Tag: control

  • Moral Capital and Locus of Control

    Moral Capital and Locus of Control

    Moral capital has become a contested currency in American public life. It is deployed by political elites to justify austerity, by campus executives to rationalize managerial authority, and by think tanks to discipline the working class. Yet moral capital also rises from below—from students building mutual-aid networks, from adjuncts organizing for fair wages, from communities confronting the harms universities have helped produce. In an era defined by climate peril, surveillance capitalism, and proliferating wars, the stakes of who controls moral capital—and who gets to exercise real agency—have never been higher.

    At the center of this struggle lies a fraught psychological and sociological concept: locus of control. Higher education constantly toggles between narratives of internal control (grit, resilience, personal responsibility) and external control (the market, political pressures, funding cycles). Powerful actors encourage an internal locus of control when it shifts blame downward, and an external locus of control when it shields institutional failure. Students, staff, and faculty live suspended in this contradiction, expected to absorb the consequences of decisions made far above them.

    Quality of Life as Moral Imperative

    Quality of Life—once peripheral to higher education policy—is now a defining moral issue. Students and workers contend with unstable housing, food insecurity, unsafe campuses, inaccessible mental health care, and relentless economic pressures. For many, these burdens are compounded by existential crises: climate anxiety, global conflicts, democratic backsliding, and precarity amplified by technological surveillance.

    Institutions often portray these crises as personal challenges requiring self-management. But Quality of Life is not an individual moral failure; it is a metric of collective conditions. When a university community’s quality of life declines, it signals a profound imbalance between agency and structure—a distorted locus of control.

    The Industry’s Manufactured Moral Capital

    Universities have long crafted narratives that elevate their own moral standing while displacing responsibility onto individuals. The “grateful striver” student, the “self-sacrificing” adjunct, the “visionary” president—these tropes protect managerial systems from scrutiny and allow elites to accumulate moral capital even as Quality of Life deteriorates for everyone else.

    This manufactured moral authority collapses under existential pressures. As campuses confront heatwaves, flooding, militarized policing, housing crises, widening wars, and state-sanctioned surveillance, it becomes impossible to sustain the fiction that individuals can simply “grit” their way to stability.

    Reclaiming Moral Capital 

    Moral capital is not owned by institutions. It can be reimagined, reclaimed, and reoriented. Four longstanding modes of internal discipline—temperance, celibacy, critical thinking, and solidarity—take on new urgency when placed in the context of planetary and political crisis.

    Temperance

    Temperance, stripped of its historical misuse, becomes a strategy of mindful refusal in the face of consumption-based exploitation. It includes rejecting burnout culture, resisting technological tools that monitor student behavior, and refusing to internalize blame for systemic failures. In an era of climate breakdown, temperance also signifies ecological responsibility—a modest but meaningful form of internal control aligned with global survival rather than institutional convenience.

    Celibacy

    Broadly interpreted, celibacy represents intentional self-limitation that protects one’s emotional and cognitive bandwidth. Amid surveillance-driven social media, algorithmic manipulation, and institutions that increasingly commodify student identity, celibacy can be a form of psychological sovereignty. It creates space for reflection in a world designed to keep people reactive, distracted, and easily governed.

    Critical Thinking

    Critical thinking remains the academy’s most subversive tradition—especially when deployed against the university itself. It helps students analyze the interplay between personal agency and systemic constraint. It equips them to understand climate injustice, militarism, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. And it exposes the ways mass surveillance—from learning analytics to campus police technologies—erodes autonomy and shifts the locus of control away from individuals and communities toward powerful institutions.

    Solidarity

    Solidarity transforms private moral commitments into collective action. It breaks the isolation manufactured by surveillance systems, precarity, and competitive academic cultures. Solidarity has historically been the source of the most effective nonviolent strategies—from civil rights sit-ins to anti-war mobilizations to student debt strikes. Today, as geopolitical conflicts escalate and authoritarian tendencies rise, the power of organized nonviolence becomes an existential necessity. It is one of the few tools capable of confronting militarized policing, resisting state repression, and challenging the corporate infrastructures that profit from crisis.

    Nonviolent Strategies in an Era of Global Threat

    Nonviolent action remains a potent form of moral capital—and one of the most effective forms of collective agency. Research across conflicts shows that sustained, mass-based nonviolent movements often outperform violent struggles, especially against highly resourced opponents. For universities, which increasingly collaborate with defense contractors, data brokers, and state surveillance agencies, nonviolent resistance has become both a safeguard and a moral compass.

    Sit-ins, teach-ins, encampments, divestment campaigns, and labor actions reassert external locus of control as something communities can influence—not by force, but by moral clarity, strategic discipline, and the refusal to comply with harmful systems.

