The University of Wollongong will offer a new Liberal Arts Major to all students from 2026 to foster critical thinking in an age of Humanities course cuts and evolving AI.
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After nearly three decades researching South Australia’s oceans at Flinders University, a leading algal bloom expert now faces an uncertain future after being told his role is being scrapped under a major restructure.
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There has been much excitement since Australia signed a landmark agreement with the United States last month to expand cooperation on critical minerals and rare earth elements.
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Since 2020, faculty, staff and administrators have noticed a trend among incoming college students: They don’t know how to make friends. Data affirms this—fewer students said they studied with classmates, volunteered or participated in clubs or organizations in 2023 than in 2019, according to a 2025 report from the Student Experience in the Research University Consortium.
At the same time, student engagement and belonging correlate with academic success. Past surveys show that students who engage in extracurricular activities are more likely to feel that they belong on campus and that it’s easier to make friends. Extracurriculars can advance students’ career skills such as leadership and communication, as well as develop their professional interests.
The challenge for institutions, therefore, is how to reverse the trend toward disengagement and emphasize on-campus connections.
Some colleges are moving beyond offering free T-shirts and raffle prizes to encourage event attendance and moving straight to giving out cash, recognizing that finances are often the biggest barrier to student participation.
State of play: An August 2025 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 36 percent of students have not participated in an extracurricular or co-curricular activity on campus. About one-third of students said they were involved in a few activities, and 17 percent said they were very involved in one activity.
Adult learners (65 percent) and two-year students were least likely to say they’ve participated in campus activities (64 percent), as were students who had dropped out for a semester (63 percent), students working at least 30 hours per week (55 percent), first-generation students (49 percent) and Hispanic students (48 percent).
The biggest hang-up for students: finances. As the costs of attending college continue to rise, a greater share of students work while enrolled. Seventy percent of Student Voice respondents said they hold a job in a typical semester, and 30 percent of those students work full-time.
When asked their top source of stress while in college, students pointed to balancing academics with other financial and personal obligations (50 percent) or paying for college (38 percent). An additional 22 percent indicated that paying for personal expenses was a top stressor.
Rather than ask students to choose between work or campus activities, administrators are creating avenues to pay students for certain university-led activities, such as attending workshops, engaging with support resources or investing in their health.
Points for participation: Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., is launching a points-based incentive program next spring, called Blueprint Rewards, that translates on-campus participation into scholarship dollars and discounts at the campus store. The initiative builds on previous investments in co-curriculars including a student-facing app, Blueprint, and digital badging, which were implemented in 2018 and 2021, respectively.
Under Blueprint Rewards, some campus events are designated as points-bearing in Blueprint, denoted by the abbreviation SET, for Student Engagement Transcript.
Each SET event is worth between one and 10 points. After reaching 20 points connected to a given theme, students unlock a badge. The six badges are loosely modeled on the National Association for Colleges and Employers’ career competencies: leadership, accountability, problem-solving, growth mindset, collaboration and adaptability.
For example, activities that count toward the growth mindset badge include participating in a mindfulness event (worth one point), attending a fitness center training (five points) or becoming a wellness educator on campus (10 points).
After completing one badge, students also earn $500 in scholarship dollars, which is applied to the following year’s tuition, making the program a retention strategy as well.
Students unlock scholarships and other rewards as they complete various badges in the Blueprint Rewards program.
Students can redeem up to $1,000 in badge dollars toward tuition each academic year. Administrators elected to cap badge scholarships at two per academic year to ensure students are juggling their academic and other responsibilities with campus participation, according to a FAQ page.
If they finish all six badges, students can opt to enroll in a no-tuition graduate-level course after their senior year, a value of $2,250.
If they complete three badges by the end of their junior year, students can gain an additional $1,500 toward participation in a faculty-led experience in the U.S. or abroad. The goal is to encourage study-away experiences, and the badges (adaptability, problem-solving and accountability) help make sure the student is adequately prepared for travel.
The program was announced Oct. 29, and full-time undergraduate students can start earning rewards in January. Since launching the digital badges in 2021, the university has seen the number of student engagements in co-curricular activities grow 65 percent, President Kevin Ross said.
