The OCR may also be rendered impotent, at least temporarily, if a judge decides to halt enforcement while considering a lawsuit filed Tuesday challenging the letter.

But college leaders are anxious about the threat of federal funding cuts, which would be catastrophic for the majority of postsecondary institutions. Ray Li, who previously worked as an attorney at the Office for Civil Rights, said he expects the office to launch investigations shortly and that many colleges will buckle under the pressure, shedding practices that fostered campus diversity and belonging.

For now, colleges seem to be taking a slow and cautious approach, removing language about race and DEI buzzwords from the names of programs and launching internal policy reviews.

University of Nebraska president Jeffrey P. Gold said system campuses are in the midst of a comprehensive review of programs and policies, but no changes have been made yet. The Nebraska Board of Regents discussed possible tweaks to its bylaws at a recent board meeting, like removing references to “cultural diversity” and revising language on equal opportunity in employment, but no final decisions were made.

Gold said that as the review process continues, he doesn’t expect to “turn up anything that looks or feels like discrimination,” as the letter describes.

But it’s possible “we will turn up some things that require some language changes or possibly some changes in titles, changes in offices … that could be misinterpreted by the Department of Education just because of [the] use of specific terminology.”

He added that Nebraska banned affirmative action in 2008 and the state’s second attempt at an anti-DEI bill is pending in the Legislature, so “we have been changing websites [and] titles for years—that’s why I believe that there’s nothing substantive that we really have to change at this time.”

The University of Montana undertook a similar compliance review that tasked senior administrators with assessing whether their departments had any policies or practices at odds with the Dear Colleague letter.

“We made the decision to be as thorough as possible,” said Dave Kuntz, the university’s director of strategic communications. The review, however, led to “very minimal changes and really no changes at a programmatic or operational level.”

University leaders over all concluded that the institution was already in compliance, though some programs, like the Women’s Leadership Initiative, chose to tweak their webpages to clarify that they don’t bar anyone who wants to participate.

A spokesperson for the Education Department did not respond to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed in time for publication.

A Thorough Scrubbing

Many institutions are responding by scrubbing their websites of words like “diversity” and “inclusion.” The University of Cincinnati, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Alaska system and many more all did so after the Dear Colleague letter; some colleges had already begun revising their digital presence in response to Trump’s executive order on DEI in January.

The University of Colorado removed all references to a former DEI office and replaced them with a website for a new “Office of Collaboration.” The University of Pennsylvania scrubbed the websites for all 16 undergraduate and graduate schools of DEI keywords and removed references to diversity and affirmative action from its nondiscrimination policies.

Shaun Harper, a professor of education, business and public policy at the University of Southern California, said he’s been disappointed that higher ed leaders are heavily revising their institutions’ online presences in the hopes that it will appease the OCR—a project he believes will prove futile. In the Dear Colleague letter, acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor specifically warned against using “proxies for race” and promised to investigate race-neutral programs that “discriminate in less direct, but equally insidious, ways.”

“Scrubbing websites, launching reviews—these are the easy things to do while colleges are in ‘wait and see’ mode, to find out if that will take the target off their backs,” said Harper, an Inside Higher Ed contributor who authored a blog post last week recommending ways colleges can fight back against the Dear Colleague letter. “I think it’s both weak and reckless.”

Some institutions have gone one step further. Colorado State University issued a statement in which leaders simultaneously maintained that its policies are already race-neutral and promised to do more to comply with the new federal directives.

“The new administration’s interpretation of law marks a change,” the statement reads. “Given the university’s reliance on federal funding, it is necessary to take additional steps.”

And one day before the deadline, Ohio State University president Ted Carter announced the institution would shutter two DEI offices and eliminate more than a dozen staff positions, some of the most dramatic measures a college has taken during the new Trump administration.

In a particularly telling move, OSU’s Office of Institutional Equity will be renamed the Office of Civil Rights Compliance to “more accurately reflect its work,” according to an email sent to students Thursday.

‘We’ve Seen This Film Before’

For a glimpse of how anti-DEI compliance battles might play out between institutions and policymakers, consider the red states that have passed laws mandating similar cuts to race-conscious programs.

In Texas and Florida, public colleges reacted to impending or newly signed anti-DEI laws by changing the names of university offices and campus resources, moving personnel to student support services, and removing DEI mentions from university materials and websites. But in both cases, lawmakers came down hard to ensure the institutions took more strident action, leading to significant layoffs, spending cuts and policy changes.

“We’ve seen the prequel to this film before in Texas,” Harper said. “When that Senate bill was looming, many institutions thought they were very smartly getting ahead of it by just renaming things. That proved to be a failed strategy, and I very comfortably predict that some version of that will also happen nationally.”

In some states, the “review and revamp” strategy for avoiding DEI crackdowns appeared to work for a while. The University of Arkansas eliminated its DEI office in June 2023 in part to pre-empt a bill that state lawmakers were considering to force spending cuts. And last year, the University of North Carolina system Board of Trustees passed an anti-DEI resolution just as legislation was gaining steam to mandate enforcement from the state; that legislation was never brought to a full vote.

