Tag: college

Linda McMahon and the College Meltdown
July 2025 was not simply a busy month for the U.S. Department of Education—it was a deliberate and coordinated effort to reshape higher education in line with the political goals of the Trump administration. Under the leadership of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the Department issued a torrent of investigations, policy changes, and legal maneuvers aimed at asserting control over universities and redefining the role of postsecondary education in American life.

What emerged was not the repair of a broken system, but the acceleration of a political project: to narrow the mission of higher education, undermine its independence, and punish institutions that resist the administration’s agenda.

A Month of Directives

The month began with the Department entering a resolution agreement with the University of Pennsylvania over Title IX violations (July 1). By July 2, the administration had concluded a negotiated rulemaking session focused on reshaping the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program—signaling that student aid reforms would now be filtered through political priorities rather than bipartisan consensus.

On July 4, the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law. This sweeping legislation gave the administration a mandate to implement provisions on accreditation, federal aid restrictions, civil rights compliance, and so-called “viewpoint neutrality.” Within two weeks, McMahon’s team was already implementing key parts of the bill, using it to alter the rules that govern financial aid eligibility and institutional recognition.

“Civil Rights” Enforcement as a Political Strategy

Throughout the month, the Department launched a wave of investigations under Title VI and Title IX. But the choice of targets raised concerns. Rather than focus on systemic discrimination or long-standing legal violations, the Department directed its attention toward cases that aligned with conservative cultural concerns.
- On July 8, an investigation was opened into the Connetquot Central School District after it banned a Native American logo.
- On July 10, George Mason University became the subject of a Title VI probe.
- On July 23, five universities were flagged for offering scholarships that allegedly favored foreign-born students.
- By July 25, five Northern Virginia school districts were found in violation of Title IX.
Harvard, Columbia, Duke, the University of Michigan, and Brown University were all pulled into scrutiny, with Columbia agreeing to pay $200 million and submit to new data-reporting requirements. These actions may appear to be standard enforcement but taken together they reflect a pattern of choosing high-profile or politically charged institutions as symbolic examples.

The use of federal compliance tools to pressure institutions seen as ideological opponents is not unprecedented—but under McMahon, it has become routine.

Policy Realignment and Workforce Redirection

On July 10, the Department announced the termination of federal aid for undocumented students, marking a sharp reversal from past practices. Just five days later, the Department entered into a new partnership with the Department of Labor to promote workforce training, part of a longer-term effort to reorient higher education toward narrow economic outcomes rather than liberal arts or civic development.

While such initiatives are framed as “efficiency” or “innovation,” the underlying message is clear: colleges that do not align themselves with federal job-training goals or cultural expectations may find their access to funding, recognition, and legal protections limited.

Restructuring the System

The Supreme Court’s decision on July 14 to permit a reduction in federal staffing has further empowered the Department to cut or replace internal personnel. By July 24, two new negotiated rulemaking committees were established, tasked with translating the One, Big, Beautiful Bill into enforceable rules. These committees will likely define the next phase of McMahon’s agenda—on issues like accreditation, financial eligibility, foreign influence, and institutional autonomy.

At the state level, the Department approved Missouri’s new pilot assessment program on July 31, continuing a pattern of promoting alternatives to standardized federal oversight. Meanwhile, state education officials were encouraged (July 29) to request waivers from burdensome federal requirements—an invitation to bypass regulations established under previous administrations.

What This Means for Higher Education

The July timeline reflects not just a burst of administrative activity, but a broader strategy to centralize decision-making power and reshape the ideological landscape of U.S. higher education. The Department has moved away from serving as a neutral enforcer of civil rights and federal law, and toward acting as a gatekeeper for cultural and political conformity.

Colleges that emphasize diversity, global engagement, or progressive research are increasingly viewed with suspicion. Those that fail to meet the administration’s evolving definition of compliance may face costly investigations, public shaming, or the loss of federal support.

The term “College Meltdown” once referred to financial instability, enrollment declines, and the erosion of public trust. Under Linda McMahon, it now also refers to a deliberate restructuring of the postsecondary system—where ideological alignment may determine institutional survival as much as financial solvency.

Sources:
- U.S. Department of Education, July 2025 public statements and press releases
- One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025
- Columbia University settlement, July 23, 2025
- Supreme Court ruling on federal workforce reductions, July 14, 2025
- Negotiated Rulemaking updates from the Office of Postsecondary Education
- Brown University agreement with the Department of Education, July 30, 2025
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July 31, 2025
Psychology Course Encourages College Students to Make Friends

Starting college can be an exciting time for students to learn new things, make friends and live away from home for the first time. But not every student takes advantage of the opportunity.