    Mass Surveillance as a Threat to Moral Agency

    Mass surveillance is now woven into the fabric of academic life. Learning management systems track student behavior down to the minute. Proctoring software uses biometrics to police exams. Campus police drones and public-private security networks feed data into law enforcement databases. Administrative dashboards quantify student “risk” and worker “efficiency” in ways that reshape institutional priorities.

    This surveillance apparatus corrodes moral capital by reducing human judgment to automated metrics. It also distorts locus of control: individuals are told to take responsibility while being monitored and managed by opaque systems far beyond their influence.

    Reclaiming agency requires dismantling or limiting these systems, demanding transparency, and reasserting human dignity in spaces now governed by algorithms.

    Toward a More Honest Locus of Control

    Moral capital and locus of control are not academic abstractions. They are lived realities shaped by climate disruption, war, inequality, and surveillance. Higher education must stop using moral narratives to deflect responsibility and instead cultivate practices that reinforce real agency: temperance, celibacy, critical thinking, solidarity, and the disciplined power of nonviolent resistance.

    In a world marked by existential threats, reclaiming moral capital from below is not simply an intellectual exercise—it is a condition for survival, and a pathway to collective liberation.

    Sources

    Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

    Erica Chenoweth & Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works

    Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

    Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

    Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

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  • 70% of Americans say feds shouldn’t control admissions, curriculum

    70% of Americans say feds shouldn’t control admissions, curriculum

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    Dive Brief: 

    • Most polled Americans, 70%, disagreed that the federal government should control “admissions, faculty hiring, and curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities to ensure they do not teach inappropriate material,” according to a survey released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute. 
    • The majority of Americans across political parties — 84% of Democrats, 75% of independents and 58% of Republicans — disagreed with federal control over these elements of college operations. 
    • The poll’s results come as the Trump administration seeks to exert control over college workings, including in its recent offer of priority for federal research funding in exchange for making sweeping policy changes aligned with the government’s priorities. 

    Dive Insight: 

    The poll from the nonpartisan PRRI isn’t the first survey to suggest that large swaths of Americans disagree with the Trump administration’s approach to higher education policy. 

    Slightly more than half of Americans, 56%, said they disapproved of how President Donald Trump was handling higher education-related issues, a May poll from The Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago found. 

    However, the AP-NORC poll found a stark political divide, with 90% of Democrats disapproving of Trump’s approach and 83% of Republicans approving of it. 

    More specifically, 73% of Democrats said at the time that they disapproved of the withholding of colleges’ federal funds for not complying with the government’s political goals. Conversely, 51% of Republicans approved of that approach. 

    Another poll — this one of Jewish Americans conducted by Ipsos and researchers from the University of Rochester and the University of California —  found in September that 58% said they disagree with the Trump administration pausing or canceling vast sums of federal research funding to Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

    In both cases, the Trump administration has accused the universities of not doing enough to address antisemitism on campus and demanded sweeping policy changes. However, federal judges have largely blocked the government’s attempted suspension of their research funding. 

    In the Ipsos poll, 72% of Jewish Americans said they were concerned about antisemitism on college campuses. But the same share said they believed the Trump administration was “using antisemitism as an excuse to penalize and tax college campuses.” 

    The Trump administration has so far cut deals with four colleges: three Ivy League institutions and, most recently, the University of Virginia, the first public institution to strike such an agreement. 

    More deals could be coming down the pike. 

    Earlier this month, the Trump administration offered priority research funding to nine colleges if they signed a compact dictating certain policies impacting their tuition, admissions and academics. Those provisions spanned from adopting a five-year tuition freeze to potentially dissolving campus units that “purposefully punish” and “belittle” conservative ideas. 

    While most of the colleges rejected the compact, Trump appeared to open up the deal to any interested institution. Additionally, two of the initial nine colleges — the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt University — haven’t yet said publicly if they will sign or reject the compact. 

    Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said he would provide feedback on the compact, adding that he looked forward to “continuing the conversation,” according to The Vanderbilt Hustler. 

    Meanwhile, UT-Austin officials have been silent on the compact lately, though the chair of the UT System initially said it was “honored” its flagship received the proposal.

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  • A Compact for Control (opinion)

    A Compact for Control (opinion)

    For more than 80 years, the system of higher education in the United States has partnered with the federal government to produce the best science, technology and scholarship in the world. Competing for federal research support on the basis of merit, universities have produced countless innovations and spurred enormous economic growth. The Trump administration has now proposed a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that threatens to destroy this partnership.

    Holding hostage federal loans and grants, the “compact” is essentially a unilateral executive decree that cannot be refused. Although it sounds in high and unobjectionable ideals, it is in fact designed to undermine the traditional academic independence and freedom that have sustained the greatness of American universities. The compact should be immediately and forcefully rejected by all self-respecting institutions of higher education.