But circumstances have changed as the Trump administration launches direct attacks on DEI. Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law earlier this month that will “prohibit affirmative action and preferential treatment in state-supported institutions,” including public colleges like the University of Arkansas. Even in Texas, where public universities underwent broad layoffs and spending cuts in response to state legislation, lawmakers have threatened to cut $400 million in higher ed funding unless colleges do more to comply.

“If they don’t kick DEI out of their schools, they’re going to get a lot less,” Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said at a policy forum last week.

What Happens Next?

Legal experts say it’s unclear what will happen after the OCR’s deadline passes. The Dear Colleague letter promised more detailed guidance, but none has materialized.

“We’re kind of all in agreement that [the letter] is really confusing and overbroad, and the timeline is really outrageous,” said Andrea Stagg, director of consulting services at Grand River Solutions, a company that works with colleges on legal compliance issues. She noted that many underresourced colleges don’t have in-house legal teams to assess their risk by the deadline.

“What actually happens after tomorrow? How fast will it be?” she said Thursday. “I don’t know.”

Typically, the Office for Civil Rights opens investigations based on complaints from students, families or legal advocates, but it can also launch its own direct investigations. Most cases end with a voluntary resolution, in which the institution agrees to make certain changes. But unresolved cases can be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for litigation.

Li believes the OCR will likely receive complaints from anti-DEI groups as well as open some direct investigations into higher ed institutions with race-based scholarships, affinity group graduation ceremonies or other practices called out by the letter, starting next week. (He pointed out that the current OCR has already launched some direct investigations into universities related to Title IX.)

But that doesn’t mean the day after the Dear Colleague deadline “schools are just going to lose all their federal funding”—assuming normal procedures are followed, he said. Such investigations can take months, even years.

An investigation reaching the point of litigation is also “an incredibly rare step that, under most administrations, pretty much never happens,” Li said. And the Department of Education taking away federal funding over an OCR investigation would be completely unprecedented.

“But, also, rare things are happening right now,” Li conceded.

Stagg said it’s hard to tell to what extent normal processes will be followed, or how much the Department of Government Efficiency’s reductions to the federal workforce could affect investigations.

“There is a real question as to who will do these investigations” and how the OCR will choose institutions to focus on, she said. “Is there going to be an AI tool to search [college] websites for certain terms, the way we saw with the flagging of grants? It could be that the president has a bad interaction at a meeting with a leader and then they are targeted for investigation.”

An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to questions about planned investigations, agency capacity and enforcement mechanisms in time for publication.

It’s also unclear how much resistance colleges will put up. Li believes there’s a strong case to be made that some of the practices targeted in the Dear Colleague letter are perfectly legal. Higher ed institutions under investigation could refuse to make changes and go head to head with the Department of Justice. But they’d be signing up for an onerous, likely expensive process that puts their funding in jeopardy.

“The question is, is anyone willing to litigate it?” Li said.

Even if the Dear Colleague letter is rescinded, Li said the Office for Civil Rights has clearly signaled its plans for the next four years, and he believes higher ed institutions will continue working to rid themselves of anything that could attract scrutiny.

“I think there’s going to be an overcorrection,” he said. “It is going to lead to some perfectly legal programs that support fostering racially inclusive communities on campus being taken away.”

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February 28, 2025
Woman admits stealing $5 mil from ED via fake students

A North Carolina woman will face up to 20 years in prison after admitting that she scammed the Department of Education out of $5 million in financial aid, USA Today reported.

Cynthia Denise Melvin pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiring with dozens of “straw students” through an elaborate, seven-year scheme, federal court records show. Melvin applied to colleges on the students’ behalf, submitted the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for them, and even went so far as to impersonate the students so it appeared they were attending class and completing assignments, according to charging documents. All the while, she pocketed any leftover aid dollars, giving a small portion to the individuals she was impersonating.

Melvin was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In addition to her time in prison, she will face three years of supervised release and be required to pay a $250,000 fine, as well as restitution.

The scam is among the biggest “straw student” schemes in years, according to a USA Today review of Department of Justice news announcements.

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February 28, 2025
Trump tells agencies to plan for mass layoffs

The Trump administration on Wednesday ordered federal agencies to start preparing for “large-scale reductions in force,” the latest step in a broader effort to dramatically reduce the federal workforce.

The memo from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management applies to all federal departments, and the Department of Education could face heavy cuts as a result of Trump’s promise to “sweepingly reform” what he calls a “bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy.”

The president has repeatedly talked about shutting down the Education Department, and this memo’s orders could give him an opportunity to diminish the agency. Specifically, the OMB document tells agency heads to eliminate all “non-statutorily mandated functions”—an action proponents of abolishing the department have supported.

The OMB memo cites an executive order, “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” that was signed Feb. 11 as justification and directed agencies to submit a reorganization plan by March 13.

“Pursuant to the President’s direction, agencies should focus on the maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated while driving the highest-quality, most efficient delivery of their statutorily-required functions,” wrote OMB director Russell Vought and Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management. “Agencies should also … implement technological solutions that automate routine tasks while enabling staff to focus on higher-value activities … and maximally reduce the use of outside consultants and contractors.”

The memo notes that reduction should not impact positions necessary to meet border security, national security or public safety responsibilities, nor should it affect agencies or services that are directly provided to citizens “such as Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ health care.”

