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New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

New research suggests that the Department of Government Efficiency has been making inaccurate claims about the extent of its savings from cuts to the Department of Education.

DOGE previously posted on X that it ended 89 contracts from the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, worth $881 million. But an analysis released Wednesday by the left-wing think tank New America found that these contracts were worth about $676 million—roughly $200 million less than DOGE claimed. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” website, where it tracks its cuts, later suggested the savings from 104 Education Department contracts came out to a more modest $500 million.

New America also asserted that DOGE is losing money, given that the government had already spent almost $400 million on the now-terminated Institute of Education Sciences contracts, meaning those funds have gone to waste.

“Research cannot be undone, and statistics cannot be uncollected. Instead, they will likely sit on a computer somewhere untouched,” New America researchers wrote in a blog post about their findings.

In a separate analysis shared last week, the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, also called into question DOGE’s claims about its Education Department cuts.

Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, compared DOGE’s contract values with the department’s listed values and found they “seldom matched” and DOGE’s values were “always higher,” among other problems with DOGE’s data.

“DOGE has an unprecedented opportunity to cut waste and bloat,” Malkus said in a post about his research. “However, the sloppy work shown so far should give pause to even its most sympathetic defenders.”

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February 27, 2025
Dear Colleague letter is lawless attack on DEI (opinion)

On Valentine’s Day, the Trump administration surprised schools and colleges with its newest attack on DEI and student body diversity. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released a Dear Colleague letter that warned schools and colleges that they may lose federal funding if they discriminate on the basis of race.

This letter revealed novel, unsupported legal theories regarding the application of federal civil rights laws to schools and colleges. In fact, OCR’s letter sweeps so broadly that it claims to prohibit certain considerations of race that remain perfectly legal under well-established legal doctrine.

While the threat of losing federal funding has been a facet of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act since its passage in 1964, the letter specifically takes aim at DEI programming as well as the use of “race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming.”

Although the letter includes some correct statements of nondiscrimination law, OCR makes assertions that are troubling and unsupported by sound legal reasoning. As part of the team that wrote OCR’s guidance on this very issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, I am disturbed by how politics is driving policy guidance that will hurt educational institutions and students from kindergarten through college.

In describing the scope of SFFA, OCR’s latest guidance attempts to smuggle in a legal standard that appears nowhere in the court’s opinion. The letter states, “Relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information, violates the law … It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”

Here, OCR baselessly claims that not only can colleges not consider race as a factor in admissions, they also cannot make race-neutral changes to admissions policies that help increase student body diversity—such as eliminating standardized testing. That claim falls firmly outside not only the bounds of SFFA but also the decades of Supreme Court case law that precede it.

In Grutter (2003), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor considers whether the University of Michigan Law School could use a lottery system for admissions. In Fisher (2016), Justice Anthony Kennedy implicitly approves of the Texas top 10 percent plan, perhaps the most well-known race-neutral strategy to increase racial diversity. And in SFFA (2023), the plaintiff’s briefs themselves include endorsements of possible race-neutral alternatives Harvard could have legally pursued such as adopting socioeconomic preferences in admissions.

Yet in its most recent letter, OCR attempts quite the head fake in its declaration that SFFA dictates that schools and colleges must abandon race-neutral strategies meant to increase student body diversity. While in reality SFFA says nothing about the permissibility of these race-neutral strategies, a separate line of cases tackles these legal questions head-on—and contradicts the Trump administration’s unfounded guidance.

In Coalition for TJ, Boston Parent Coalition and other recent cases, groups similar to Students for Fair Admissions have challenged changes to admissions policies of prestigious, selective high schools that were adopted in part to increase student body diversity. In some cases, the schools reconfigured weighting for standardized tests; in others, schools guaranteed that each feeding middle school gets a certain number of seats. In all of the cases, the school districts won. The position now advanced by OCR in its recent letter has failed to find footing in two courts of appeal. And just last year, the Supreme Court declined to further review the decisions in TJ and Boston.