Emmanuel College psychology professor Linda Lin said she’s seen students reluctant to engage with peers in public spaces, including on their own dorm floor, out of fear of being perceived as odd or intrusive.

“At the beginning of the semester, I always offer students extra credit points if they come see me for a 10-minute meeting and I just check in with them,” Lin said. Typically, a significant share of those students will say they have yet to make friends and get connected on campus.

“It’s become almost half or maybe a majority of the students are really struggling to find their people on campus and find their way,” Lin said.

Nationally, college students express high levels of social anxiety. One study, by the College Student Wellness Advocacy Coalition and the Hi, How Are You Project, found that 65 percent of students said they feel stress often or all the time, and 57 percent reported feeling anxious, worried or overwhelmed frequently.

Lin thinks this could be due in part to the pandemic’s role in hindering social skill development as well as changing social norms among adults in the U.S., who now prioritize relationships built online or via phone-enabled connections, rather than in shared physical spaces.

In response, Lin designed a course on positive psychology and happiness to demonstrate the evidence-based practices that can improve student well-being and push them out of their comfort zones.

How it works: The course covers topics in positive psychology and the research behind those principles. Content includes stress management, connection to nature, exercise and mental health, gratitude, spirituality, optimism, self-compassion, mindfulness, and generosity.

The class is an upper-level psychology elective, so the majority of students enrolled are junior or seniors majoring in psychology, though about 20 percent are nonmajors, Lin said.

Throughout the semester, students receive assignments to practice various techniques to boost their own well-being, ranging from taking a nature walk to writing a letter expressing thankfulness or performing a random act of kindness.

Lin’s most controversial assignment is asking students to talk to three people they don’t know over two or three days. “It can be a stranger you’re making small talk with, or someone that you see in your regular day that you’ve never introduced yourself to,” she said.

Students have said they’d rather drop her class than do the assignment, Lin said. “The social anxiety is so high, they anticipate it being super awkward, super anxiety-provoking, that people are gonna think they’re weird.”

But so far, none of her students has reported a bad experience; instead they’ve come back pleasantly surprised by the interactions. Some have even made lasting friends.

The impact: The class has received an overwhelmingly positive review from students who have taken it, Lin said, with some graduating seniors telling her it had a huge impact on them or that the course changed their life.

“A lot of students, generally, by the end of the course, are shocked that these little things make them feel better,” Lin said. “A lot of them were saying, ‘I technically know I should be doing these things, but this course gave me an opportunity to actually do them.’”

Some students shared her lecture recordings (PowerPoints with audio overlaid) and assignments with their families and friends, in the hopes that the content could benefit their health and well-being, as well.

Lin also conducts pre- and postassessments of student happiness and well-being throughout the term. She found that from the first class in September to the final one in December, students report a 20 percent jump in their scores. And that’s on top of seasonal blues and stressful final exam season feelings, Lin said.

The practices helped all students boost their happiness and well-being, but the greatest gains were among students who were already struggling, especially those receiving clinical mental health support.

“One student was like, ‘My therapist wants to talk to you—this made such a big difference in my life,’” Lin said.

Lin is collecting data from the course for future research and has also taken her curriculum out of the classroom, training resident advisers and other campus community members on how to make friends.

“I think everybody’s a little bit concerned about this, and I’m just trying to go out and take the science everywhere, because I think this should not be behind a paywall,” Lin said.

Are you noticing and responding to a lack of peer engagement and community on your campus? Tell us more about it.

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July 31, 2025
‘Who’s going to want these jobs?’: How the role of college president is changing

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In early June, the governing board of Florida’s university system surprised the higher education sector when it rejected Santa Ono as the sole finalist for the presidency of the University of Florida. Ono had faced backlash — led by conservative activist Christopher Rufo — over his past embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts while head of the University of Michigan.

Later that month, University of Virginia President Jim Ryan abruptly stepped down after the U.S. Department of Justice pressured him to resign over the institution’s diversity efforts. Ryan said he wouldn’t fight to keep his job when staying would have cost the institution research funding and student aid and hurt international students.

The duties of the modern college president extend far beyond keeping their institutions viable. For decades, how the head of a college is selected and who fills the position has been steadily shifting. Now, whoever assumes the role will likely take vitriol from both the public and policymakers.

James Finkelstein, professor emeritus at George Mason University’s public policy school, researches leadership in higher education. We spoke with him about the changing role of the college president, the increased influence a presidency faces from both the political and private sectors and what that means for higher ed in the long run.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

HIGHER ED DIVE: How does one become a college president? And has that changed in recent decades?