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February 28, 2025
UConn faculty member allegedly used funds for personal travel

A University of Connecticut faculty member has been charged with first-degree larceny after allegedly using more than $58,000 of university and grant funds for personal expenses and travel, including a trip to Disney World, The Hartford Courant reported.

Sherry Lynn Zane, who is listed on the UConn website as a professor-in-residence of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, allegedly took 19 trips, “of which 17 were identified as potentially having unreported personal travel or lacking the sufficient documentation to support the purpose of business travel,” according to a report by UConn’s director of university compliance, Kimberly Hill.

The compliance office referred the case to UConn police after receiving an anonymous report about Zane’s travel, which allegedly included seven trips to Belfast, Ireland, where her daughter had recently moved. According to the report, she was reimbursed for some of the travel through a grant provided to UConn by the Mellon Foundation.

“Dr. Zane expensed trips where there were no actual planned business activities and then provided information or created documentation after the fact to justify the expenses incurred by the University,” the report said. “Dr. Zane also provided misleading or false information to the University on the travel request forms she submitted for the majority of these trips. In these circumstances, Dr. Zane’s actual activities while traveling were distinctly different and off-topic from the agreed-upon purpose.”

Zane remains on administrative leave pending the completion of the university’s disciplinary process.

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February 28, 2025
Accreditors offer flexibility on DEI standards

President Donald Trump’s broadside against diversity, equity and inclusion has left colleges scrambling to determine how to comply—even as they juggle accreditation standards containing elements of DEI.

But even with an executive order from the Trump administration targeting “illegal” DEI programs at colleges blocked by the courts, and a Dear Colleague letter from the Education Department likely unenforceable, accreditors are treading lightly on DEI, allowing colleges leeway on complying to certain standards. If the accreditors didn’t provide such flexibility, colleges would essentially have to decide between complying with the federal government or with their accreditor—a nearly impossible situation for institutions.

Some, like the STEM accreditor ABET, have dropped DEI standards entirely. And the American Bar Association suspended enforcement of its DEI standards through August while it weighs revisions to such requirements.

As colleges feel the squeeze, some of the largest institutional accreditors have decided not to force colleges to choose between them or the Education Department, at least for now, largely telling institutions they will not be adversely affected if they fail to comply with DEI standards due to state or federal laws.

Accreditors Push Back

While accreditors allow colleges to operate with flexibility on DEI standards, some are also pushing back on the Trump administration’s crackdown, particularly the Dear Colleague letter that seeks to expand a Supreme Court opinion in the Students for Fair Admissions case, which shot down affirmative action, to ban race-conscious scholarships, programming and more.

“We would suggest that the [U.S. Department of Education’s] interpretation of SFFA is overly broad and expansive, a concern shared among legal experts,” the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions wrote in a letter to the Trump administration Monday.

C-RAC officials added that the 14-day deadline for colleges to drop all race-conscious activities is “unreasonable” and that “the expectations for institutional actions or the methods through which institutions are expected to comply with these broad reaching requirements are unclear.”

Numerous accreditors also signed on to a letter to the department from the American Council on Education, which raised similar concerns. That letter also noted that, “however one defines DEI—and DEI is a concept that means different things to different parties—it is worth noting that the range of activities that are commonly associated with DEI are not, in and of themselves, illegal.”

Offering Flexibility

As accreditors press the Department of Education for clarity, they have also provided guidance to colleges, emphasizing that their member institutions must follow state and federal laws.

“What we have said is that they can be assured we would not take any adverse action with regard to any of our standards if the institution is attempting to follow what they believe is a legal requirement,” Larry Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education, told Inside Higher Ed.

Nicole Biever, chief of staff at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, wrote by email that the organization has notified institutions “that the Commission would never expect any institution to violate the laws or government mandates of the jurisdictions in which they operate.”

She added that MSCHE standards “will in no way inhibit” institutional compliance with the law.

Barbara Gellman-Danley, president of the Higher Learning Commission, emphasized in an email to Inside Higher Ed that institutions must comply with all members of the regulatory triad, comprised of accreditors, state governments and the federal Department of Education. If “HLC’s requirements overlap with requirements from other members of the Triad, we work with the other Triad members to identify these situations and limit the burden on the institution,” she wrote.

“HLC does not prescribe how a member institution meets HLC’s requirements,” she added. “If a requirement of another entity of the Triad may appear to limit an institution’s ability to meet HLC’s requirements in a particular manner, an institution has the flexibility within HLC’s requirements to identify other ways to demonstrate it meets HLC’s requirements.”

In guidance sent to member institutions, Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission interim president Christopher Oberg noted that the Dear Colleague letter does not have the force of the law and encouraged institutions “to consult their own legal counsel to help navigate the Department’s guidance.” Oberg added that the organization “will continue to provide updates to member institutions as matters are clarified.”

The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges has also emphasized flexibility in its guidance to members.

“It is important to note that as a federally recognized institutional accreditor, ACCJC would never require a member institution to violate state or federal laws and regulations or consumer protection clauses. As an agency, we are beholden to the federal government, state governments, and our member institutions, and work collaboratively and flexibly with those oversight partners to meet any and all regulations and communicate requirements to member institutions, as necessary,” AACJC president Mac Powell wrote by email.