What OCR attempts to do with its letter is extraordinary. It tries to advance a legal theory with support from a Supreme Court case that says nothing about the matter. At the same time, OCR ignores recent judicial opinions in cases that directly address this question.

Regardless of how legally infirm OCR’s proclamations are, schools and colleges will likely feel forced to comply. This could mean that the threat alone will lead schools and colleges to cut efforts to legally pursue racially diverse student bodies and racially inclusive campus environments. As a result, our nation’s classrooms and campuses will unfortunately look less like the communities that they sit in and serve, all because of shoddy policymaking and legal sleight of hand.

Ray Li is a civil rights attorney focusing on education policy. He recently left the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after serving as a career attorney from 2021 to 2025. In that role, he worked on more than a dozen policy documents for OCR, including guidance issued after the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA. He also served as OCR’s lead staff attorney on appellate and Supreme Court litigation matters, including for the SFFA, Coalition for TJ and Boston Parent Coalition cases. Prior to joining OCR, he advised schools, colleges and universities on legal regulatory issues, including civil rights issues, at Hogan Lovells’ education practice.

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February 27, 2025
AI for everyone – but not everything
- Mary Curnock Cook CBE chairs the Emerge/Jisc HE Edtech Advisory Board, and Bess Brennan is Chief of University Partnerships with Cadmus. Cadmus is running a series of collaborative roundtables with UK university leaders about the challenges and opportunities of generative AI in higher education.
- Yesterday, Wednesday 26th February, HEPI and Kortext published the Student Generative AI Survey 2025: you can read that here.
Clarity and consistency – that’s what students want. Amid all the noise around Generative AI and assessment integrity, students are hugely concerned about the risk of inadvertent academic misconduct due to misunderstandings within their institutions around student use of GenAI.

That was the message coming loud and clear from the HE leaders at Cadmus’ latest invite-only roundtable, which included contributions from LSE, King’s College London, University of Exeter, Maynooth University and the QAA.

As Eve Alcock, Director of Public Affairs at QAA, put it:

‘Where there’s lack of clarity and uncertainty, student anxiety goes up enormously because they want to do what’s right. They want to engage in their assessments and their learning honestly. And, without clarity, they can’t be sure that they are doing that.‘

Leaders shared examples of good practice around how universities are working in partnership with students to understand how they are using GenAI, as well as their concerns and what faculty and leadership need to know to encourage greater clarity and consistency.

LSE: Student use of AI

At LSE, student use of GenAI has been the focus of a major research project, GENIAL. It’s a cross-departmental initiative to explore the students’ perceptions and experiences of GenAI in their own learning process.

According to Professor Emma McCoy, Vice President and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education), AI is being used widely by LSE students on the courses covered by the project, and they are specifically using it to enhance their learning.

However, there were risks when AI was brought into modules as part of the project: when it was introduced too early, some students lacked the foundational skills to use it effectively. Those who relied on it heavily in the formative stages generally didn’t do so well in the summative. Using AI tools sped up coding for debugging in data science courses, for example, but there were also examples of AI getting it wrong early on and students taking a wild goose chase because they lacked the foundational skills to recognise the initial errors. In addition, despite banning uploads, students uploaded a variety of copyrighted materials.

While LSE has comprehensive policies around when and how students can use GenAI tools and how it should be acknowledged, only a predicted 40% acknowledged AI use in formative assessments in the project. In any case, such policies may become quickly redundant in any university, warned Professor McCoy:

‘We’re already seeing AI tools being embedded across most platforms so it’s going to be almost impossible for people to distinguish whether they’ve actually used AI themselves or not.‘

Maynooth University: Co-creating for clarity

For Maynooth University in Ireland, the starting point has been the principle that AI is for “everyone but not everything”. Leaders were aware that students were feeling nervous and uncertain about what they could use legitimately, with contradictory guidance sometimes being given about the use of tools with embedded AI functionality, such as Grammarly.

Students were also concerned about a perceived lack of transparency around the use of AI. They felt they were being asked to put great effort into demonstrating that they were not using AI in their work but their openness wasn’t necessarily being reciprocated by the academic staff.