    Universities and colleges have two essential missions. They serve to increase our knowledge of the world and to educate our young. Knowledge cannot be increased if it is assessed by political criteria, as distinguished from standards of intellectual merit. But the compact requires that institutions of higher education abolish “institutional units that … belittle … conservative ideas.” What exactly counts as conservative is unstated and left in the control of the administration. The compact seeks to supplant intellectual competence with explicitly political criteria, to be determined by a political agency. This demand violates not only academic freedom, but also free speech. It imposes government orthodoxy on private entities.

    The compact demands that universities offer empirical verification that each institutional field, department and unit represent a “broad spectrum of viewpoints.” It thus invites government to overrule scientific consensus on the range of acceptable inquiry. Most colleges of environmental sciences, for example, teach that global climate change is accelerated by human conduct. But Trump himself, speaking before the United Nations, branded this view the “greatest con job.” Most medical schools teach that vaccines are important to health. But Trump’s secretary of health and human services “has been crusading against vaccines for decades.” Under the compact, government might insist that every biology department house a vaccine denier, or that every environmental science program contain a climate change skeptic. Political control of this kind would quickly degrade the intellectual integrity of university scholarship.

    Early in the 20th century, American universities were managed by laypersons who attempted to censor and control the scholarship of professors. But in 1915, the newly established American Association of University Professors defined and defended academic freedom in the canonical Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. The declaration set forth principles that are now enshrined in contracts at virtually every American college and university. These principles protect academic freedom, which rests on the axiom that scholarly excellence is to be determined by academic rather than political standards. Trump’s proposed compact wantonly violates this essential principle, even as it purports to protect academic freedom.

    The declaration also makes clear the educational goal of American colleges and universities, which is to equip students to think for themselves. The compact, in contrast, requires universities to suppress “support for entities designated by the U.S. Government as terrorist organizations.” Government may of course create such designations, but unfortunately they may also be problematic, overbroad or erroneous. Students and professors should be allowed to criticize such errors, but the compact would prevent this. It would require American colleges and universities to become instruments of official thought control. This is what happened in the United States during World War I, when professors were fired for opposing the war. We have spent a century repenting those mistakes, and now the Trump administration demands that we repeat them.

    Some provisions in the compact are unobjectionable because they merely restate existing law. The Supreme Court has outlawed the use of race in admissions. Congress has laid out procedures for enforcing antidiscrimination law under Title VI and Title IX. These tools are adequate to enforce the law. But the compact has a larger goal: It seeks to break the independence of American higher education, an independence that has fueled the ascent of American colleges and universities to greatness. The compact goes far beyond the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action to require that all admissions decisions “be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria.” It also requires “grade integrity,” freezing tuition rates for five years, disclosure of postgraduate earnings and free tuition for students in the hard sciences at universities with large endowments. It limits the percentage of foreign students and requires screening for anti-American bias.

    The diversity of American institutions of higher education is commonly understood to be a source of its enormous strength. Competing against each other for students, American colleges and universities admit students based on their own distinct and legal criteria. But the administration seeks to end that heterogeneity. For many institutions what matters is the creativity of a student’s essay, the qualitative assessment of recommendations and the resilience of an applicant’s personality as revealed in a résumé. The administration would have universities ignore all that. It would turn our colleges and universities into drab, bureaucratic and uniform institutions, under the shadow of the continuous threat of government interference.

    Under the compact, universities also must commit to institutional neutrality, the idea that university leaders and departments will not officially comment on social and political issues of the day that do not affect the university. This is an ideal embodied in the 1967 Kalven report at the University of Chicago, but its adoption and interpretation is a very local matter, and it should not be required as a condition for receipt of federal funds.

    Institutional neutrality is important because it protects the maximum freedom of students and faculty to vigorously inquire, without battling the pall of official ideas. But some institutions might have specific missions that they deem essential. For example, a religious institution of higher learning might have a certain set of principles that require leaders to speak out. If government gets to decide what counts as a social or political issue, a medical school might not be able to opine on the safety of vaccines, an environmental department on the impacts of climate change or a law school on violations of the rule of law. Of course, universities may choose not to opine on these matters, but for the administration to impose this silence is truly inimical to a marketplace of ideas.

    The compact insists that universities “commit to defining” gender roles “according to reproductive function and biological processes.” Gender troubles certainly abound in universities, and prior administrations may have contributed to these difficulties. But these quandaries are for universities to settle. The diversity of approaches taken by American colleges and universities is our greatest strength. The compact unaccountably seeks to impose its own ideology on all institutions of higher education. It seeks to replace a pluralist market with a single orientation set by Washington, D.C.

    The architect of America’s public-private research partnership, Vannevar Bush, asserted that “scientific progress” required “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” The Trump administration would do well to recognize that a genuine marketplace of ideas requires academic freedom for scholars and a competitive environment for institutions.

    For the administration to attempt to use federal funds to force colleges and universities to toe a conservative line is to create what our constitutional law calls unconstitutional conditions. No university that is committed to independently searching for the truth, or to producing students who can think for themselves, should submit to the deliberate and possibly illegal humiliations contained in the compact. Institutions that do so may very well cease being universities in the full sense of the term. They should just say no.