What Are the DEI Standards?

Policies on DEI are as varied as the accreditors themselves, with different requirements or none at all.

For instance, NECHE’s accreditation criteria urge member institutions to address their “own goals for the achievement of diversity, equity, and inclusion” across the student body, faculty and staff.

But MSCHE’s accreditation criteria require institutions to “reflect deeply and share results on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the context of their mission” across areas such as goals and actions, demographics, policies, processes, assessments, and resource allocation.

“One goal of DEI reflection would be to address disparate impacts on an increasingly diverse student population if discovered,” part of MSCHE’s standards reads. Elsewhere, MSCHE indicates that candidates for accreditation should have “sufficient diversity, independence, and expertise to ensure the integrity of the institution.”

Other accreditors, such as HLC, say that an accredited college should strive “to ensure that the overall composition of its faculty and staff reflects human diversity as appropriate within its mission and for the constituencies it serves.”

Others, such as programmatic accreditors, may have more exacting standards. But some accreditors, like the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, have never included DEI criteria.

Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities interim president Jeff Fox told Inside Higher Ed by email that it too has never officially had DEI standards as part of its accreditation requirements.

“The NWCCU has no language in the standards pertaining to DEI, and it recognizes institutions are addressing the requirements of various state and federal laws in this arena. The NWCCU supports institutions in their efforts to address the DCL as appropriate for their circumstances,” Fox wrote.

‘Very Little Danger’

Some critics, particularly on the conservative side, take a dim view of accreditors’ DEI standards. Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the conservative Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, wrote in a recent paper that “accreditors too often abuse their power as gatekeepers” to federal financial aid, including in areas such as pushing DEI standards.

On paper, such standards look fine, he wrote to Inside Higher Ed by email. But he questions how such standards get enforced, arguing that “the problem is the interpretation of those standards. Accreditors can and do use vague standards to force radical changes on campus.”

Gillen pointed to a past conflict in 2000 when—he argued—the ABA “used innocuous and vague diversity requirements to force George Mason University Law School to discriminate in favor of Black applicants by simply rejecting anything the university did short of discriminating.”

But Gillen believes colleges face little risk if they fail to comply with accreditors’ DEI standards.

“Colleges are in very little danger so long as they follow federal civil rights laws, which have largely reverted to their original intention of promoting colorblindness,” he wrote. “Any state or accreditor that requires violating these laws will find itself in a world of legal trouble. Accreditors that ignore civil rights laws would lose their recognition from the Department of Education, and colleges that followed such requirements would also lose access to federal aid programs.”

Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation and a member of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the education secretary on accreditation, downplays the notion that accreditors’ DEI standards are burdensome.

Typically, he told Inside Higher Ed, accreditors’ DEI requirements are minimal. Such standards tend to focus on inclusivity, but he notes that accreditors are “not enforcing any kind of quota.”

At a recent NACIQI meeting, he said when asked about changing DEI standards, accreditors indicated they didn’t plan to do so because “they feel that there’s nothing inappropriate about the approaches that they are taking, and they are holding firm.” He added that accreditors recognize “schools have to comply with laws, whether those laws are federal laws or state laws.”

There’s also an outstanding question on how the Trump administration is defining DEI.

“‘DEI’ has become this undefined term that gets interpreted in certain kinds of ways,” Shireman said. “And most accreditors are quite flexible in their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion.”

In a time of uncertainty, Shireman believes many institutions want to see accreditors hold firm on DEI while they push ED for guidance on terminating race-conscious activities and programming.

Shireman points to “surprise and outrage” over what he calls “an absurd perversion of civil rights laws that is happening in this administration. To read civil rights laws as prohibiting a caring approach to providing opportunity is Orwellian and it’s not appropriate. I don’t think schools support the idea of accreditors caving in to a backwards interpretation of civil rights laws.”

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February 28, 2025
Former staffer alleges Liberty U ignored Title IX violations

A former Title IX investigator at Liberty University is suing the private evangelical institution, alleging he was fired for reporting sexual harassment within the office to his superiors, USA Today reported.

Peter Brake, a former investigator in Liberty’s Title IX office from 2019 to 2024 (including a three-and-a-half-year leave of absence for active military duty), alleges he was fired in June after he raised concerns about “multiple violations of law” to his supervisor and reported instances of sexual harassment of coworkers by another investigator, according to a copy of the lawsuit.

Brake also alleged that the same investigator, Nathan Friesema, was inappropriately directing the outcome of Title IX cases, including asking leading questions and embellishing complaints.

(Friesema did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed sent via LinkedIn.)

Brake’s lawsuit alleges that Friesema subjected a coworker in the Title IX office to inappropriate jokes, including about sexual assault. Brake eventually brought the concerns to Liberty University president Dondi Costin in late 2023 and to his supervisor, Ashley Reich. However, Brake alleges that he was then “interrogated” by LU’s human resources department and fired.