Maynooth’s answer was to set up an expert and genuinely cross-disciplinary AI advisory group to work on complementary student and staff guidelines. Crucially, they brought on board a large group of students to work on the project. From undergraduates through to PhD students and across faculties, students worked in sprint relays on the guidelines, building the “confidence to be able to contribute to this work alongside their academic colleagues to try and remove some of the hierarchies that were sometimes in place,” said Professor Tim Thompson, Vice-President (Students and Learning).

One result was greater clarity around when GenAI use is permitted, with a co-created policy setting out parameters from no GenAI permitted through to mandated GenAI use and referencing.

University of Exeter: Incubating innovation

At the University of Exeter, new guidelines similarly describe every assessment as either AI integrated, where GenAI is a significant part of the assessment, AI supported, where ethical use of GenAI is accepted along with appropriate transparency, or AI prohibited. Alongside clear calls for students to be open about their GenAI use is a push for staff to also show best practice and be transparent with students if they are using GenAI to monitor or assess their work.

To that end, Exeter is supporting staff to pick up the challenge of integrating GenAI into learning and teaching to better understand the ways in which students are accessing these tools. Exeter’s Education Incubator offers opportunities for staff to explore pedagogic innovation in partnership with students, with the intention of scaling up successful interventions. Projects include rethinking historical skills assessment with LLMs in Classics and Ancient History and student-led hackathons on detecting bias in AIs.

While recognising the opportunities offered by AI for democratising access to learning, with innovations such as 24/7 coaching, Professor Tim Quine, Vice-President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Education and Student Experience, also highlighted the danger of ever-widening digital divides:

‘There is a significant risk that AI will open up gaps in access to support where privileged students can access premium products that are inaccessible to others, while universities are struggling to navigate the legal, ethical and IP issues associated with institutional AI-supportive technologies, even if we’ve got the budgets to put those technologies in place.‘

King’s College London: rethinking assessment

‘No one wants more assessment!‘ declared Professor Samantha Smidt, Academic Director, King’s College London.

‘Talking to staff and to students about assessment, they’re asking for things to be different, to be more meaningful and rewarding, but nobody’s saying we don’t have enough of it.’

King’s has grasped the opportunity to rethink assessment in a holistic way as a result of, but not limited to, the AI imperative. Aware that students are keen for credit-focused work to be transparently comparable across modules, and for marks to be comparable across markers, King’s has been working on culture change, socialising ideas around a new approach to assessment.

Professional development opportunities – and, importantly, funding, for staff to explore areas of interest within a new assessment framework, TASK – have been allied with student partnership work. Pilots are trialling programmatic assessment across 10 programmes, focusing on assessment timings, tariffs, a shift to more formative assessment and a drive to reduce turnaround times.

In the loop

AI policy in HE is an increasingly complex area, with staff AI literacy requiring as much attention as student use of GenAI tools. In such a fast-developing field, where AI is going to become ever more woven into the fabric of the everyday technology used in academic work, engaging staff and students with emerging issues is critical.

‘The thing we hear time and time again is to keep partnering with and learning from students as a continuous process,‘ urged QAA’s Eve Alcock:

Some AI policies will have been in place for a year, two years now, which is brilliant, but are they still working? Is there a need to evolve them? Making sure that students are fully within that loop is incredibly important.
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February 27, 2025
We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too
The most obvious way that a university expresses what it values is what it chooses to pay for.

At an institution level this might be about which kinds of jobs in which kinds of areas are funded. At a more personal level value is made clear by how people get in and get on in an institution.

Promotion

In reviewing promotion criteria of a number of universities, where it is not behind a login of some kind, one theme comes out time and time again. Promotion isn’t solely based on being consistently good at one thing. Promotion is about being able to be good at lots of things at once.

Whether this is the hope that academics can be good researchers, teachers, and administrators all at once. The desire to find managers that can manage people as well as projects. And the forever quest for professional services that have innovative approaches of some kind.

