Tag: Career

  • Woman admits stealing $5 mil from ED via fake students

    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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  • Colleges scramble to meet federal anti-DEI deadline

    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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  • Cheating matters but redrawing assessment “matters most”

    Cheating matters but redrawing assessment “matters most”

    Conversations over students using artificial intelligence to cheat on their exams are masking wider discussions about how to improve assessment, a leading professor has argued.

    Phillip Dawson, co-director of the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning at Deakin University in Australia, argued that “validity matters more than cheating,” adding that “cheating and AI have really taken over the assessment debate.”

    Speaking at the conference of the U.K.’s Quality Assurance Agency, he said, “Cheating and all that matters. But assessing what we mean to assess is the thing that matters the most. That’s really what validity is … We need to address it, but cheating is not necessarily the most useful frame.”

    Dawson was speaking shortly after the publication of a survey conducted by the Higher Education Policy Institute, which found that 88 percent of U.K. undergraduates said they had used AI tools in some form when completing assessments.

    But the HEPI report argued that universities should “adopt a nuanced policy which reflects the fact that student use of AI is inevitable,” recognizing that chat bots and other tools “can genuinely aid learning and productivity.”

    Dawson agreed, arguing that “assessment needs to change … in a world where AI can do the things that we used to assess,” he said.

    Referencing—citing sources—may be a good example of something that can be offloaded to AI, he said. “I don’t know how to do referencing by hand, and I don’t care … We need to take that same sort of lens to what we do now and really be honest with ourselves: What’s busywork? Can we allow students to use AI for their busywork to do the cognitive offloading? Let’s not allow them to do it for what’s intrinsic, though.”

    It was a “fantasy land” to introduce what he called “discursive” measures to limit AI use, where lecturers give instructions on how AI use may or may not be permitted. Instead, he argued that “structural changes” were needed for assessments.

    “Discursive changes are not the way to go. You can’t address this problem of AI purely through talk. You need action. You need structural changes to assessment [and not just a] traffic light system that tells students, ‘This is an orange task, so you can use AI to edit but not to write.”

    “We have no way of stopping people from using AI if we aren’t in some way supervising them; we need to accept that. We can’t pretend some sort of guidance to students is going to be effective at securing assessments. Because if you aren’t supervising, you can’t be sure how AI was or wasn’t used.”

    He said there are three potential outcomes for the impact on grades as AI develops: grade inflation, where people are going to be able to do “so much more against our current standards, so things are just going to grow and grow”; and norm referencing, where students are graded on how they perform compared to other students.

    The final option, which he said was preferable, was “standards inflation,” “where we just have to keep raising the standards over time, because what AI plus a student can do gets better and better.”

    Over all, the impact of AI on assessments is fundamental, he said, adding, “The times of assessing what people know are gone.”

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  • A letter to NEH on compliance with Trump orders (opinion)

    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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  • Final “Intellectual Affairs” column by Scott McLemee (opinion)

    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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  • How cuts at U.S. aid agency hinder university research

    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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  • Former staffer alleges Liberty U ignored Title IX violations

    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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  • Dear Colleague letter is lawless attack on DEI (opinion)

    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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  • New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

    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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  • To make profit, AI companies will have to take your job

    To make profit, AI companies will have to take your job

    Lately, I have been experiencing anger, occasionally edging toward rage (depending on my mood) when I open a new document in MSWord and I see the ghostly prompt urging me to use its Copilot generative AI tool.

    I do not want to use this tool. I especially do not want to use this tool to start a draft of a document, because writing the first draft under the power of my own thoughts is the key to ultimately producing something someone else might want to read, and outcome on which my living depends, but it’s also, the point of all writing ever, in any context, as far as I’m concerned.

    I am persuaded by Marc Watkins’s framing of “AI is unavoidable, not inevitable” for no other reason than the tech companies will not allow us to avoid their generative AI offerings. We can’t get away from this stuff if we want to, and boy, do I really want to.

    But just because it is unavoidable and must be acknowledged and, in its way, dealt with, does not mean we are required to use or experiment with it. Over the period of writing More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, and now spending a month or so promoting and talking about the book in various venues, I grow more and more convinced that if this technology is to have utility in helping students learn—and I mean learn, not merely do school—this utility is likely to be specialized and narrow and the product of deep thought and careful exploration and step-by-step iteration.

    Instead, we’re on the receiving end of a fire hose spraying, This is the future!

    Is it, really?

    One of the reasons we’re being told it’s the future is because at this time, generative AI has no strong business rationale. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who admitted in a podcast interview that generative AI applications have had no meaningful effect on GDP, suggesting they are not amazing engines of increased productivity.

    Tech watcher Ed Zitron has been saying for months that there is no “AI revolution” and that we’re heading toward the bursting of a bubble that will at least rival the 2008 downturn caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.

    So, while there is reason to believe that we are experiencing a bubble that is inevitably going to burst, as we imagine what our institutional and individual relationships should be with this technology, I think it’s useful to see what the people who are—literally—invested in AI envision for our futures. If they are right, and AI is inevitable, what awaits us?

    Let’s check in with the people directly funding and developing AI technology what they foresee for the educators of the United States.

    @elonmusk/X

    That is the man who is apparently running—and running roughshod over—the United States government suggesting that AI-assisted education is superior to what teachers deliver. Now, we know this is not true. We know it will never be true—that is, unless what counts as outcomes is defined down to what AI-assisted education can deliver.

    At her “Second Breakfast” newsletter, Audrey Watters puts it plainly, and we should be prepared to accept these truths:

    “But to be clear, the ‘better outcomes’ that Silicon Valley shit-posters Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk fantasize about in the image above do not involve the quality of education—of learning or teaching or schooling. (You’re not fooled that they do, right?) They aren’t talking about improved test scores or stronger college admissions or nicer job prospects for graduates or well-compensated teachers or happier, healthier kids or any such metric. Rather, this is a call for AI to facilitate the destruction of the teaching profession, one that is, at the K-12 level comprised predominantly of women (and, in the U.S., is the largest union) and at the university level—in their imaginations, at least—is comprised predominantly of ‘woke.’”

    It is hard to know what to do about a technology that some intend to leverage to destroy your profession and harm the constituents your profession is meant to serve. More Than Words is not a book that argues we must resist this technology at all costs, but again, these people want to destroy me, you, us.

    ChatGPT and its ilk haven’t even been around for all that long, and we already see the consequences of voluntary deskilling. Futurism reports, “Young coders are using AI for everything, giving ‘blank stares’ when asked how programs actually work.”

    Namanyay Goel, a veteran coder who has been observing the AI-wielding coders who can’t actually code, says, “The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just … missing.” This is output divorced from process, a pattern that is already endemic to our transactional model of schooling, but which AI now supercharges.

    There is no role for educational institutions in the world where we allow this sort of thing to substitute for knowledge and learning. That may be the least of our problems should the full deskilling result. (See the film Idiocracy for that particular flavor of dystopia.)

    When Microsoft shoves its AI tools in the face of a student with less time, less freedom, less confidence and more incentive to use it, what are we giving them to make them want to resist, to commit to their learning, to become something other than a meat puppet plugging syntax into a machine with the machine spewing more syntax out?

    At this point, where is the evidence the companies do not wish us harm?

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