“Liberty University has received news of this lawsuit by a former employee, and we are reviewing details of the case. Liberty takes all allegations of wrongdoing seriously and has impartial measures in place to assure the fair and equal treatment of all employees. While we will not respond to these allegations in the media at this time, we disagree with the lawsuit’s claims and are prepared to defend ourselves in court,” a Liberty spokesperson wrote by email.

The lawsuit comes less than a year after the U.S. Department of Education determined that LU failed to comply with federal campus crime–reporting requirements and officials discouraged victims from coming forward, weaponizing LU’s code of conduct against sexual abuse survivors.

Liberty was hit with a $14 million fine for various violations last March and is required, per an agreement with ED, to spend $2 million on campus safety and compliance improvements. The university is also on postreview monitoring through April 2026 to ensure it enacts improvements.

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February 28, 2025
How cuts at U.S. aid agency hinder university research

Peter Goldsmith knows there’s a lot to love about soybeans. Although the crop is perhaps best known in America for its part in the stereotypically bougie soy milk latte, it plays an entirely different role on the global stage. Inexpensive to grow and chock-full of nutrients, it’s considered a potential solution to hunger and malnutrition.

For the past 12 years, Goldsmith has worked toward that end. In 2013, he founded the Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and every day since then, the lab’s scientists have worked to help farmers and businesses solve problems related to soybeans, from how to speed up threshing—the arduous process of separating the bean from the pod—to addressing a lack of available soybean seeds and varieties.

The SIL, which now encompasses a network of 17 laboratories, has completed work across 31 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. But now, all that work is on hold, and Goldsmith is preparing to shut down the Soybean Innovation Lab in April, thanks to massive cuts to the federal foreign aid funds that support the labs.

A week into the current presidential administration, Goldsmith received notice that the Soybean Innovation Lab, which is headquartered at the University of Illinois, had to pause operations, cease external communications and minimize costs, pending a federal government review.

Goldsmith told his team—about 30 individuals on UIUC’s campus that he described as being like family to one another—that, though they were ordered to stop work, they could continue working on internal projects, like refining their software. But days later, he learned the university could no longer access the lab’s funds in Washington, meaning there was no way to continue paying employees.

After talking with university administrators, he set a date for the Illinois lab to close: April 15, unless the freeze ended after the government review. But no review materialized; on Feb. 26, the SIL received notice its grant had been terminated, along with about 90 percent of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s programs.

“The University of Illinois is a very kind, caring sort of culture; [they] wanted to give employees—because it was completely an act of God, out of the blue—give them time to find jobs,” he said. “I mean, up until [Jan. 27], we were full throttle, we were very successful, phones ringing off the hook.”

The other 16 labs will likely also close, though some are currently scrambling to try to secure other funding.

Federal funding made up 99 percent of the Illinois lab’s funding, according to Goldsmith. In 2022, the lab received a $10 million grant intended to last through 2027.

Dismantling an Agency

The SIL is among the numerous university laboratories impacted by the federal freeze on U.S. Agency for International Development funds—an initial step in what’s become President Donald Trump’s crusade to curtail supposedly wasteful government spending—and the subsequent termination of thousands of grants.

Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth and a senior aide to the president, have baselessly claimed that USAID is run by left-wing extremists and say they hope to shutter the agency entirely. USAID’s advocates, meanwhile, have countered that the agency instead is responsible for vital, lifesaving work abroad and that the funding freeze is sure to lead to disease, famine and death.

A federal judge, Amir H. Ali, seemed to agree, ruling earlier this month that the funding freeze is doing irreparable harm to humanitarian organizations that have had to cut staff and halt projects, NPR and other outlets reported. On Tuesday, Ali reiterated his order that the administration resume funding USAID, giving them until the end of the day Wednesday to do so.

But the administration appealed the ruling, and the Supreme Court subsequently paused the deadline until the justices can weigh in. Now, officials appear to be moving forward with plans to fire all but a small number of the agency’s employees, directing employees to empty their offices and giving them only 15 minutes each to gather their things.

About $350 million of the agency’s funds were appropriated to universities, according to the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, including $72 million for the Feed the Future Innovation Labs, which are aimed at researching solutions to end hunger and food insecurity worldwide. (The SIL is funded primarily by Feed the Future.)

It’s a small amount compared to the funding universities receive from other agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, also the subject of deep cuts by Trump and Musk. But USAID-funded research is a long-standing and important part of the nation’s foreign policy, as well as a resource for the international community, advocates say. The work also has broad, bipartisan support; in fiscal year 2024, Congress increased funding for the Feed the Future Initiative labs by 16 percent, according to Craig Lindwarm, senior vice president for government affairs at the APLU, even in what he characterized as an extremely challenging budgetary environment.

Potential Long-Term Harms

Universities “have long been a partner with USAID … to help accomplish foreign policy and diplomatic goals of the United States,” said Lindwarm. “This can often but not exclusively come in the form of extending assistance as it relates to our agricultural institutions, and land-grant institutions have a long history of advancing science in agriculture that boosts yields and productivity in the United States and also partner countries, and we’ve found that this is a great benefit not just to our country, but also partner nations. Stable food systems lead to stable regions and greater market access for producers in the United States and furthers diplomatic objectives in establishing stronger connections with partner countries.”

Stopping that research has negatively impacted “critical relationships and productivity,” with the potential for long-term harms, Lindwarm said.