It isn’t fair to single out specific institutions as this is a sector wide phenomena but consider some of the language in the follow promotion criteria:
- For a Grade 7 Assistant Professor “Evidence will be required of the ability to innovate and plan, and to execute plans competently”
- For a Grade 9 lecturer role “Contributes to the planning, design and development of objectives and material, identifying areas for improvement and innovation.”
- For a Grade 6 professional services role “You are involved in decisions that have an ongoing impact beyond your immediate team”
- The job evaluation criteria for professional service staff “Will the role holder play an active part of any networks (connecting regularly with groups outside their team)? If so, please outline what these networks are, whether the role holder would be expected to establish the network, and the input they are expected to have”
The thread between these criteria is the implication that doing a defined job to an agreed standard isn’t enough. Promotions, particularly to high grades, depend on creating new practices, integrating with other teams, and making an impact beyond the confines of a role. It is the things which aren’t in the job description, because the nature of innovation means they cannot be, that are as valuable as the actual job description.

Innovation may be the goal but it comes at a cost.

Consistency

Every promotion criteria is a choice on what an institution values. The consistent message is that value is not purely about executing a single role consistently well. The choice that many universities have made is that there is value in working vertically, developing new practice within a role, and working horizontally, developing and sharing expertise across teams and departments.

This choice means that there is less emphasis on maintenance and delivery. The slow grind of keeping the place running and doing a set of discreet things well over and over again.

The result of this choice is that roles where there is less autonomy may be at a disadvantage. This is not to say there is not a role for innovation in all jobs but that innovation is structurally easier in some jobs than others. Take for example the jobs which are purely focussed on creating and interpreting new knowledge. In a previous role as a senior policy advisor I had great latitude to pursue institutional projects, look into problems and suggest new ways of working, and as a bonus my boss was the Vice Chancellor. It would have been an enormous failure of mine to have not been innovative.

Conversely, the people our institutions rely on that work on the reception desks, maintain buildings, clean the offices, and do the things that actually make the entire place stay open clearly have less freedom to innovate in their work. They are managed on their ability to deliver a distinct service but promotion is often dependent on being able to move beyond maintaining performance. There therefore opens a gap in the possibility of getting promoted between those who work primarily in maintaining the institution and those who think about what the institution might do. This does not seem like an ideal incentive for institutions that rely on lots of people turning up, doing a defined role well, and being motivated to do so.

Innovation for the sake of it

The underpinning assumption is that innovation for its own sake is a good thing. There is even a league table for the most innovative universities in the world.

This is because the university bureaucracy demands feeding with new ideas. It is a more machine. It needs more papers, more ideas, more meetings, more service innovation, more approaches, more evaluation, and ultimately more with less. The current more is innovating in service delivery with less resource to do it. It is rare to see a university with few ideas. It is much more common to see an institution with too few people to deliver them.

The prizing of the new is tempting because it’s interesting but it’s a tool for a limited set of purposes. Innovation is the tool through which new ideas, services, processes, and products can emerge. Maintenance, the kind of reusing, fixing, and keeping things consistent, is the tool to ensure the good keeps going. They both have their place but one is not more inherently valuable than the other.

In their influential essay on the topic Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write that:

Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there?

To believe entirely in innovation as an unalloyed good is to fundamentally believe that newness is better. It is by extension a surrender of agency to say the promise of the future is better than the material of the present. Once the innovation happens more maintenance is needed. Once innovation overtakes maintenance, leaving no capacity to keep the new thing working, the realm of innovation for innovation sake is entered.

However, the alternative is not to go entirely the other way and focus on consolidation. As Russell and Vinsel point out in their own country

What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls.

It is a question of balance and in a multi-layered bureaucracy like a university it requires balance across numerous domains.

At a human level, there should be clear progression pathways for people that want to be experts and keeping things going. The reward does not have to be management responsibility (why make people who are good at delivering do less delivery?) but recognition of their domain specialisms.