James Finkelstein, professor emeritus at George Mason University

Permission granted by Judith Wilde

JAMES FINKELSTEIN: The traditional route would start with becoming an assistant professor. You get tenure next, and then you may start to move up the administrative ranks. The most common path was to go from provost to president. For now, that’s still the most common path, but it’s on the decline.

The problem is, provosts don’t fundraise. Deans do. And the No. 1 qualification that a board now looks for in a university president is their ability to raise money.

Given that shift in priorities, how do college boards pick their institution’s next presidents?

My colleague, Judith Wilde, and I have studied this process extensively, and boards are increasingly relying on executive search firms.

We found that only 2% or 3% of presidential classified ads mentioned a search firm in 1975. Today, it’s almost 100%. And based on the data, that change has also correlated with the beginning of the decline in the length of university presidents’ tenure.

Search firms do the initial screening and determine for the board which candidates are really viable. But very few of the search firm senior executives have any real experience in higher education and their No. 1 responsibility as fiduciaries is to return profit to investors.

From there, the board picks from the candidates highlighted by the search firm? What do they look for?

Yes. People tend to look for candidates who look like them. And boards are not primarily made up of academics — the only thing most board members know about a university is that they got a degree from one. You’re seeing a lot more political types on the boards, as is the case in Virginia, or corporate types.

It’s interesting, corporations don’t turn to universities for their leadership. They don’t select a college president to run them. The former president of TIAA [Clifton Wharton Jr.] was the only university president to become a CEO of a Fortune 500 company — and he led a company designed to serve universities.

But many universities, at least 10% or so, will select a corporate executive to lead them.

If boards expect university presidents to behave more like corporate executives than leaders of an educational, social and cultural institution — someone who serves the public — then the next generation of university leadership is going to look very different. You’re going to see a different kind of person be not only sought after but interested in these jobs because they think they can take their private sector skill set directly into higher ed.

In recent years, the presidential compensation packages at some colleges have mirrored those of Fortune 500 CEOs. In 2022, Ben Sasse received a notably lucrative package when he was hired to lead the University of Florida, as you and Judith have discussed. What effect does that shift have on colleges?

When I was an undergraduate, the university president probably wore a tweed sport coat with leather patches on the elbows. And the patches weren’t there to make a style statement; it’s because the elbows were worn out. If he had a car — and it was far and away “he” when I was in school — it was a car from the university’s car pool that was several years old.

And in the past, presidents maintained some academic interests. They taught. They were visible on campus.

Now, university presidents drive expensive cars and are more likely to associate with people outside the university than faculty inside the university.

Our sector does not enjoy the reputation with the public that it used to. There are all sorts of questions now about the value of a college degree. People generally think faculty get paid a lot of money and don’t do very much.

More than anything, presidents today are facing the question of if there is a way to win back that trust.

While college presidents are grappling with that question, though, they are also watching their positions become increasingly precarious. One recent example is Santa Ono, who had been set up as Sasse’s replacement. Traditionally, the vote from the Florida universities’ governing board would have been pro forma. What shifted the tides and left Ono out of a job?

Ono was targeted by the Chris Rufo machine. You can go back and read Rufo’s interview with Politico and listen to his interview with The New York Times — he’s very public about his strategy to delegitimize leaders in higher ed. His team made a decision early on that they wanted one of their own in Florida. And Ono wasn’t it.

Having watched the entire governing board meeting in Florida, my professional assessment is that I’ve never seen a president or someone of Ono’s stature so ill-prepared and give so poor a performance on every level.

Whoever prepared him, didn’t. And if they did, they weren’t preparing him for the right thing. It was much like what happened to the college presidents who testified at congressional committee hearings. Ono wasn’t completely prepared that he was going to be essentially cross-examined by a former state legislator.

By that point, Ono had already announced his departure from the University of Michigan, leaving a highly debated track record on diversity efforts and the handling of student protests in his wake. Does he stand a chance of getting another job heading a university?

About 75% of presidents are what we call one-and-done — they report they’ll hold one presidency, and that’s more than enough. The Gordon Gees of the world are the exception, not the rule.

Ono was, in my view, the modern-day equivalent of [former West Virginia University President] Gordon Gee. He’s the professional president who developed a public persona. He developed it at the University of Cincinnati, refined it at the University of British Columbia, and then brought it to Michigan.

But I’ve talked to people at Cincinnati and Michigan. The truth of the matter is, he wasn’t well-thought of by the faculty. And he burned out very quickly in Michigan.