    Robert Post is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he served as dean from 2009 to 2017. His research specialties include issues of free speech and academic freedom.

    Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago Law School and director of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.

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  • Phones, devices, and the limits of control: Rethinking school device policies

    Phones, devices, and the limits of control: Rethinking school device policies

    Key points:

    By now, it’s no secret that phones are a problem in classrooms. A growing body of research and an even louder chorus of educators point to the same conclusion: students are distracted, they’re disengaged, and their learning is suffering. What’s less clear is how to solve this issue. 

    Of late, school districts across the country are drawing firmer lines. From Portland, Maine to Conroe, Texas and Springdale, Arkansas, administrators are implementing “bell-to-bell” phone bans, prohibiting access from the first bell to the last. Many are turning to physical tools like pouches and smart lockers, which lock away devices for the duration of the day, to enforce these rules. The logic is straightforward: take the phones away, and you eliminate the distraction.

    In many ways, it works. Schools report fewer behavioral issues, more focused classrooms, and an overall sense of calm returning to hallways once buzzing with digital noise. But as these policies scale, the limitations are becoming more apparent.

    But students, as always, find ways around the rules. They’ll bring second phones to school or slip their device in undetected–and more. Teachers, already stretched thin, are now tasked with enforcement, turning minor infractions into disciplinary incidents. 

    Some parents and students are also pushing back, arguing that all-day bans are too rigid, especially when phones serve as lifelines for communication, medical needs, or even digital learning. In Middletown, Connecticut, students reportedly became emotional just days after a new ban took effect, citing the abrupt change in routine and lack of trust.

    The bigger question is this: Are we trying to eliminate phones, or are we trying to teach responsible use?

    That distinction matters. While it’s clear that phone misuse is widespread and the intent behind bans is to restore focus and reduce anxiety, blanket prohibitions risk sending the wrong message. Instead of fostering digital maturity, they can suggest that young people are incapable of self-regulation. And in doing so, they may sidestep an important opportunity: using school as a place to practice responsible tech habits, not just prohibit them.

    This is especially critical given the scope of the problem. A recent study by Fluid Focus found that students spend five to six hours a day on their phones during school hours. Two-thirds said it had a negative impact on their academic performance. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 77 percent of school leaders believe phones hurt learning. The data is hard to ignore.

    But managing distraction isn’t just about removal. It’s also about design. Schools that treat device policy as an infrastructure issue, rather than a disciplinary one, are beginning to implement more structured approaches. 

    Some are turning to smart locker systems that provide centralized, secure phone storage while offering greater flexibility: configurable access windows, charging capabilities, and even low admin options to help keep teachers teaching. These systems don’t “solve” the phone problem, but they do help schools move beyond the extremes of all-or-nothing.

    And let’s not forget equity. Not all students come to school with the same tech, support systems, or charging access. A punitive model that assumes all students have smartphones (or can afford to lose access to them) risks deepening existing divides. Structured storage systems can help level the playing field, offering secure and consistent access to tech tools without relying on personal privilege or penalizing students for systemic gaps.

    That said, infrastructure alone isn’t the answer. Any solution needs to be accompanied by clear communication, transparent expectations, and intentional alignment with school culture. Schools must engage students, parents, and teachers in conversations about what responsible phone use actually looks like and must be willing to revise policies based on feedback. Too often, well-meaning bans are rolled out with minimal explanation, creating confusion and resistance that undermine their effectiveness.

    Nor should we idealize “focus” as the only metric of success. Mental health, autonomy, connection, and trust all play a role in creating school environments where students thrive. If students feel overly surveilled or infantilized, they’re unlikely to engage meaningfully with the values behind the policy. The goal should not be control for its own sake, it should be cultivating habits that carry into life beyond the classroom.

    The ubiquity of smartphones is undeniable. While phones are here to stay, the classroom represents one of the few environments where young people can learn how to use them wisely, or not at all. That makes schools not just sites of instruction, but laboratories for digital maturity.

    The danger isn’t that we’ll do too little. It’s that we’ll settle for solutions that are too simplistic or too focused on optics, instead of focusing  not on outcomes.

    We need more than bans. We need balance. That means moving past reactionary policies and toward systems that respect both the realities of modern life and the capacity of young people to grow. It means crafting strategies that support teachers without overburdening them, that protect focus without sacrificing fairness, and that reflect not just what we’re trying to prevent, but what we hope to build.

    The real goal shouldn’t be to simply get phones out of kids’ hands. It should be to help them learn when to put them down on their own.