“Blueprint Rewards builds on that momentum—helping students lower tuition costs while earning résumé-boosting credentials and scholarships that recognize their engagement and career readiness,” Ross said.
Another model: Administrators at Lynn aren’t the only campus officials using financial incentives to get students out of their dorm rooms and gaining life skills.
The University of Kentucky’s UK Invests both rewards students for engaging in health and wellness activities and provides financial literacy and investment education. The university dedicated $1 million for the first year and has received philanthropic support to continue awarding students money.
UK students who open a Fidelity savings account and deposit $25 are given $50 by the investment firm; each event they attend could be worth as much as an additional $50 in their accounts.
Student behaviors are tracked on three platforms—Handshake, SUMO and BBNvolved—and participation data is used to establish how much money the student earned, which is then deposited into the student’s Fidelity account. The university processes payments to student accounts every other Friday.
There is no cap on how much money a student can earn in a given year under UK Invests, but there is a limit to which events have financial incentives attached. For example, a student who uses the gym is paid $5 for visiting the gym three times in one week, but the student isn’t eligible to earn money after six weeks.
The goal for the university, in addition to encouraging students to take advantage of the various offerings on campus, is to ensure graduates leave with a return on investment for their degree and some cash in savings.
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Universities are ‘friendless and alone’, Western Sydney University vice-chancellor George Williams explained in his new essay, that warns of the dangers of fading social license.
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Universities Australia has signed a deal with China that will encourage research collaboration and student exchanges between the two countries.
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Ian Oppermann is in charge of digital ID for the federal government and an Associate Industry Professor of engineering and IT at the University of Technology Sydney.
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The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. In his new book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber reports on FIRE’s data on free speech and First Amendment norms on campus while making no effort to understand it and misusing the data of others. In other words, he’s skipped that first step — and now Princeton is tumbling down the staircase.
Eisgruber’s book makes many questionable claims, from dismissing good-faith critiques to muddying examples of censorship. But for our purposes here, let’s cabin our criticism to the nine pages of Chapter 5 that he devotes to dismissing data, including FIRE’s.
FIRE’s research — like all research — is imperfect, and we welcome criticism. Research isn’t about proving you’re right. It’s about stress-testing ideas to see what holds up. Scrutiny is how the process works, and it’s how the work gets better.
Our largest and most ambitious annual research project is the College Free Speech Rankings, which combines three factors: written speech policies, a national survey of student views on campus free expression, and outcomes from campus speech controversies. Reasonable minds can differ on how to weigh these factors, which is why we make all our data available to anyone who requests it. If someone believes these factors should be weighed differently, or has different factors they would like to include, they are welcome to do so, and to use our data.
The College Free Speech Rankings is a comprehensive comparison of the student experience of free speech on their campuses.
We’re also transparent about our methodology. This year, we preregistered our methodology before our survey data came back, in part to make clear that we do not — and cannot — reverse-engineer outcomes to put certain schools on top or bottom.
Every year when we release the report, we get feedback. We take the thoughtful critiques seriously and have often used them to improve our work. Again, feedback is part of the process. But not all feedback comes from a place of good faith.
Eisgruber introduces FIRE in a manner intended to discredit us, but that probably ends up saying more about his biases than any of ours:
An organization called FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has probably done as much as any other entity to create the impression that free speech is under continuous assault on college campuses. FIRE is a nonprofit advocacy organization that describes itself as defending free speech and free thought for all Americans; it was founded in 1999 with a focus on campus speech issues and now receives a substantial portion of its funding from foundations often associated with conservative political causes.
Eisgruber provides no footnote explaining or citing the conservative foundations to which he objects, when the “now” period started, or how “substantial” are those alleged funds. In reality, FIRE is funded by a very politically diverse cohort, and in the last fiscal year, 74% of our funding came from individual donors compared to 26% from foundation grants.
Eisgruber’s implication is that FIRE is biased towards conservatives because we have conservative donors. (So does Princeton, and few would accuse it of being politically conservative.) He has to rely on these vague implications because if you look at the evidence, you have to contend with FIRE’s many cases on behalf of liberal students and professors. Or our lawsuit against the Trump administration. Or against the governments of Texas and Florida, in which we succeeded in blocking speech restrictions passed by deep-red legislatures.