Culturally, it is about language that reflects the shared contribution of skills toward a common goal. And institutionally, it is a question of how maintenance becomes a key strategy component, and is therefore recognised. For example, the extent to which sustainability strategies are built on innovative idea vs the extent to which they are about keeping the old going.

Our institutions depend on the people that literally keep the lights on, the machines working, and the services delivered. Let’s let the maintainers maintain and reward them for doing so. Let’s also keep innovating, maybe just not on everything all of the time.
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February 27, 2025
The polycrisis needs you | Wonkhe

Facing a climate and ecological polycrisis, human society needs to make a transition to restore life on earth to a sustainable footing.

This is particularly true for those parts of the world sufficiently prosperous to have well-developed higher education systems, both because there is capacity and because the causes and effects of the crisis are uneven.

Education for this purpose is variously called “education for sustainable development”, “teaching the crisis”, “climate and sustainability education” and other alternatives. There are good conversations to be had about the relative merits of these terms – what they invite, what they close off – but those are for a different piece. For this one we can go with EfS – education for sustainability.

For those unconvinced

In addressing the question of how higher education curricula can accelerate this transition, it helps to engage with the reservations. While many professionally oriented degrees already have some variant of sustainability in the criteria set by their accrediting body, it tends to be the harder, purer disciplines that pose the toughest questions about EfS.

One position is that, as a matter of academic freedom, sustainability should not be imposed on higher education curricula. It’s true that coercion sits problematically with the kind of criticality and individual judgement higher learning demands. Yet students are already implicitly treated as prospective custodians of their discipline, and while on the surface this can look very diverse, there is a common basis of consistent reasoning, intellectual humility, collective endeavour, ethical practice, and academic integrity.

It seems a small step to include the kind of integrative, future-oriented learning that characterises EfS – especially given that EfS exists to preserve and uphold the existing values. To underline this point, see the revised QAA Subject Benchmark statements, which begin to distinguish what EfS could be for different subject areas.

Another concern is that there is no space for EfS in a given curriculum. It’s true that EfS needs thinking through to make it relevant to disciplinary teaching and learning. It’s also true that all curricula are all more or less time sensitive and are developed by module and programme leaders drawing on their evolving expertise and foresight. A case in point is the medical degree, perhaps the most pressured of all curricula.

The General Medical Council takes a position that Education for Sustainable Healthcare and the concept of Planetary Health are key to addressing the greatest threats to health we face, and consequently medical curricula are integrating these.

Somebody else’s problem

The assumption that somebody else should do the EfS is common. It often comes from a place of humility and self-doubt – a belief that there are colleagues better qualified to lead this work, with better-suited modules. But in a modularised system this is a trap that needs to be sidestepped. EfS is most meaningful when integrated rather than adjunct, and strongest when it connects deeply with the disciplines students have signed up to study; it belongs in the core of a curriculum at each level. Viewed in this way, supporting core module leaders to develop themselves to teach the climate and environmental crisis through the lens of their discipline, along with ways students and graduates can contribute to addressing it, does not seem much different from any other continuous self-development a disciplinary expert and educator would undertake.

Another reservation is that students of a given subject or discipline don’t need sustainability as part of that education. In response to that, an appeal: the polycrisis is existential and it needs you.

This makes sense if we recognise climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and all that follows from those as a “wicked” (nexus) problem that cannot be addressed by one discipline alone, but needs a plurality of perspectives within and beyond academia.

For example, the modelling that informs the planetary boundaries framework depends on mathematicians, who in turn depend on scientific researchers collecting data out in the field, who in turn use bespoke equipment and software created by engineers with particular cases in mind. The modelling needs visualisation by scientific communication specialists, and it needs the kind of readiness abundant in arts and humanities to imagine and inculcate the social transformation implied. The transformation requires specialists in economics, law and policy, and the creativity of business and management. The impetus for all of this is health, and its dependency on our life support, a stable planet. So, education for sustainability doesn’t take students away from their discipline but draws deeply on it. This ability and intent to bring their disciplinary learning to the world beyond academia is what any academic hopes their students will do.