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  • Cut, Coerce, Control: What Trump Is Doing to U.S. Universities

    Cut, Coerce, Control: What Trump Is Doing to U.S. Universities

    The single biggest story in higher education for the first six months of this year, without a doubt, has been the Trump administration’s remarkable assault on science and universities. Arguably it’s the largest state-led assault on higher education institutions anywhere in the world since Mao and the cultural revolution.

    Billions of dollars already legally allocated to institutions have been stripped from them mainly, but not exclusively through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Billions more are going to be cut permanently through the budget process. Individual institutions in particular, Harvard, have been threatened with a variety of punishments if they do not obey the administration’s wishes on DEI and the curriculum. International students are being deported and the government has mooted a variety of policies that would see international numbers decline sharply. Low income students are looking at major cuts to both loans and grants. And we’re only, as of this recording, 134 days into this administration’s term, still 1,327 less to go.

    With me today is a returning guest, Brendan Cantwell, from Michigan State University. He joined our show last fall to talk about what, based on his reading of the now notorious Project 2025, a Trump administration might do to higher education. And he was mostly right. Certainly he was more perspicacious than most actual higher education leaders, and so we thought just before we break for the summer, we’d invite him back on, not just to say, I told you so, but to help us understand both the strategies and tactics that the Trump administration is using and where the conflict might be headed next.

    Just one note, we recorded this on Wednesday, the 28th of May. Some things such as the state of the Trump Harvard battle have changed since then, so keep that in mind as you listen.

    And now, over to Brendan.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.34 | Cut, Coerce, Control: What Trump Is Doing to U.S. Universities

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Brendan, let’s start with the big picture. We’re four months—and a week—into Trump’s presidency, with just over three and a half years to go. Let me see if I’ve got this right.

    He’s attacked the major granting agencies—NIH and NSF—and reduced direct funding to individual investigators, often on DEI grounds. He’s also cut overhead payments to universities. On top of that, he’s gone after specific institutions—Columbia, Harvard, and others—trying to pull their funding in ways that, frankly, seem completely illegal. The justification has ranged from their support for EDI to questionable claims of antisemitism or collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party.

    We’ve now got a budget moving through Congress that, as I understand it, takes an axe to the student loan and grant system. And just this week, the government appears to be targeting international students—starting with Harvard, and more broadly by ordering embassies to conduct social media checks before issuing student visas. Am I missing anything?

    Brendan Cantwell (BC): I’m not sure—there’s just been so much. It’s hard to keep up. There have been several executive orders, including ones targeting what we call Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Others have touched on accreditation and a range of other topics.

    The thing about this administration is that so much is happening so quickly, and these actions are in various stages of implementation. Some are being held up in court, and with others, it’s not even clear how they’re supposed to be implemented. The president makes a proclamation, but then there’s this uncertainty: what does it actually mean in practice?

    Even for someone who spends a lot of time tracking this, it’s really difficult to stay on top of everything. But the overall thrust seems clear: the administration is using every mechanism it believes it controls—and some it probably doesn’t, legally—to pressure universities to align with the president’s agenda.

    That’s not just my interpretation. It’s actually a common talking point from the administration: if universities want funding, they ought to support the president’s goals. More broadly, there’s a clear effort to weaken the sector—to undermine its role as an independent political and cultural force that could challenge the president or the party.

    AU: I think Linda McMahon actually said exactly that earlier today—that universities are fine as long as they’re aligned with the president and the administration. So, I think you’ve done a good job explaining the through line across these various actions. But how coherent are those actions, really?

    Is this a well-oiled plan, where they expected to be at this point by month three or four? Or is it more like the tariff policies, where the president just thinks of something new each day and rolls it out on a whim?

    BC: I almost want to push back on the either/or framing. It’s definitely true that the president—and to some extent his top policy people and enforcers—are just throwing things at the wall. A lot of it is reactionary: this university defied me, so now I’m mad and I’m going to do something outrageous to show how much authority I have over them.

    So yes, there’s an erratic, incoherent aspect to it. The rationale for their actions shifts constantly: one day it’s antisemitism, the next it’s about violating a Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, then it’s about foreign collaboration. The justification just keeps changing.

    But if you take a step back and look at the cumulative effect of what the administration is doing—getting universities to be more compliant, weakening their financial position, causing faculty and staff to lose their jobs—that broader objective is being advanced. And that’s exactly the kind of outcome that people like Chris Rufo, who claim to speak for the administration’s education policy, seem to be aiming for.

    So no, it’s not tactically precise—it’s not some kind of meticulously calibrated battle plan. But the overall strategy of flooding the sector with challenges is definitely happening.

    AU: I’ll come back to the strategy in a second, but let’s talk tactics. Do you get the sense that the Trump team is getting smarter in how it’s operating? That maybe they’ve been caught off guard a few times and are starting to adapt?

    I’m just thinking about what’s happened in the last week. First, they attacked Harvard—saying, essentially, “we’re getting rid of all your international students.” Then the court pushes back. But right away, the administration has a response: the court says, “No, you can’t do that,” and they immediately pivot to pulling individual scholarships or research grants for international students—ones that hadn’t already been cut.