If he actually had any evidence that donors were influencing our research or casework, he’d have shown it. And with regard to our research, if the methodology and procedures are solid, it wouldn’t even matter if we were conservative, liberal, or from another planet entirely. If someone you hate tells you the sky is blue, the fact that you don’t like them is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of their statements. So he’s just tossing out the accusation and hoping that’s enough to bias his audience against us in the section that follows.
Eisgruber then brings up FIRE’s supposed bias to praise another group’s research in a similar vein about free expression in the University of North Carolina system (more on that later):
Unlike at FIRE and its kin, the researchers brought no discernible ideological or advocacy agenda to their work: The three original collaborators on the project included one self-identified conservative (McNeilly) and one self-identified liberal (Larson).
If he had bothered to fact-check this claim by contacting FIRE, he would have found that our research department and those of us who work on the rankings share at least that level of political diversity (as does FIRE as a whole)! As for their indiscernible advocacy agenda, he may have missed their excellent recommendations for free expression:
In sum, we recommend that efforts to improve the campus culture for free expression and constructive dialogue be holistic and attentive to the diverse contexts in which students encounter politics. Tangibly, we suggest that the UNC system encourage researchers from member institutions to review these data, conduct their own analyses, and develop campus-specific plans for creating and evaluating their own interventions.
As agendas go, that’s a praiseworthy one to have, but it is an agenda.
But while Eisgruber is quick to baselessly accuse FIRE of bias, in all his discussion of our findings, he never once pauses to consider his own biases. His defense of the status quo for free speech on campus is, not coincidentally, a defense of his own record as president. That’s a pretty big blind spot, and it shows. Even worse, his desire to justify himself leads to some exceptionally lazy takes on our research.
Eisgruber takes issue with the methodology of FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. He notes that before 2024, it was called the Disinvitation Database, and adds a footnote: “It is not clear what changed when the database expanded.” That’s not even close to correct, as we published a complete explanation about the changes on Feb. 8, 2024. It would be absurd for us to completely overhaul the methodology and purpose of our database without explaining those changes somewhere. That’s why we did explain it. He could have found this out with a simple Google search.
One might be forgiven for missing this kind of mistake when writing a critique on X. It’s less excusable in the context of a book, for which he presumably had research assistance and certainly had an editor. (Or did he? Curiously, the same footnote also says that the database was “accessed November 17, 2025,” which, at the time of this writing, has not yet occurred.)
As for the substance of his critique, Eisgruber calls the database a “hot mess,” claiming our inclusion criteria are too broad and that we “[conflate] disinvitation with deplatforming and censorship.” He never defines these terms, so it’s hard to know what distinction he thinks we missed. His example? He cites as “absurd” our decision to classify as a disinvitation attempt a situation in which NYU students tried to replace their commencement speaker, former Princeton President Shirley Tilghman, with someone more famous, followed by several similar efforts at Princeton.
Reasonable minds can disagree on what such episodes mean, but by our stated methodology, they clearly count as deplatforming attempts:
A deplatforming attempt . . . is an attempt to prevent someone from expressing themselves in a public forum on campus. Deplatforming attempts include attempts to disinvite speakers from campus speeches or commencement ceremonies.
That definition is public and consistent. It doesn’t depend on some subjective criterion for how “bad” we or Eisgruber think an incident was, or how justified students felt in opposing it. If Eisgruber wants to challenge our data, he could propose his own definition and see what share of our dataset fits it. Instead, he cherry-picks anecdotes he happens not to care about, and conveniently ignores more egregious examples.
He also objects to the idea that disinvitations — even successful ones — can threaten free speech, arguing that FIRE “confuses the exercise of free speech with threats to free speech.” But that’s a false dichotomy. The exercise of free speech can absolutely threaten others’ ability to speak.
As FIRE has noted on many occasions, calls for disinvitation are themselves protected speech — so are calls for violence in response to speech that don’t meet the bar for incitement.