Beyond the UN goals

In some quarters there is a perception of EfS as teaching about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and this is a misunderstanding which partly explains the reservations about disciplinary fit above. A simple explanation for why the SDGs on their own have not successfully averted the polycrisis is that they are in considerable tension with each other and require trade-offs. Education for Sustainability is an action-oriented education focused on empowering students to navigate these competing goods, cognisant that the basis for all of them is a habitable planet. It recognises that being able to mobilise knowledge does not necessarily follow from knowing alone.

Hence the EfS emphasis on holistic thinking that recognises disciplinary boundaries and is curious beyond them, dialogue towards a shared, multifaceted understanding of the problem at hand, and the ability to contribute the most relevant of one’s own disciplinary perspectives and methods, in negotiation with others, to arrive at a collective plan of action which deals justly with conflicts of interests.

This kind of education has always been valuable. In current times, where collective human behaviour is key to averting hunger, forced migration and conflict, it is not only valuable but urgent.

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February 27, 2025
Liberty University must face former trans worker’s discrimination claim, judge rules

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A worker who was fired by Liberty University for disclosing her transgender status and announcing her intention to transition may proceed with her employment discrimination case against the institution, a Virginia district court judge ruled Feb. 21 (Zinski v. Liberty University).

The case involved a worker who was hired in February 2023 as an IT apprentice at the university’s IT help desk. She received positive performance reviews until July of that year, when she emailed Liberty’s HR department, explaining that she was a transgender woman, had been undergoing hormone replacement therapy and would be legally changing her name, according to court documents. An HR representative promised to follow up with her.

Shortly thereafter, after hearing nothing, the worker reached out again and was scheduled for a meeting later the same day. She was presented with a letter terminating her employment and explaining that her decision to transition violated Liberty’s religious beliefs and its Doctrinal Statement.

In response to the worker’s lawsuit, Liberty University argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (among other laws) allow religious employers to discriminate on the basis of religion, contending that the worker’s firing was religion-based rather than sex-based in discriminatory nature.

While Judge Norman Moon appreciated that the case presents a “novel question of law in the Fourth Circuit,” he ultimately found current case law didn’t fully or clearly support the university’s argument.

“If discharge based upon transgender status is sex discrimination under Title VII generally, it follows that the same should be true for religious employers, who, it has been shown, were not granted an exception from the prohibition against sex discrimination,” Judge Moon said in his order denying the university’s motion to dismiss the case. “They have been entitled to discriminate on the basis of religion but on no other grounds.”

Judge Moon pointed out that “no source of law … answers the question before us,” but “we find that a decision to the contrary would portend far-reaching and detrimental consequences for our system of civil law and the separation between church and state.”

“This case — and the law it implicates — points to the delicate balance between two competing and laudable objectives: eradicating discrimination in employment, on the one hand, and affording religious institutions the freedom to cultivate a workforce that conforms to its doctrinal principles, on the other,” Moon wrote. “We find that our holding today — that religious institutions cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, even if motivated by religion — most appropriately maintains this balance.”

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February 27, 2025
Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

New York governor Kathy Hochul took an unusual interest in the hiring practices of the City University of New York on Tuesday when she ordered the public system to take down a job posting for a professorship in Palestinian studies at Hunter College.

CUNY quickly complied, and faculty at Hunter are up in arms over what they call a brazen intrusion into academic affairs from a powerful state lawmaker.

The job posting was for “a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.”

“We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches,” the posting continued.

In a statement Tuesday night, Hochul said the posting’s use of the words “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid” amounted to antisemitic attacks and ordered CUNY to “immediately remove” the posting.

A few hours later, CUNY complied, and system chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez echoed Hochul’s criticisms of the posting.

“We find this language divisive, polarizing and inappropriate and strongly agree with Governor Hochul’s direction to remove this posting, which we have ensured Hunter College has since done,” he wrote in a statement.

Hochul also directed the university system to launch an investigation at Hunter “to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom.” Matos Rodríguez appeared to imply the system would follow that order as well, saying, “CUNY will continue working with the Governor and other stakeholders to tackle antisemitism on our campuses.”