Ono shouldn’t be the model for the modern university president. Personally, I don’t think that he’s going to get another presidency after the Florida situation, at least not for a while.

Is the role of president still a consequential one? Do the heads of colleges wield influence in the same way they have in the past?

Who the president is makes a difference. They set the tone of the institution in many ways. But presidents today can exercise less independent leadership than they did in the past — they’re being put on a shorter and shorter leash.

There are so many different constituencies that they’re having to serve, and a lot of those constituencies are in conflict with each other.

Some presidents are engaging in what people call anticipatory compliance.

“In order to avoid these conflicts,” the thinking goes, “I’m going to get one step ahead.” Sadly, what that means is that when the board intervenes, they want even more.

Is there a world where that kind of interference becomes so unpleasant that it renders the job unpalatable?

I think for many serious potential candidates, the answer is yes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re being paid $1 million. Or if you have two country club memberships, a big car, a big house and staff, and all of that. These jobs have always been 24/7, 365. And the scrutiny is exponentially worse now.

The real question is: Who’s going to want these jobs? That’s part of the plan of critics of higher education. They want to drive people out so they can replicate what they’re doing in Florida and appoint political loyalists who have no experience in higher education.

Even though conservatives are critical of what they see as judicial activism, they have been extraordinarily active on college boards, working to influence curriculum and promotions and tenure.

The current climate changes things for all trustees, even those who don’t align with this thinking. Regardless of their backgrounds, no board will want to appoint a president who is going to put at risk all of their research funding. And the Trump administration has shown that it is willing to use any lever it has to bring these institutions under its thumb. Look how quickly Jim Ryan was gone from UVA.

As you mentioned, presidents are serving increasingly shorter tenures, instead of holding the position for life, or at least until retirement. Beyond a loss of leadership consistency, does this turnover hurt colleges?

Take Jim Ryan as an example. He’s 58 years old.

I assume the terms of his contract were renegotiated when he left, but based on my analysis of his 2022 contract, the university has a future liability of almost $17 million to him. He would actuarially retire from teaching in 15 years, and in 2038, his base salary would be over $1 million a year for teaching at most two courses a semester.

The people who are actually doing most of the teaching at UVA in 2038 won’t be tenured or tenure track. They will be contingent faculty who are barely able to scrape together a living.

If you put $10 million in a scholarship fund at UVA, would that be a better investment than keeping Ryan on the faculty? The answer is a no-brainer.

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July 30, 2025
Post-Test Worksheet Encourages College Student Metacognition

Many of today’s college students have experienced disruptions to their education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, negatively affecting their personal well-being as well as their academic preparation. Encouraging students to embrace effective and meaningful study habits can be one way to improve their college readiness and confidence in learning.

One professor at Western Iowa Tech Community College designed a mandatory post-test reflection and correction for students and saw dramatic improvement in their performance on the second exam. The assignment encourages students to strengthen their study habits and hold themselves accountable for making meaningful changes.

What’s the research: Students say their biggest challenges when studying are time management (47 percent) and distractions from technology or other people (both 38 percent), as well as a lack of sufficient time (34 percent), according to a 2024 survey from Kahoot. Forty-one percent of respondents indicated they experience anxiety while studying, compared to 34 percent who said they feel confident.

Test corrections, also called exam wrappers by teaching and learning centers, are activities delivered before or after an assessment to help students consider how they study and ways they could improve their practices before the next exam.

Past research on exam wrappers has found that implementing the strategy can improve course and exam grades, as well as students’ level of metacognition and changes to study habits.

For years, Frank O’Neill, a sports medicine instructor at Western Iowa Tech, has offered students the opportunity to complete an optional correction worksheet after each exam. Typically, the students who take him up on the opportunity are the ones already excelling in the course, he said—not those who could benefit from additional support.

“My primary goal is to turn a D student into a C student,” O’Neill said.

This summer, O’Neill decided to run an experiment and see if making the test analysis and correction worksheet mandatory would have any impact on students’ grades.

The assignment: After students take an exam, O’Neill’s assignment asks them a series of reflection questions on their study habits as well as a post-test commitment to improving their test-taking abilities.

Some of the questions are designed to help O’Neill understand which study strategies students employ and how they correlate to their grades.

For example, he’s learned that a student who’s less confident entering into the assessment more often receives a higher score than their confident peers, which O’Neill believes is because students who have studied longer have spent more time wrestling with the material and consider it to be difficult, compared to their peers who skim notes and think they’ve learned content.

Other questions prompt students to consider their test-taking abilities and the errors they make frequently. Sometimes students indicate that they got a question wrong because they changed their answer from the correct response to an incorrect one, O’Neill said, which allows him to encourage more confident responses.