Eisgruber agrees with FIRE that shoutdowns are never acceptable and are incompatible with free speech. But it’s hard to reconcile that with his position that disinvitation attempts can never threaten free speech. They often involve appeals to university authorities to shut down an event or speech. In other words, they are attempts by one group of people to decide for their peers what speech their peers will be able to hear, similar to a heckler’s veto.
Eisgruber also presents a heckler’s veto from 1970 that doesn’t appear in our database, as if to prove that campus illiberalism didn’t start with Gen Z. Believe me, we’re aware. We’ve written plenty about McCarthy-era censorship and the Red Scare. Plus, FIRE was founded back in 1999, long before today’s version of the culture wars. Illiberalism on campus isn’t new, and we certainly wouldn’t argue that it is new after 25 years of fighting it. It just takes different forms in different eras — and we track it wherever it appears. The reason Eisgruber’s example wasn’t included in our database is simply that we made the decision to limit the database to incidents that occurred since FIRE’s founding.
Today, one in four faculty say they’re very or extremely likely to self-censor in academic publications, and over one in three do so during interviews or lectures — more than during and Second Red Scare and McCarthyism.
He praises Princeton for not having given in to a heckler’s veto since then: “Hickel got shouted down not by Gen Z but by members of an older generation that now criticizes young people for failing to respect free speech. Princeton students allowed every speaker in the next half century to have their say.” Unfortunately, this may have jinxed Princeton, as, apparently after Eisgruber’s manuscript was finalized, two speaking events at Princeton were disrupted.
Eisgruber next tries to argue that concerns about self-censorship are overblown. He starts reasonably enough, noting that survey data can be tricky:
Polling data is, however, notoriously sensitive to sampling biases and small differences in the formulation of questions. Data about concepts such as free speech requires careful interpretation that it rarely gets.
We agree! But then he cites FIRE’s 2021 finding that over 80% of college students self-censor at least sometimes, and 21% do so often, only to dismiss it: “Should we worry about these numbers? Not without more evidence and better poll questions.”
What’s wrong with the poll question? He never says. He just moves on to talk about other surveys. So let’s stay on this one. What does he think about self-censorship? Well, as he defines it, he actually thinks it’s good:
Indeed, I am most concerned about the substantial fraction of people who say they never self-censor. Do they really say everything that pops into their heads? . . . Of course people self-censor! Politeness, tact, and civility require it. And as we become more aware of the sensibilities of the diverse people around us, we may realize that we need to self-censor more often or differently than we did before.
Do students share his conception of self-censorship as politeness or conscientious refusal to offend? Here’s how we have asked that question for the past four years:
This next series of questions asks you about self-censorship in different settings. For the purpose of these questions, self-censorship is defined as follows: Refraining from sharing certain views because you fear social (exclusion from social events), professional (losing job or promotion), legal (prosecution or fine), or violent (assault) consequences, whether in person or remotely (by phone or online), and whether the consequences come from state or non-state sources.
Q: How often do you self-censor during conversations with other students on campus?
Q: How often do you self-censor during conversations with your professors?
Q: How often do you self-censor during classroom discussions?
Never
- Rarely
- Occasionally, once or twice a month
- Fairly often, a couple times a week
- Very often, nearly every day
As you can see, this isn’t asking about garden-variety tact or politeness. To be fair to Eisgruber, we didn’t provide this definition when we asked the question in 2021 (though he should have sought the most recent data; that he did not is itself strange). Unfortunately for him, since adding this clarifying definition, the portion of students who self-censor at least rarely has increased to 91-93%, depending on the context, and those reporting that they often self-censor now stand at 24-28%.
In other words, a quarter of university students in America regularly silence themselves out of fear of social, professional, legal, or violent consequences. As for his request for “more evidence,” the responses are dire year after year. Maybe Eisgruber still thinks that’s fine, but we don’t.