A CUNY spokesperson declined to say whether the system would launch a probe into the posting at Hunter but wrote in an email that “each college is responsible for its own faculty job posting.”

Hochul’s order came after pro-Israel activists, including a former CUNY trustee and current professor, publicly voiced concerns about the posting.

“To make a Palestinian Studies course completely about alleged Jewish crimes is akin to courses offered in the Nazi era which ascribed all the world’s crimes to the Jews,” Jeffrey Weisenfeld, who served as a CUNY trustee for 15 years, told The New York Post.

Faculty at Hunter are livid about the decision, according to multiple professors who spoke with Inside Higher Ed both on the record and on background. They say it’s a concerning capitulation to political pressure from an institution they long believed to be staunchly independent.

One longtime Hunter and CUNY Graduate Center professor, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their job, said faculty across the system were “outraged at this craven act by our governor and our chancellor.”

“It shows that [Matos Rodríguez] has no commitment to academic freedom or moral compass that would allow him to stand up at this moment of political repression,” they said.

CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, the union representing more than 30,000 faculty and staff members across the system’s 25 campuses, wrote a letter to Matos Rodriguez on Wednesday evening condemning the posting removal and calling on leadership to reverse their decision.

“An elected official dictating what topics may be taught at a public college is a line that should not be crossed,” the letter reads. “The ‘divisive concepts’ standard for universities is something devised in Florida that shouldn’t be exported to New York. What’s needed are inclusive ways of teaching, not canceling concepts and areas of study.”

It was unclear Wednesday whether the job posting would be edited and reposted or if the opening would be eliminated. A CUNY spokesperson declined to respond to questions about the job’s future, but the anonymous faculty member said they believed Hunter officials were revising the post, intending to relist it.

The anonymous professor said they were worried that Hunter president Nancy Cantor, who took on the role last August after leading Rutgers University–Newark for a decade, could face severe scrutiny after the posting.

“We fully support this initiative by our president to make this Palestinian studies cluster hire,” the anonymous professor said. “I’m very worried about Nancy Cantor’s tenure at Hunter. I think this is part of a campaign by the far right to get rid of Félix [Matos Rodríguez], and it would not surprise me in the least if he threw Nancy Cantor under the bus to save his own skin.”

Heba Gowayed, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter, said she was shocked that Hochul had made the job posting a priority, especially as threats to academic freedom and attacks on higher education from Republicans are intensifying.

“This is an unprecedented overstep in authority, but instead of coming from Republicans, it’s coming from a Democrat in one of the bluest states in the country,” she said. “They’re the ones that are supposed to be fighting to protect academic freedom. This is a tremendous abdication of that responsibility.”

‘A Climate of Fear’

The anonymous professor said their colleagues are grappling with contending emotions: rage and fear. There’s a great appetite to speak up, they said, but they also feel it’s more dangerous than ever, even for tenured faculty.

“People are worried across the board,” they said. “That is the kind of climate of fear that this sort of action creates.”

It’s not the first time CUNY has responded to pressure from pro-Israel activist groups in faculty workforce decisions. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, CUNY institutions have declined to renew contracts for two vocally pro-Palestinian professors: Danny Shaw at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who says he was the target of a pro-Israel pressure campaign to get him fired after 18 years of teaching, and lecturer Lisa Hofman-Kuroda at Hunter, who was reported for pro-Palestinian social media posts.

Shaw, who is currently suing CUNY for breach of contract, told Inside Higher Ed that the decision to remove the job posting did not surprise him.

“This is McCarthyism 2.0,” he said. “Administrators won’t protect us. It’s been made pretty clear that at the end of the day, it’s either their necks on the chopping block or ours.”

Last spring, when the student-led pro-Palestinian encampment protests spread from Columbia University across town to the City College of New York, CUNY leadership drew criticism for calling the New York Police Department to disperse students. Gowayed said that decision shocked faculty across the system, who took pride in their institution’s progressive reputation and history of academic integrity.