“Your brain is smart; your gut is smarter than your brain,” O’Neill said. “You gotta go with that gut.”

Students can also provide feedback to the professor on how to improve the course. Sometimes O’Neill gains insights from test performance and frequently missed questions to understand how to make content clearer in the future.

The assignment requires students to correct every incorrect response on the test, which O’Neill says serves as a study technique as well, because exams are cumulative, so students will need to know the right answer later. It also fosters a growth mindset among learners, helping them reframe their learning and consider how to fail forward and see assessment as progress toward their goals, O’Neill said.

The impact: O’Neill is teaching two sections of microbiology this summer with 20 students enrolled in each section.

After the first exam, O’Neill assigned all students in one section to complete the exam wrapper, which would add five points to their grade. The other section could complete the optional wrapper but without points attached.

By the second test, the difference between classes was clear; the optional correction section showed little to no difference in grades between exams one and two. In the mandatory correction section, the average exam grade rose nine percentage points.

Since he first offered the assignment, O’Neill hasn’t received any negative feedback from students about having to complete the exam wrapper, which he attributes in part to his commitment to avoid giving students “busywork,” instead explaining the purpose behind each assignment. He’s also seen self-reported levels of test anxiety decrease over the course of the semester among students who use the wrapper and fewer students failing or dropping the class, signaling the personal benefits of the worksheet.

O’Neill now plans to assign the post-test reflection to all the courses he’s teaching this fall, for about 200 students in total. He’s also exploring opportunities to digitize at least portions of the assignment in the college’s learning management system, Canvas.

Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.

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July 30, 2025
1 in 2 graduates say their college major didn’t prepare them for today’s market

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As today’s college graduates struggle to start a steady career, 1 in 2 Americans say their college major didn’t prepare them for the job market, according to a June 18 report from Preply.

Beyond that, 1 in 6 Americans who went to college said they regret it. When thinking about their college experience, college graduates said their top regrets included taking out student loans, not networking more and not doing internships.

“One of the main concepts of seeking higher education after high school is that college will prepare you for the rest of your life. While some graduates leave their alma mater feeling prepared to enter the workforce and begin their career, others feel underprepared,” according to the report.

In a survey of more than 1,700 Americans with an undergraduate degree, 29% said they wished they picked a different major, and 18% said they regretted the institution they attended.

College graduates said they felt unprepared in numerous ways, especially finding a job after graduation and navigating student debt and personal finances.

Americans also said they don’t feel college gave them real-world work experience, practical or technical skills or a professional network. In fact, only 5% reported feeling “adequately prepared” for life and the workplace.

On the other side of the hiring table, more than half of hiring managers say recent graduates appear to be unprepared for the workforce, and 1 in 6 say they’re reluctant to hire them, according to a report from Resume.org. Their top complaints included excessive phone use, a lack of professionalism and poor time management skills.

Within the workplace, executives and workers alike say entry-level workers seem unprepared for their jobs, particularly compared to five years ago, according to a General Assembly report. Although leaders said workers don’t have enough training to be hired, employers also don’t offer adequate training, the report found.

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July 29, 2025
Will free expression make a comeback at Haverford College?

One of the oldest and most respected liberal arts institutions in America, Haverford College has a long history of principled protest — from its abolitionist Quaker founders to the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 20th century. In recent years, that tradition has sadly curdled into a culture of censorship. But a new free-speech committee plans to restore this lost legacy.

In the 1960s, Haverford students joined the Free Speech Movement launched at UC Berkeley, and, bucking the national trend at the time, found themselves aided by their administrators. Haverford even chartered buses so students could attend anti-Vietnam War protests around the country.

But Haverford has in recent years developed one of the most restrictive campus speech climates in the country. The college has plummeted in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings, landing 220th out of 251 schools in terms of how comfortable students are in expressing their ideas. Making matters worse, Haverford has taken the radical step of codifying its own decline. In a 2021 overhaul of its Honor Code, the college allowed the Honor Council to put students on trial for their political opinions. FIRE named it “Speech Code of the Month” and urged President Wendy Raymond to reject the changes. She did not.

Four years later, the tide is finally turning.

On July 9, 2025, Haverford’s Ad Hoc Committee on Freedom of Expression, Learning, and Community publicly released its final report, marking a pivotal course correction. The committee said the school’s Social Honor Code “is overly proscriptive and therefore restricts expressive freedom,” inferring that, when the code was written, “students were trying to legislate power dynamics between individuals based on a broader perception of societal imbalances and pursuit of social justice.” The committee criticized the code’s intrusion into interpersonal relationships and enforcement of ideological conformity, contributing to “a climate of silencing non-dominant viewpoints” and stifling “deeper learning and dialogue.”