Eisgruber also downplays how many students think it’s acceptable to use violence or shoutdowns to silence speakers, and tries to hand-wave away data in an explanation that utterly mangles First Amendment law:
One explanation highlights ambiguities in the survey questions. For example, American free speech law agrees with students who say that it is “rarely” or “sometimes” acceptable to stop people from talking. Not all speech is protected. If, for example, speakers are about to shout “fire” falsely in a crowded theater, or if they are preparing to incite imminent violence, you may and should do what you can to (in the words of the poll question) “prevent them from talking.”
We would be remiss to pass up an opportunity to once again address the immortal, zombie claim that you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Eisgruber did better than many others by including “falsely,” but it’s still incomplete and misleading (did a panic occur? Was it likely or intended? These questions matter) and has been for a very long time. It’s dispiriting to see it come from the president of an Ivy League university — one who has a law degree, no less. But also, the fact that you as a listener think someone might be about to engage in unprotected speech doesn’t mean you should dole out vigilante justice to prevent it. If you do, you’ll probably go to jail.
Different wording, same story: growing student support for violence and shoutdowns shows campus free speech is in danger.
But leaving that aside, what of his contention that the high levels of support are just an artifact of the “prevent them from talking” wording? Well, here’s the wording of our latest poll question on that subject:
How acceptable would you say it is for students to engage in the following actions to protest a campus speaker?
Q: Shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus.
Q: Blocking other students from attending a campus speech.
Q: Using violence to stop a campus speech.
- Always acceptable
- Sometimes acceptable
- Rarely acceptable
- Never acceptable
With this different wording, we find 71% at least “rarely” accept shoutdowns, 54% at least “rarely” support blocking, and 34% at least “rarely” support violence. Different wording, same story: growing student support for violence and shoutdowns shows campus free speech is in danger.
It’s important to note that Eisgruber offers only quibbles with question wording, and offers theories for how students may be interpreting questions. He doesn’t offer competing data. While that might be understandable for the typical social media critic, if all this could be debunked by “better poll questions,” no one is in a better position to commission said research (at least on his or her campus) than the president of a university. Instead of offering unconvincing dismissals of existing data, he could have contributed to the body of knowledge with his “better” questions. We still encourage him to do so. Seriously. Please run a free speech survey at Princeton.
As much as FIRE or Eisgruber may wish these poll numbers were different, we need to deal with the world as it is.
So what data does Eisgruber use to support his case that the situation on campus is rosier than FIRE’s data suggests? As mentioned earlier, he turns to a study of the UNC system called “Free Expression and Constructive Dialogue in the University of North Carolina.” We were darkly amused by this because FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens, who heads up our College Free Speech Rankings survey, was approached by that study’s authors based on his work on surveys for FIRE and Heterodox Academy — and they consulted with Stevens about what questions to include in their survey. Here’s Eisgruber:
I believe, however, that the analysis by Ryan, Engelhardt, Larson, and McNeilly accurately describes most colleges and universities. Certainly it chimes with my own experiences at Princeton.
This could be in a textbook next to “confirmation bias.” The data that jibes with his experience he sees as more trustworthy. Yet this survey does not refute FIRE’s findings, but is perfectly compatible with them. The rosy finding upon which Eisgruber puts a lot of weight is their finding that faculty do not push political agendas in class. This isn’t an area that FIRE studies, so it’s not a refutation of our work. More importantly, it’s not asking the same question.
Eisgruber goes on:
There is another reason why the North Carolina study’s conclusions are plausible. They mesh with and reflect broader, well-documented trends in American political life. A mountain of evidence shows that over the past several decades, and especially in the twenty-first century, political identities have hardened.
But FIRE’s data is also perfectly compatible with the idea of increasing polarization. It’s hard, therefore, even to find the disagreement to which he’s pointing when he says their data is good and our data is bad.
The UNC survey, like ours, found “campuses do not consistently achieve an atmosphere that promotes free expression” and “students who identify as conservative face distinctive challenges.” This is fully compatible with our data. It’s not clear where Eisgruber finds meaningful disagreement, and to the extent he frames this data as hopeful, it seems to misinterpret the authors’ findings.