At the SIL, numerous projects have now been canceled, including a planned trip to Africa to beta test a pull-behind combine, a technology that is not commonly used anymore in the U.S.—most combines are now self-propelled rather than pulled by tractor—but that would be useful to farmers in Africa. A U.S. company was slated to license the technology to farmers in Africa, Goldsmith said, but now, “that’s dead. The agribusiness firm, the U.S. firm, won’t be licensing in Africa,” he said. “A good example of market entry just completely shut off.”

He also noted that the lab closures won’t just impact clients abroad and U.S. companies; they will also be detrimental to UIUC, which did not respond to a request for comment.

“In our space, we’re well-known. We’re really relevant. It makes the university extremely relevant,” he said. “We’re not an ivory tower. We’re in the dirt, literally, with our partners, with our clients, making a difference, and [that] makes the university an active contributor to solving real problems.”

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February 28, 2025
Final “Intellectual Affairs” column by Scott McLemee (opinion)

The historian and political analyst Garry Wills once described writing for magazines and newspapers as a way to continue his education while getting paid to do it. The thought made a lasting impression on me and has been a driving force since well before I started writing “Intellectual Affairs” in 2005.

Twenty years is a sizable portion of anyone’s life; a kind of record of it exists in the form of something short of a thousand columns. I am a slow writer (my wonderful and long-suffering editors at IHE can confirm this), and quantifying the amount of time invested in each piece would probably make me feel older, even, than I look.

The launch of the column came after a decade of covering scholarly books and debates, first as a contributing editor at Lingua Franca and then as a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The founders of Inside Higher Ed approached me with an offer of far less money but complete freedom in what and how I wrote. The decision was easy to make. The offer seemed as close to tenure as a perpetual student could hope to get.

The shift from writing for dead-tree publications to an online-only venue was not an obvious choice to make, but IHE’s audience and reputation grew rapidly. Getting review copies of new books was not always straightforward or quick. Confusion with other publications having similar names was also a problem. But “Intellectual Affairs” began to draw a certain amount of attention—whether enthusiastic, contemptuous or trollish—in the academic blogosphere of the day.

The work itself, while grueling at times, was for the most part gratifying. Scholars would write to express astonishment that I’d actually read their books, and even understood them. It seemed best to regard that as a compliment.

I tend to forget about a column as soon as it’s finished and rarely look at it again. To explain this it is impossible to improve upon Samuel Johnson, who was a columnist of sorts even though the term had not yet been coined. In 1752 he wrote,

“He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.”

It’s not always that bad, but the experience he describes is familiar and typically yields the resolution to start earlier next time. But there is no next time with this column.

I’ve revisited the digital archive in recent days to assemble the selection below. If “Intellectual Affairs” has served as the notebook of an intellectual vagabond, here are a few pages from a long, strange trip.

Among the earlier columns was one considering the practice of annotating texts while you are reading—specifically, ones printed on paper with ink. A few people found my account of an improvised method useful. These days I mark up PDFs along much the same lines.

Much Sturm und Drang over e-publishing was underway during the column’s first decade—not least in scholarly circles. A column from 2014 surveys some of the trends predicted, emergent and/or collapsing at the time. Another piece described efforts to rethink literary history with an eye to the prevailing energy sources at the time a text was written.

More offbeat (and a personal favorite) was this exposé of the unspeakable secret behind Miskatonic University’s financial stability. Another piece brought together the purported psychic powers of Edgar Cayce, a.k.a. “the sleeping prophet,” with news of a technological advance permitting someone to “read” a closed book, or its first few pages, at any rate.

Early in the last decade, the New York Public Library prepared to offload a sizable portion of its holdings to locations outside the city—freeing up space for more computer terminals. Scholars and citizens spoke up in protest. A second column was necessary to correct the record after an official spun his way through a response to the first one.

Compulsive and compulsory technological change was at issue in this column suggesting that the Pixar film WALL-E owed a lot to the dystopian satire presented in the cultural theorist Kenneth Burke’s “Helhaven” essays. It was a bit of a stretch, sure, but the point was to honor their “margin of overlap,” as KB would say.

Many interviews ran in “Intellectual Affairs” over the years. Two in particular stand out. The earliest was with Barbara Ehrenreich on the occasion of her 2005 book about white-collar labor. I also reviewed two of her later books, here and here.

The other interview was with George Scialabba—a public intellectual working at a certain distance from the tenure track—on the occasion of his first book. His collected essays appeared not too long ago.

I stand by this assessment of Cornel West’s self-portrait. It caused a ruckus for a few days, but nothing changed in its wake, which is disappointing.

While by no means prescient, a column on the scholarly study of ignorance from 2008 still feels topical. The subject remained far too relevant 15 years later. Someone will eventually start an Institute for Applied Agnotology; it won’t have trouble finding financial backing.

Also distressingly perennial is a column considering social-scientific analysis of American demagogues of the 1930s and ’40s. A sequel of sorts, at least in hindsight, was this look into the stagnant depths of a spree killer’s worldview. And I was at work on a column about Ku Klux Klan historiography when Charlottesville broke into the news.