The committee got it exactly right.

At Haverford — where liberals currently outnumber conservatives six-to-one — social justice is a broadly shared value. In 2021, that value motivated an egregiously censorious speech code. Now, nudged by news headlines in which the federal government has sought to effectively nationalize a private university and routinely undermines the First Amendment, Haverford seems to have rediscovered the importance of free speech.

As former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser famously warned, “Speech restrictions are like poison gas. You see a bad speaker out there, and you don’t wanna listen to him or her anymore. So you got this poison gas and you say, ‘I’m gonna spray him with it!’ And then the wind shifts. And pretty soon, the gas blows back on you.”

Glasser added: “And so, free speech is a kind of insurance policy. And the price you pay for that insurance policy is you gotta listen to bad people.”

Haverford’s committee deserves credit for recognizing the absolute necessity of a strong free speech culture to a liberal arts education. Notably, the committee affirmed the importance of an open marketplace of ideas in carrying out Haverford’s educational mission, called on President Raymond to adopt an institutional statement supporting free expression, and recommended greater schoolwide investment in civil discourse programming. Perhaps most significantly, the committee called for revisions to the Social Honor Code. These changes could improve Haverford’s “red light” rating in FIRE’s Spotlight Database of speech codes as well as raise the college’s standing in our College Free Speech Rankings.

The world is better when we embrace the humility of uncertainty — when we are willing to listen to others, debate them, work to understand them — no matter how immovable our current beliefs feel.

Last December, FIRE sent the committee a letter offering resources and support as they reviewed Haverford’s speech climate and policies. The committee subsequently cited FIRE’s publicly available policy guidance on acceptable time, place, and manner restrictions in its final report. And the college’s new “Interim Policy on Expressive Freedom and Responsibility” passed our Policy Reform team’s review with flying colors. We encourage Haverford to make this policy permanent.

In addition to harnessing FIRE’s insights, the committee turned to students, faculty, staff, and alumni for feedback. And even before the committee was formed, a group of students and alumni made their concerns clear with The New Kronstadt (an online magazine I created through FIRE’s Campus Scholars Program), named after the Kronstadt Rebellion in which socialist sailors in the early Soviet Union demanded free speech and other civil liberties. Vladimir Lenin didn’t take kindly to these demands and ordered the sailors slaughtered. Soviet troops massacred the rebels, illustrating how sometimes the most brutal form of censorship comes from within shared communities.

Sounding the FIRE alarm at Haverford College

Despite its proud history at my school, it is clear that free speech is not fully valued at Haverford College today.

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Quite often, movements rooted in moral causes attract idealists, and idealists tend to crave clarity. Demanding conformity then becomes a way of reducing ambiguity in a morally messy world. But as Haverford alumnus and aspiring archivist Nicholas Lasinsky wrote in an op-ed for The New Kronstadt, “The world is better when we embrace the humility of uncertainty — when we are willing to listen to others, debate them, work to understand them — no matter how immovable our current beliefs feel. This is a fundamental step in any journey to understanding a topic, and a fundamental step of education.”

Haverford seems poised to take that step again. As a Haverford alum and FIRE staffer, I’m proud to see my alma mater return to its pro-free speech roots. The work I do every day to defend free expression is shaped by the values, people, and intellectual traditions I came to know at Haverford.

This summer, I attended the Colorado Conference on Civic Discourse to facilitate a workshop titled “Let’s Talk: Student Civil Discourse.” The keynote conversation featured Cornel West, a visiting professor at Haverford in the late 1970s and early 1980s and a frequent guest speaker on campus ever since. After watching West, a prominent left-wing defender of free thought and expression, engage in civil discourse with his friend and longtime sparring partner, the conservative legal scholar Robert P. George, I had a chance to speak with West. His face lit up when he heard I’d studied at Haverford. He remembered my old English professor and Haverford’s former president, Kimberly Benston, as a brilliant scholar of the often-censored writers Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. Reflecting on how those authors shaped us, we lingered on the final line of Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

When any honest, unfiltered voice is heard, it can speak beyond identity and viewpoint, breaking a silence we may not know we shared. Finding the courage to speak is our shared human condition.

On a deeper level, Ellison’s Invisible Man is not only the story of one nameless black man navigating 1940s America, but a meditation on the universal struggle for self-definition and human dignity — and the necessity of free speech to achieve it. For when any honest, unfiltered voice is heard, it can speak beyond identity and viewpoint, breaking a silence we may not know we shared. Finding the courage to speak is our shared human condition.