    Then they go a step further, announcing cuts that apply not just to Harvard, but to all international students. Are they getting smarter, or not? I never had the sense this group was particularly good at learning, but maybe that’s changing?

    BC: Are they getting smarter? I’m not sure. Are they more determined? Yes. And I think the voices inside the administration that might have constrained the president’s impulses back in 2016 to 2020—those are gone now. He’s unconstrained. He’s persistent. And he and his senior policy advisors genuinely believe in what they’re doing. They’re committed to the project and they’re looking for ways to push it forward.

    Take the example you just mentioned: there’s an injunction—you can’t bar Harvard from enrolling international students, at least not before the courts weigh in. And the administration responds, “Fine. We’ll just create a new process to vet all international student visas.” So suddenly, they’re grinding the whole system to a halt.

    They’re absolutely more willing now to use tactics that are difficult to block—tactics that escalate the situation every time someone pushes back. And they’re building out those tactics in a way that moves them closer to their goals.

    That said, I don’t think their objectives are ever really precise or coherent. It’s more of a generalized impulse: they don’t like foreigners, they don’t like foreign students, they don’t like Harvard, they don’t like universities. So, they hit where it hurts—and this is one way to do it.

    Now, is that smart? Maybe more effective, yes. I’m not sure it serves the country, or even the president’s long-term agenda, in any meaningful way. But it’s definitely happening.

    AU: So let me turn to the Trump administration’s broader strategy. Last time you were on, we talked about Project 2025 and its implications for higher education. How closely do you think the White House’s actions over the past four months align with what was outlined in Project 2025? And by the way, this is your chance to say “I told you so.”

    BC: Yeah, I love to say “I told you so”—it’s one of my character flaws.

    A lot of what was in Project 2025 has now been implemented—or at least, versions of it have. Take the cap on indirect costs, for example. They’ve implemented a 15% cap, rather than the negotiated rates that were often quite a bit higher for individual campuses. Those rates sometimes raised eyebrows, especially among people unfamiliar with how the U.S. system works.

    And even the rhetoric is the same. They’ve said, essentially, “Marxist foundations only pay 15%, so why should we subsidize Marxist stuff?” That language comes directly from Project 2025.

    There are other examples, too. Many of the student loan reforms currently working their way through Congress have Project 2025 fingerprints on them. The executive order on DEI? Same thing. So yes, there are a lot of specific elements from the plan that are now showing up in policy.

    And beyond the specifics, the overall spirit of Project 2025 is clearly visible in the administration’s posture toward higher education.

    That said, there’s one key difference: Project 2025 envisioned a more active role for Congress and a more deliberative policymaking process than what we’re actually seeing. It assumed, at least implicitly, more checks on presidential power than the president has been willing to accept.

    So, while many of Project 2025’s ideas have been implemented—some fully, some partially—how long they last is still an open question. And ironically, the actual execution by the administration is in many ways less constrained, and possibly less lawful, than what Project 2025 originally proposed. That’s my impression, at least—as a non-lawyer.

    AU: We’ve been talking about the Trump administration. I want to shift now to the higher education sector. For most of February and part of March, the sector seemed… bewildered. Almost unable to process what was happening. It was like, “This must be a mistake—they can’t possibly mean that.”

    And as a result, I think the response was pretty slow. When the administration went after Columbia, which was the first institutional target, many universities seemed to instinctively say, “Let’s stay quiet. Maybe we’ll be spared.”

    You, and a few others, were pretty clear-eyed from the beginning about how this would unfold. Why didn’t university leaders see it coming? This feels like a colossal failure of imagination. What happened?

    BC: Let me start by offering a partial defense of university leaders.

    There are people like me—and others—who are pretty knowledgeable but also pessimistic. We say bad things are going to happen a lot, and often they don’t. During Trump’s first term, there was concern that a lot of his anti-higher-ed rhetoric would turn into policy. And in some ways, it did. But in many ways, it didn’t. Congress constrained him. The courts constrained him. Even people inside his administration held him back. And he also lost focus on higher ed.

    So, I think university leaders had some reason to believe that the best strategy was to remain quiet, lobby Congress, and let the courts do their work. That approach worked last time, so it wasn’t irrational to assume it might work again. It just took them some time to adjust to the new reality.

    Some of that delay is about individual cognitive response, which I’m not really qualified to speak to. But some of it is structural—university bureaucracies and associations take time to pivot. Shifting strategies isn’t easy.

    So yes, it’s fair to say the sector was caught flat-footed. And yes, leaders should have had a better sense of what was coming. That’s a valid critique. But once they figured out what was happening, I think the sector showed a fair amount of agility. Associations started taking a more aggressive posture. ACE, for instance, became part of the resistance—which I wouldn’t have predicted would happen so quickly.