Even if the data coming out of UNC schools were wildly different from our national-level data, it would be a mistake to take it as representative of the nation as a whole. The mistake, specifically, would be cherry-picking. Six of the seven UNC schools that we rank are in the top 20 of our College Free Speech Rankings. The most amusing part, from a FIRE perspective, is that this is not a coincidence. Those six each worked with FIRE’s policy reform team and achieved our highest “green light” rating for free speech, and have implemented programming to support free expression on campus. Indeed, since the early days of FIRE’s speech code ratings, FIRE has made a special effort to evaluate the speech codes of all of the UNC System schools, even the smaller ones, thanks to a partnership with the state’s James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (then called the Pope Center). So if UNC campuses are far more likely to have a “green light” than the rest of the nation, that’s in significant part because of FIRE’s ongoing work. Princeton, in comparison, receives FIRE’s lowest “red light” rating.
If anything, the UNC schools provide evidence that the way to improve free speech on campus is to address it head-on, rather than grasp about for some explanation to justify the current state of affairs. Speaking of which:
In the process of writing this piece, we received word of a very different response to FIRE data from administrators at Wellesley College:
“Both FIRE stats and our own research, in some ways, have been similar,” said [Wellesley Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs Tara] Murphy. “We are taking this seriously.”
In November [2024], Wellesley commissioned Grand River Solutions to conduct a survey on civil discourse among students. Out of 2,281 students invited to participate, 668 responded to at least one of the three questions, yielding a 29% response rate. The data was similar to the FIRE report: 36.8% of respondents said they felt either “very reluctant or somewhat reluctant” to share their views on controversial topics in the classroom, and 30% felt similarly hesitant outside of class.
That’s the kind of response we hope for. If campuses aren’t sure that FIRE has it right, they should be getting their own data so that they can address any campus free speech problems that the data may bear out.
We’re happy to report that in that sense FIRE’s rankings have been extremely successful. Many schools have reached out and worked with us to improve their policies and begin to implement programming to support free speech on campus. As dire as some of the stats can appear to be, FIRE has seen green shoots in the form of faculty and administrators who recognize the problem and want to do something about it.
Our research deserves, and has, more thoughtful critics. Princeton’s community deserves a president who is more curious about what’s happening on his campus, and serious about improving the environment for free speech. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the academic experience that ultimately led Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate to found FIRE began when they met during their freshman year at … Princeton University. Or maybe it’s not.
If finding out ever becomes a priority for Eisgruber, we’d be happy to help.
The September ruling in Harvard University’s favor restoring roughly $2.2 billion in federal funding struck a short-term blow against the Trump administration’s use of civil rights investigations against universities.
The administration pulled the funding in April after Harvard rejected a series of sweeping demands, claiming it was suspending the funds because the university hadn’t adequately protected students from antisemitism.
In June, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office formally accused the university of violating Title VI, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in programs or activities receiving federal funding.
Yet in her 84-page order, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs found that none of the federal government’s grant termination letters specified how Harvard failed to respond to any acts of antisemitism in violation of Title VI.
“A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” Burroughs wrote. “Further, their actions have jeopardized decades of research.”
Harvard isn’t the only university facing Title VI accusations. The Trump administration is seeking $1.2 billion from the University of California, Los Angeles — plus an overhaul of its campus practices — after the U.S. Department of Justice accused the institution of violating Title VI. In both UCLA and Harvard’s cases, the Trump administration cited pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations and claims of antisemitism in its notices of violations.
The Justice Department didn’t make an official available for an interview.
These types of developments have set off a high stakes debate among legal experts about whether the Trump administration is weaponizing Title VI.
They trouble Jodie Ferise, a partner in the higher education practice at the Indiana law firm of Church Church Hittle and Antrim, who previously served as vice president and general counsel for the Independent Colleges of Indiana.
“Discrimination was always a disqualifier for federal funds, but when it’s just a pretext to bend higher education to the federal government’s will, that’s a problem,” Ferise said. “To sweep every single grant off the table seems more like extortion. Nothing about it is designed to make higher education better.”
In the Harvard ruling, Burroughs wrote that the administration failed to take the proper steps before pulling federal funding.
Title VI requires the federal government to notify an institution of its alleged violation and determine that it can’t come into compliance voluntarily before ending financial assistance to the university, the judge explained. Even then, the agency may terminate the funding only after the university has been given the opportunity for a hearing.