This month, Haverford found its voice again — and called for its administrators to reaffirm the right of its community to speak freely. Now, college leadership must answer. President Raymond must ensure the committee’s words do not ring hollow and take action to ensure the Social Honor Code is revised to permit free speech. The college should also adopt an institutional statement on free expression and implement the cultural investments and pedagogical programming the committee prescribed. If the committee’s recommendations take hold, a frequent Quaker refrain and campus ideal can resonate with renewed promise: “Let your life speak.”

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July 28, 2025
This college campus may be literally underwater sooner than you think

Stockton University’s Atlantic City campus may be treading water—literally and figuratively. Built in 2018 on a stretch of reclaimed land in the South Inlet neighborhood, the coastal satellite of Stockton University sits just a few hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. With scenic views and beachfront access, it was marketed as a fresh vision for higher education: experiential learning by the sea.

But according to Rutgers University’s Climate Impact Lab and corroborated by NOAA sea level rise projections, that vision may be short-lived. In less than 50 years, large portions of the campus could be underwater—possibly permanently. In fact, with high tide flooding already happening more frequently in Atlantic City and sea levels expected to rise 2 to 5 feet by 2100 depending on emissions, climate change poses an existential threat not just to Stockton’s Atlantic City facilities, but to the broader idea of oceanfront higher education.

The Science: Rutgers’ Stark Warning

Rutgers’ 2021 “New Jersey Science and Technical Advisory Panel Report” projected sea level rise in the state could exceed 2.1 feet by 2050 and 5.1 feet by 2100 under high emissions scenarios. Even under moderate mitigation efforts, the sea is projected to rise 1.4 to 3.1 feet by 2070, placing critical infrastructure—including roads, utility networks, and public buildings—at risk. Stockton’s coastal campus is among them.

A Teachable Crisis

For students and faculty in environmental science, public policy, and urban planning, Stockton’s Atlantic City campus is both classroom and case study. Professors can point to flooding events just blocks away as real-time lessons in sea level rise, coastal erosion, and infrastructure vulnerability. Students witness firsthand the tension between development and environmental limits.

Yet these lived experiences also raise ethical questions. Is the university preparing students for the reality of climate displacement—or is it merely weathering the storm until the next round of state funding? Are public institutions being honest about the long-term risks students will face, not just as residents but as debt-burdened alumni?

In many ways, Stockton’s presence in Atlantic City epitomizes the “climate denial by development” that characterizes so much U.S. urban planning: Build now, mitigate later, and leave tomorrow’s collapse for someone else to manage.

No Easy Retreat

Climate adaptation strategies in Atlantic City have been slow-moving, expensive, and often controversial. Proposed solutions—such as sea walls, elevating roads, and managed retreat—require enormous financial and political capital. There’s also no consensus on how to preserve equity in a shrinking, sinking city.

For Stockton University, retreating from the Atlantic City campus would be politically and financially damaging. The expansion was celebrated with ribbon-cuttings and bipartisan support. Pulling back now would mean acknowledging a costly miscalculation. Yet failing to plan for relocation or phased withdrawal could leave students and taxpayers on the hook for an underwater investment.

According to the New Jersey Coastal Resilience Plan, Atlantic County—home to Stockton’s main and satellite campuses—is one of the most climate-exposed counties in the state. And Stockton isn’t just sitting in the floodplain; it’s training the very people who will be tasked with managing these emergencies. It has both a responsibility and an opportunity to lead, not just in mitigation but in public reckoning.

Lessons for Higher Ed

Stockton is hardly the only university caught between mission and market. Across the U.S., colleges and universities are pouring resources into branding campaigns and capital projects that ignore—or actively obscure—the long-term environmental risks. Climate change is often treated as a course offering, not an existential threat.

In Universities on Fire, Bryan Alexander outlines how climate change will fundamentally reshape the higher education landscape—from facilities planning to enrollment, from energy consumption to curriculum design. He warns that campuses, particularly those located near coasts or in extreme heat zones, face not just infrastructural threats but institutional crises. Rising waters, wildfires, hurricanes, and population shifts will force universities to rethink their physical footprints, economic models, and public obligations.

Yet few accreditors or bond-rating agencies have accounted for climate risk in their evaluations. Endowments continue to fund construction in flood-prone areas. Boards of trustees prioritize expansion over retreat. And students, many of whom are first-generation or low-income, are seldom told what climate vulnerability could mean for the real value of their degrees—or the safety of their dormitories.