    Universities are still trying to find their footing. And then you have Red State universities, which are really hemmed in by state legislatures. They’re facing a whole different set of challenges, apart from what’s coming out of the federal administration. Those institutions are in a very tough spot.

    AU: What does it say about American higher education that Harvard has become ground zero for the resistance?

    BC: Full credit to Harvard—absolutely.

    Here’s my hedge: they had the benefit of seeing what happened to Columbia. That experience showed there was no good-faith negotiation to be had with this administration.

    In some ways, it makes strategic sense for Trump to pick on Harvard. It’s not the most lovable institution. It’s a big, juicy target.

    But at the same time, it’s also kind of foolish. Harvard has enormous resources—financial, social, institutional. They have more capacity to fight back than almost any other institution in the country.

    I think they recognized what Columbia’s experience revealed: if you give in to this administration, institutional autonomy is gone—possibly for a long time.

    If Harvard wants to preserve the American establishment—which it’s often accused of doing, by reproducing elite institutions and elite classes—then it has to resist Trump. That resistance is a condition of preserving the pre-Trump order.

    So yes, it’s good and necessary that Harvard is doing this. But I wouldn’t interpret this as Harvard becoming some scrappy underdog street fighter. It’s simply one of the few institutions with the resources and standing to try to defend the old order.

    AU: What about going forward, though? I mean, I hear more institutions—maybe not acting, but at least sounding like they understand they all have to hang together, or they’ll hang separately. But will they?

    I mean, take the University of Michigan on DEI—they folded like Superman on laundry day. Part of that was probably about Santa Ono’s personal ambitions. But there are a lot of institutions, both public and private, that have already bent the knee at least once.

    How do you come back from that? And can it really be done through the courts alone? Because right now, it’s all being held up by temporary restraining orders. And as you’ve said, that doesn’t provide clarity. Eventually, these cases are going to have to go up to the Supreme Court—where, incidentally, four or five justices are Harvard alums. Whatever else they believe, they might have some interest in preserving these institutions.

    How do you see the resistance evolving over the next few months?

    BC: I’d be disingenuous if I told you I know exactly how this is going to play out.

    AU: Best guess.

    BC: I think the strategy for the sector is to try to win where it can in the courts, and hope the administration abides by those rulings—which, honestly, is a real concern at this point.

    And then also to behave like a school of fish: move together, so it becomes difficult to single out and take down any one institution.

    The hope is that they can wait the president out—that the administration will shift its focus to something else, burn through its energy on attacks, and that most of the sector will remain intact enough to keep operating.

    And then, when that moment comes, institutions can manage the fallout: the indirect consequences like how states deal with a recession if healthcare or food assistance burdens shift onto them, or the winding down of research operations as the pool of available grant funding shrinks.

    I think the approach is: keep your head down, don’t explicitly cave, and hope the administration moves on. It’s probably the best available strategy right now.

    But I don’t know if it will work. If the administration manages to keep its attention fixed on higher education and maintains this pace of attacks and cuts, then it’s going to be very difficult for large parts of the sector to emerge unscathed.

    AU: You mentioned at the beginning of the interview an executive order related to accreditation. We haven’t talked about that yet, and I think some people see that as the sleeper issue—not necessarily for the big, wealthy private institutions, but for the vast majority of colleges and universities.

    Changes to the U.S. accreditation system could have huge implications. What’s been happening on that front so far? What’s actually in that executive order, and what could these changes mean for institutional autonomy and academic freedom?

    BC: Most of the executive orders from this administration, it’s not exactly clear what it does. It directs the Secretary of Education—who, by the way, has also been tasked with dismantling the Department of Education, so there’s that contradiction to hold in your mind.

    AU: But she’s still the Secretary. I saw her today.

    BC: Yes, she’s still there.

    So, this order directs her to collaborate with new accreditors and to open up competition in accreditation. The stated goal is to “foster innovation” and “rein in the accreditation cartel”—that’s the language they use. They frame current accreditors as promoters of Marxist, DEI, anti-Semitic, or otherwise ideologically objectionable agendas. It’s a jumble of terms, but it signals their intent.

    There are really two key elements here. First, increasing competition among accreditors. That means recognizing accreditors that wouldn’t have been approved under a Democratic administration—and maybe not even under many Republican ones. These would be organizations willing to give the stamp of approval to short-term or for-profit programs that don’t meet U.S. or international best practices for educational quality. If I were being snarky, I’d call them scammer programs.

    Second, they could use accreditation as a way to impose standards that align with the president’s political agenda. For example, they might require changes to how campuses regulate student conduct, admissions policies, or even faculty hiring practices. They could try to use accreditation to reach into curriculum—mandating, say, a general education requirement focused on Western Civilization or other ideologically favored content.