Less connected to the news cycle but likewise bloody was an item filed after attending a seldom-performed Shakespeare play in 2009. A year earlier, I looked into the far-fetched legend that The Tempest was inspired by a small island near New Bedford, Mass. (Copies of this column were available for a while in pamphlet form at the local historical society.)

Finally—and a matter of bragging rights— there’s this piece on the first volume of a biography of the long-forgotten Hubert Harrison, a Caribbean-born African American polymath and pan-African activist from the early 20th century. On more than one occasion the author told me that nothing generated more interest in the book than the column.

George Orwell characterized the professional book reviewer as someone “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” I once considered this amusing; now it makes me wince. (It’s not even a whole pint, mind you.) The rewards of non-celebrity-oriented cultural journalism tend to be meager and infrequent, but writing this column for Inside Higher Ed has provided more than my share. Thanks in particular to Scott Jaschik, Sarah Bray and Elizabeth Redden for their patience and keen eyes.

Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

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February 28, 2025
A letter to NEH on compliance with Trump orders (opinion)
On Feb. 11, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on its website that it had modified its funding criteria for eligible humanities projects in compliance with three recent executive orders. According to the announcement, “NEH awards may not be used for the following purposes:
- promotion of gender ideology;
- promotion of discriminatory equity ideology;
- support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives or activities; or
- environmental justice initiatives or activities.”
These prohibitions impose the terminology of Executive Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 onto future applicants for NEH funding, whether individual scholars, museums, nonprofit organizations or colleges (including historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges). Published well within the stipulated 60-day window for government agency compliance with the order to terminate all “equity-related” initiatives, grants or contracts, these prohibitions represent a swift implementation of the Trump administration’s point-by-point mandate for “Ending Radical Indoctrination.”

I can only begin to conjecture here about what the consequences of the NEH’s new criteria might be for the humanities, the domain of cultural and intellectual inquiry the NEH was created to foster. To cite the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, “While no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”

To uphold conditions defined by prohibition rather than freedom—and with prohibitions explicitly targeting the right to existence of queer and transgender people (“gender ideology”), the ability in any way to offset egregious structural inequalities in educational and cultural access (“DEI”), and even the very right to advocate on behalf of anyone’s rights (“discriminatory equity ideology”)—is to betray the very terms under which the NEH was created. In revising its Notice of Funding Opportunities, the NEH is in violation of its public mission.

Presumably, as a government agency perpetually under threat of budget cuts, the NEH hastened to implement Trump’s executive orders in order to fend off wholesale elimination. The NEH is a federal agency and is thus directly implicated in the executive orders, provided those orders are constitutional. By complying with Trump’s ideology, the National Endowment may perhaps live to see another day, thereby preserving the careers of at least some of its approximately 185 employees and its ability—to do what?

The NEH has not yet fully overhauled its website to reflect its compliance. Of its current listings of Great Projects Past and Present, perhaps “The Papers of George Washington,” “Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” and “The Real Buffalo Bill” might manage to squeeze through under the new stipulations, but would the Created Equal documentary film project be so lucky? Would a biography of union organizer César Chavez manage to qualify as a fundable project, or a documentary about “A Black Surgeon in the Age of Jim Crow”? How about the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database? The NEH has leveraged its own institutional survival on the forfeit of future such projects.

The problem is a far deeper one, however. In what universe should it be too much to ask that a state-sponsored institution created to uphold the “material conditions” for freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry put up even the slightest resistance to the inhumane, reactionary and repressive edicts issued by the Trump regime? Even today, the NEH website champions its past support for projects that uphold justice in the face of oppression, that resist totalitarian erasure. Yet the NEH itself has mustered no such resistance. Instead, it has announced that any such projects are now ineligible for consideration.

Of one thing I am certain: The National Endowment for the Humanities has forfeited its claim to the word “humanities.” The humanities do not designate a prohibitive sphere of capitulation to ruling forces. The humanities are not furthered by a governmental agency that serves, willingly or unwillingly, as an ideological extension of a political party. The humanities are a domain of inquiry, of questioning and investigation, not of unquestioning acquiescence.

As a literature professor and an educator in the humanities for more than a quarter century, I have assured my students that the study of cultural, artistic and intellectual production is continuous with its practice. This not only means that humanistic inquiry involves creativity, creation and a commitment to thinking freely, but it also means that humanistic inquiry necessarily upholds the same responsibility to questions of ethics, value and meaning with which any other historical action must reckon. Humanists cannot, and do not, stand meekly aside while the “real” agents of historical change make big decisions.

In posting a recent message to the frequently asked questions web form on the NEH website, I wrote that in light of the NEH’s silent capitulation to Trump’s executive orders, I was ashamed to call myself a humanist. I hereby recant that statement. I am not ashamed to call myself a humanist. It is the National Endowment for the Humanities that should be ashamed. Or, better yet, I call on the NEH and all its 185 employees, including and especially NEH chair Shelly C. Lowe, to recant their compliance with Executive Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 and join other national and international agencies, organizations and individuals in resisting the inhumane and unconstitutional decrees of the Trump administration.