Burroughs concluded, “It is undisputed that Defendants did not comply with these requirements before issuing the Freeze Orders or Termination Letters.”
However, experts who spoke with Higher Ed Dive agree that Burroughs’ ruling is far from the last word on the issue. That case could eventually be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Trump administration vowed to appeal, though a settlement is not impossible.
The Trump administration has warned dozens of colleges of potential Title VI violations. In March, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent letters to 60 institutions of higher education warning them of potential enforcement actions if they failed to comply with Title VI to protect Jewish students.
“What’s been happening is not so much expanding Title VI as implementing it properly so there’s no double standard. For many years, Jewish students’ rights were not being protected,” said Kenneth Marcus, the founder and CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a research and legal advocacy group aiming to combat antisemitism.
As an official in the George W. Bush administration and the first Trump administration, Marcus also strongly advocated for the use of Title VI to protect students who were harassed because of their ancestry, such as ethnic and religious characteristics.
“When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI was an ingenious mechanism to ensure federal funds are not misused,” said Marcus in noting this was crucial to ensure institutions racially desegregated.
He added that Title VI can have a broad impact because it ensures students don’t face a hostile environment and have equal access to learning opportunities at their institutions.
But Harvard law professor Benjamin Eidelson takes a decidedly different view about the Trump administration’s use of Title VI. Eidelson, who co-authored a June Harvard Law Review article about Title VI and antisemitism, said in an email to Higher Ed Dive that “the recent enforcement actions and lawsuits have gone far, far beyond anything Title VI was meant to do.”
He added that Title VI was never meant to require imposing content-based speech restrictions in the name of curing a hostile environment.
“Nobody has a right under Title VI to have a campus free of protests that offend their moral or political convictions,” Eidelson said. “It’s so clear that fighting antisemitism is just the administration’s pretext for imposing ideological reform and demanding submission across the board. And Judge Burroughs rightly held that the First Amendment doesn’t allow that.”
Marcus, however, takes issue with the judge’s view that the Trump administration’s position is a smokescreen. Speaking of his conversations with administration officials, Marcus said, “There is no question in my mind that they’re furious with what’s happened to too many Jewish students and faculty members.”
The Brandeis Center was not a party to the case before Burroughs, but it had settled a separate Title VI federal lawsuit against Harvard earlier this year on behalf of several students.
Under the settlement, Harvard agreed to incorporate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism to assess complaints of harassment. While some have praised the adoption of the IHRA’s definition — which lists different examples of potential antisemitism — critics argue it can be used to target protected forms of speech and criticism against Israel.
But Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit organization that has filed Title VI antisemitism lawsuits against colleges such as Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University and The Cooper Union, said the cases he has seen involve legitimate antisemitic incidents and that there has been a double standard.
He said, for instance, that it would be unthinkable to have lecturers speak about white power on college campuses, but suggested the equivalent is happening with hate speech against Jews. “The 64,000-foot view is it’s always good when the government is doing what it can to combat antisemitism.”
Columbia’s $221 million settlement with the federal government this summer, after the administration formally accused it of violating Title VI, will deter future bad conduct, according to Filitti. But he added that the deal could have included more policies to address the root cause of antisemitism.
In Harvard’s case, the university established two task forces in January 2024 — one to combat antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and another to fight anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias. The university also began making policy changes aimed at ensuring that its campus is safe and welcoming for those students. Other universities have similarly set up task forces to combat antisemitism and taken actions such as hiring Title VI coordinators in recent months.
But the Trump administration is citing the findings of these task force reports when accusing universities of violating Title VI. And that doesn’t sit well with attorney Ferise, who suggested this tactic is already leading to a chilling effect among university administrators.
“If we are only inviting candid disclosure of their weak spots so as to prove our preexisting notion that they were evil actors with discriminatory intentions, that’s a real disincentive to lay bare any unpleasant truth,” she said. “No one wants to send out invitations to their own funeral.”
“Discrimination was always a disqualifier for federal funds, but when it’s just a pretext to bend higher education to the federal government’s will, that’s a problem.”