Even then, she said she was “disturbed that they have let it get to this higher level of censoring faculty for a completely legitimate job posting.”

The Palestinian studies position was one of two Hunter planned to hire, and Gowayed said faculty and leadership at Hunter had been supportive of the plans to expand their research and teaching capacity in an area of growing interest.

“Whatever your feelings on Palestine, this is a research area in a widely recognized field of scholarship on genocide and apartheid,” Gowayed said. “These are well-established fields, whether you’re studying the Belgian Congo or Rwanda or Palestine, and the posting wasn’t even saying what approach the faculty should take … The reaction to this posting is so discrepant from the actual academic integrity of the job search.”

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February 26, 2025
Fighting for science, research—and cures (AFT Higher Education)

Hands off our research! Hands off our healthcare! Hands off our jobs! The message rang out loud and clear at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, where scientists, researchers and other higher education workers rallied against the cuts the Trump administration has been making to medical research. It’s just one way AFT members are pushing back against attacks that harm not just researchers but the millions of Americans who rely on their work for cures and treatments for everything from cancer to diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

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February 26, 2025
Struggling soup kitchens and hospitals in Sudan face uncertainty amid U.S. aid freeze (CBS News)

When President Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on foreign aid, no one felt the impact more than the people of Sudan. Two years of civil war has left more than 25 million Sudanese starving in what is the largest humanitarian crisis the world has ever seen. Debora Patta reports.

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February 26, 2025
Teachers’ union sues to block Trump admin’s DEI guidance

The lawsuit comes after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from carrying out parts of two executive orders cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Pete Kiehart/The Washington Post/Getty Images

A coalition of educators and sociologists is challenging the Department of Education and its unprecedented Dear Colleague letter—which declared all race-conscious student programming illegal—in a lawsuit filed late Tuesday evening.

The American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association argue in the complaint, which was submitted to a Maryland federal court, that following the letter’s dictates “will do a disservice to students and ultimately the nation by weakening schools as portals to opportunity.”

“This vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself … It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It would upend campus life.”

The expected legal challenge came just three days before a Feb. 28 compliance deadline. The four-page guidance document says that colleges and universities must rescind any race-based policies, activities and resources by the end of the day or risk investigation and the loss of federal funding.

The department justifies its demands through a new interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned the consideration of race in college admissions. Although the Supreme Court’s decision applied specifically to admissions, the Trump administration believes it extends to all race-conscious activities.

On Friday, a judge from the same federal court in Maryland issued a temporary injunction in a separate lawsuit that blocked parts of President Trump’s antidiversity executive orders.

But higher education legal experts say that the Dear Colleague letter and the executive orders, though similar, are independent levers, so the injunction doesn’t affect the department’s guidance. The Education Department has also said it is still moving forward with its interpretation of the law and the deadline stands.

So now all eyes are on this most recent court case, as higher education leaders wait to see if the judge will issue a second injunction and block the guidance.

“The Department of Education’s new policy, reflected in the February ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, seeks to undermine our nation’s educational institutions and is an unlawful attempt to impose this administration’s particular views,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, the legal group representing the plaintiffs. “We will continue to pursue every legal opportunity to oppose and stop harmful attacks on freedom of expression and on the values like inclusion, diversity and belonging that make us all and our nation stronger.”

In the meantime, higher education advocacy groups are urging colleges and universities to stay calm and not overreact to the Dear Colleague letter.

On Tuesday the American Council on Education sent a letter to Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of civil rights, requesting that he “rescind the DCL” and work with higher education institutions to ensure a clearer understanding of the letter before setting a new compliance deadline.

“Over the last two years, our colleges and universities have worked hard to assess and modify, as appropriate, policies and practices in light of the decision in the SFFA case and applicable civil rights laws,” ACE president Ted Mitchell wrote. “It is unreasonable for the department to require institutions to appropriately respond to this extremely broad reinterpretation of federal law in a mere two weeks and in the absence of necessary guidance.”

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February 26, 2025