Jonathan P. Eburne is a professor of comparative literature, English and French and Francophone studies at Pennsylvania State University and director of undergraduate studies in comparative literature.
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February 28, 2025
Cathedralic Higher Education – HEPI

With the major challenges facing UK higher education at present, it is perhaps hardly surprising that many in the sector are concentrating on the short term. Survival rather than strategy is the order of the day. Higher education institutions (HEIs), though, are fundamentally long-term operations which educate students and undertake research intended to benefit society for many years to come.

Indeed, they embody what has been labelled ‘cathedral thinking’, that is, a long-term activity which is ultimately for the good of future generations. There is a real risk, though, that the short-termism endemic in institutions and wider society will undermine this core attribute of HEIs.

Here and now

The UK higher education sector is, arguably, facing some of the biggest challenges it has for generations. Coping with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the worldwide recession following the 2007-08 financial crisis was hugely difficult, but they feel, in hindsight, somehow to be less problematic than where we are now.

Everyone is focused on survival, on getting through the next month, the next term, the next academic year. Certainly there is much lobbying going on from Universities UK, Vice-Chancellors and sector groupings to seek to persuade the government to do the right things for the sector in the forthcoming 2025 spending review. But, as the THE reported in garnering sector views on the year ahead, there is a great deal of uncertainty. Nick Hillman, quoted in the article, notes that the nature of politics, which HEIs are currently grappling with, is ‘a dirty, mucky, short-term, quick-fix sort of business.’

While Universities UK’s Vivienne Stern believes that many HEIs have already made or begun to make the difficult changes required to cope with the challenges ahead, the longer-term investments in infrastructure and facilities which are required to sustain and develop a world-class higher education offer remain somewhere in the future.

At times of great challenge, it is difficult to look beyond the immediate problems, the in-your-face issues which just have to be addressed, or there might be no future. Higher Education institutions should be well-placed to take longer-term views of everything and not be distracted by temporary turbulence. Many have been around for centuries in one form or another and have found ways to survive even when times were really, really tough. And yet it does feel that in common with just about every other organisation, HEIs are focused very much on the short term.

Planning the long game

However, so much in an HEI has to be viewed as long-term. Decisions around the development of the estate, research priorities, student recruitment and fundraising all require plans and commitment to sustained investment over the years.

Whilst strategic planning is often the subject of cynicism or even mockery in HEIs and strategies are easily critiqued as being very similar, they serve a really important purpose in drawing the institutional community’s attention to the need to consider the components of the long-term success of the enterprise. Strategic plans also provide a framework for decision-making and a set of markers to ensure that the long term is not forgotten in all of the current noise and turbulence. This feels more important now, given societal trends of focusing only on the immediate issues and the current challenges facing the sector.

Cathedral thinking

HEIs have all the ingredients to ensure they balance short-term needs and longer-term priorities. The nature of education and research dictates a different perspective. Private sector companies frequently beat themselves up about this kind of thing and try to find ways to move away from a model which demands a relentless focus on short term profitability at the expense of long-term success.

The idea of cathedral thinking, of delivering for future generations rather than just the current shareholders, has gained some purchase recently as companies have sought to develop a sense of purpose beyond just profit and be clearer with their investors what the long-term plan is. They have also sought to clarify longer-term goals and measure progress towards them whilst developing a culture which is focused on the long term. Universities and colleges are here already.

The worry is, though that they are being pushed in the other direction, towards the short term rather than the more distant future. Indeed, governing bodies are often dissatisfied with the kind of key performance indicators that institutions generate, which are inherently longer-term. Most of them change on an annual basis at best, and some of them, such as the Research Excellent Framework or Teaching Excellence Framework outcomes, are only reported over a much longer timescale.

As an aside, one of the important examples of taking a long-term view is in the appointment of staff. Careful and considered appointments are fundamentally long-term decisions. Many years ago when I worked at the University of Warwick, the ethos in appointing new administrators was very much about the long term. This was articulated, quaintly as it now seems, as ‘do they have a registrar’s baton in their knapsack?’ but the long-term view was clear in relation to the potential of appointees.

Universities and colleges should be really good at this. Not only is the fundamental service offered a long-term one, but everyone spends ages every few years developing strategic plans, which are just that, plans setting out the strategic, long-term ambitions for the university. These are usually the product of substantial dialogue across the institution and with governing bodies and external stakeholders.

Planning and punching

As Mike Tyson famously said when asked whether he was worried about the plan Evander Holyfield was said to have for their forthcoming fight: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ It’s not a hugely original comment, even in boxing, and echoes the old military adage that ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy.’ Finding a way both to respond to the immediate shock or issue and to consider the actions which will serve best for long term success is challenging. But it is essential if everything is not to be about just dealing with what is in your face (literally or metaphorically) right now and that your plans can be flexed to cope with the new reality.

HEIs have to take a long-term view, but that is difficult when governments struggle to see beyond the next stage in the current election cycle. This is the dirty and mucky nature of politics described by Hillman. To ensure long-term certainty, universities and colleges ultimately have to take more into their own hands. This means a more vigorous defence of institutional autonomy while at the same time engaging with government priorities. It also means finding new ways to collaborate and to push back against the tide of excessive and burdensome regulation. Above all, though, it means taking the long-term view – cathedralic higher education.

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February 28, 2025