Jodie Ferise
Partner, Church Church Hittle and Antrim
The Brandeis Center’s Marcus acknowledged that university administrators at many institutions have taken actions to deter antisemitism, but said few have done enough. And, he added, “Sophisticated people in universities have known for some time that these task force reports can be used as evidence.”
Along similar lines, Filitti said the task force report contents are “precisely what plaintiffs are seeking in discovery anyway, so it saves six months of time and expense” to seek the findings out earlier.
But Harvard’s Eidelson noted in an email to Higher Ed Dive that these reports, including Harvard’s, often focus on how the university can better promote a sense of belonging for students who might feel marginalized.
“That is a fundamentally different question than the one that matters under Title VI, namely how the university has responded if and when students experience harassment that is ‘so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive’ that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit,” Eidelson said, citing a 1999 Supreme Court ruling in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education.
While these task force reports could theoretically be used to surface information relevant to a federal investigation, they “pose special risks of misuse, especially in the hands of unserious investigators,” Eidelson said. That’s because these task force reports are usually seeking to answer different questions than what matters under the law, he added.
The potential loss of federal funding is a real pressure point, lawyers on all sides point out.
“The power of the purse has always been an important tool in the government’s arsenal,” the Lawfare Project’s Filitti said. “The flip side is it’s meant to address discrimination and not be used for political purposes.”
But Ferise lamented that that ’s exactly what’s happening.
At Harvard, she pointed to the Trump administration sending “overbroad” demand letters seeking information about international students, including whether they have conduct violations or if they have obstructed “the school’s learning environment.”
“That’s not calculated to reveal who engaged in a bias incident,” Ferise said.
“What’s been happening is not so much expanding Title VI as implementing it properly so there’s no double standard.”
Kenneth Marcus
Founder and CEO, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law
Ferise added that it’s not just elite institutions that should fear these government investigations and enforcement actions.
“Every college and university should be concerned, but smaller schools don’t have the bandwidth” to fight these investigations in court, she said.
And that has led her to change the advice she now gives to her higher education clients.
“We represent several small, private institutions with large endowments for their size and a great deal of intentionality about inclusion. Not in a million years could any of them afford to litigate as Harvard has,” Ferise said.
“You never want to say ‘Lay low,’ but that is my advice now because you don’t want to end up on the administration’s radar. No one wants to be the first non-elite school that goes out of business.”
Campus security at Hampton University escorted members of Blexit off the historically Black university’s campus this past weekend after the Black conservative group tried to join homecoming festivities as part of its “Educate to Liberate” HBCU tour. The group claims it was silenced by the university. Hampton leaders say Blexit didn’t follow proper protocols for visiting the campus.
Blexit, which is affiliated with the Charlie Kirk–founded Turning Point USA, planned to visit 10 HBCUs during homecoming events with the goal of “bringing conservative values to life, fostering critical thinking, and sparking powerful conversations on HBCU campuses,” according to Blexit’s website. The group also made stops at Howard University and other campuses, though it canceled a visit to Florida A&M University, promising to announce a new date.
Craig Long, a Blexit member, claimed on Instagram that Hampton University shut down the group’s dialogue with students.
“Instead of celebrating that spirit of open discussion, the university shut it down—claiming we ‘didn’t go through the proper channels,’” Long wrote. “Let’s be honest: this wasn’t about paperwork. It was about politics. We were silenced because we are Blexit—because we stand for Christian values, conservative principles, and independent thought that challenge the mainstream narrative.”
Hampton University leaders pushed back on Long’s description of the incident. They wrote in a statement that Blexit didn’t complete the application to participate in homecoming as a vendor or pay the associated fees. Out of 36 vendor applications submitted, the university approved 18, and Blexit “was among those that did not meet the stated requirements,” according to the statement. Those vendors were notified the week before the event that they would not be allowed on campus. University leaders framed the procedures as a “matter of public safety” to know who’s on campus, with nearly 15,000 people visiting for homecoming.
“Hampton University welcomes organizations and speakers representing a variety of perspectives, provided they follow established protocols,” the statement read. “BLEXIT failed to meet those standards.”