As sea levels rise and climate models grow more precise, Stockton’s Atlantic City campus may become a symbol—not just of poor urban planning, but of an education system unprepared for the world it claims to be shaping.

What Comes Next?

For now, Stockton continues to expand its Atlantic City footprint, even as new reports suggest that this part of the Jersey Shore may be uninhabitable or cost-prohibitive to protect in a few decades. The university has proposed additional student housing and even a new coastal research center. But each new building reinforces the same flawed logic: that short-term gains outweigh long-term collapse.

At some point, Stockton University—and many other coastal institutions—will have to decide whether to keep investing in property that’s literally slipping into the sea, or to model the kind of resilience and foresight they claim to teach.

Because this is not just a sustainability issue. It’s a justice issue. It’s a debt issue. It’s a survival issue.

And it’s happening now.

Sources

Bryan Alexander. Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.

NJ Department of Environmental Protection. Resilient NJ: Statewide Coastal Resilience Plan. 2020.

Rutgers University. New Jersey Climate Change Resource Center.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Back Bay Study – New Jersey.

New Jersey Future. “Climate Risks and Infrastructure in Atlantic County.”

Stockton University. Strategic Plan 2025: Choosing Our Path.

NOAA. State of High Tide Flooding and Sea Level Rise 2023 Technical Report.

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July 25, 2025
Trump Aims to Save College Sports with Executive Order

The Trump administration threw its hat in the ring Thursday amid growing debates over how best to manage compensation for college athletes, issuing an executive order titled Saving College Sports.

It comes just over 24 hours after House Republicans in two separate committees advanced legislation concerning the same topic.

“The future of college sports is under unprecedented threat,” the order stated. “A national solution is urgently needed to prevent this situation from deteriorating beyond repair and to protect non-revenue sports, including many women’s sports, that comprise the backbone of intercollegiate athletics, drive American superiority at the Olympics … and catalyze hundreds of thousands of student-athletes to fuel American success in myriad ways.”

Ever since legal challenges and new state laws drove the National Collegiate Athletic Association to allow student-athletes to profit off their own name, image and likeness in 2021, America has entered a new era that many refer to as the wild west of college sports.

Lawmakers have long scrutinized this unregulated market, arguing that it allows the wealthiest colleges to buy the best players. But a recent settlement, finalized in June, granted colleges the power to directly pay their athletes, elevating the dispute to a new level. Many fear that disproportionate revenue-sharing among the most watched sports, namely men’s football and basketball, will hurt women’s athletics and Olympic sports including soccer and track and field.

By directing colleges to preserve and expand scholarships for those sports and provide the maximum number of roster spots permitted under NCAA rules, the Trump administration hopes to prevent such a monopolization.

The order also disallows third-party, pay-for-play compensation that has become common among the wealthiest institutions and booster clubs, and mandates that any revenue-sharing permitted between universities and collegiate athletes should be implemented in a manner that protects women’s and nonrevenue sports.

Many sports law experts are skeptical about the order, suggesting it’s unlikely to move the needle and might create new legal challenges instead.

However, Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, thanked the president for his commitment to supporting student-athletes and strengthening college athletics.

“The SCORE Act, led by our three committees, will complement the President’s executive order,” Walberg said. “We look forward to working with all of our colleagues in Congress to build a stronger and more durable college sports environment.”

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July 25, 2025
College Employees in Kansas Can’t List Pronouns in Emails

College Employees in Kansas Can’t List Pronouns in Emails

Ryan Quinn

Wed, 07/23/2025 – 05:25 PM

Lawmakers in Topeka, like those in some other state capitals, used a budget bill to order nonfinancial changes to public higher ed. DEI was the target this time.

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Ryan Quinn

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July 23, 2025
Illinois Budget Lists Funds for Defunct College

Illinois lawmakers budgeted $500,000 for Lincoln College in a state budget that went into effect July 1—even though the small private institution closed in 2022, WICS News Channel 20 reported.

The earmark added in a capital bill in 2018 continues to resurface in the budget each year because it’s included in a state law, even though it hasn’t been funded.

“That money’s still in there. However, it wouldn’t have any place to go to now,” state senator Sally Turner told WICS.

But it could be redirected in the future.

“Later on, down the road, we could probably change that title to the city of Lincoln or to the furtherment of the development of Lincoln Developmental Center or something of that nature, if it ever gets funded,” Turner said.

Critics say it raises broader concerns about the budgeting process.

State Representative Bill Hauter, whose district includes Lincoln, told The Center Square that state lawmakers have hours to review thousands of budget pages.

“This line item for Lincoln College? It’s basically a banner that says ‘incompetent,’” he said.

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July 23, 2025