    Accreditation is the clearest vehicle they have to influence what’s taught and how institutions operate. But these kinds of changes take time and require more methodical planning—something this administration has been less consistent about, as we’ve discussed.

    So, we’ll see what happens. But it’s definitely something to keep an eye on over the next couple of years. If universities are already weakened by all the other pressures—funding cuts, legal battles, political attacks—they may be less able to resist a fundamental restructuring of the accreditation system.

    AU: The sector’s had a lot thrown at it over the last four months. But looking ahead—have we seen the end of all this sabotage innovation, so to speak? Is there more coming? We talked about Project 2025 a little earlier. Is there anything in there that hasn’t been used against the sector yet? What should we be even more worried about?

    BC: I’m not sure there’s any one Project 2025 policy I’d point to and say, “watch out for that specifically.” But a couple of things are worth keeping an eye on.

    One would be if the administration attempts to block institutions—or even groups of institutions, or the entire country—from accessing federal student financial aid. That’s Title IV under the Higher Education Act. If they were to go after Title IV the same way they’ve unilaterally blocked access to research grants or are now targeting international students, that would be hugely disruptive. It’s a big, coercive lever. They could do a lot of damage with it.

    The other thing to watch is the relationship between federal and state policy. We’re already seeing red states passing legislation that mirrors or reinforces the Trump administration’s higher ed agenda. Utah, for example, just passed a bill where institutions face a big cut to their appropriations—unless they agree to evaluate and cut programs the state deems nonessential.

    And even individual boards of governors, particularly in Republican-dominated states, are taking it upon themselves to implement Trump-aligned policies. I think we might be seeing that at the University of North Carolina, for instance, where no one outside of the health sciences has received tenure in the past year. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, but it certainly looks like the board is using its technical authority to enact the administration’s broader political agenda. So those are the kinds of developments to watch.

    AU: Brendan, best of luck—and thanks for joining us.

    BC: Thanks very much, Alex. Always a pleasure to be here.

    AU: That just leaves me to thank our excellent producers—Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek—and you, our viewers, listeners, and readers, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s podcast, or suggestions for future episodes, don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected]. Run—don’t walk—to our YouTube page and subscribe. That way, you’ll never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education Podcast. Join us next week for what will be our final episode before the summer break. Our special guest? Me. Tiffany will be turning the tables and peppering me with questions about higher education in Canada and internationally during the first half of 2025. I’ll do my best to make it all sound coherent. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.

    This episode is sponsored by KnowMeQ. ArchieCPL is the first AI-enabled tool that massively streamlines credit for prior learning evaluation. Toronto based KnowMeQ makes ethical AI tools that boost and bottom line, achieving new efficiencies in higher ed and workforce upskilling. 

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  • Indiana governor sued by state ACLU over university board control

    Indiana governor sued by state ACLU over university board control

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    Dive Brief:

    • The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is suing the state’s governor, Mike Braun, over a new law giving him full control over the selection of Indiana University’s trustee board.
    • Last month, Republican lawmakers added several last-minute changes to Indiana’s budget bill that expanded the state’s control over its public colleges. Braun signed the budget into law Tuesday.
    • One provision empowers the governor to appoint all nine members of Indiana University’s board, eliminating the institution’s longstanding tradition of alumni trustee elections. That change illegally targets Indiana University and violates the state’s constitution, ACLU of Indiana’s lawsuit argues.

    Dive Insight:

    Indiana University has held alumni trustee elections since 1891, with the process codified into state law. Board members oversee everything from admissions standards to presidential appointments to faculty promotions and tenure. 

    Prior to the change in law this month, three trustees on the university’s nine-person were elected by alumni. The governor appointed the rest.

    ACLU of Indiana is suing Braun on behalf of a candidate who was vying for a board position this summer, Justin Vasel.

    “This challenge addresses a law that strikes at the heart of democratic governance at Indiana’s flagship university,” Vasel said in a statement Wednesday. “This unconstitutional legislation threatens IU’s 134-year-old tradition of alumni representation while an election for those very positions is already underway.”

    Before the change in law, the university’s over 790,000 graduates were eligible to cast a ballot, according to the university’s alumni association, making the voter pool larger than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont or Alaska.

    Six members of the university’s alumni association had announced their candidacy for trustee, and the month-long election was set to begin in June. Had it gone on as scheduled, the winner would have joined the board July 1.

    Now, Braun has the power to appoint who he wishes, so long as five trustees are university alumni and five are Indiana residents. The governor also received the power to remove any previously elected members at his discretion. 

    Braun defended the change during an April 30 press conference, citing low alumni voter turnout in the trustee elections, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

    “It wasn’t representative. It enabled a clique of a few people to actually determine three board members. And I don’t think that is real representation,” the governor told reporters.

    The university’s next trustee meeting is set to take place June 12.

    The lawsuit castigated lawmakers for not following the normal legislative process when approving the change, instead relying on last-minute amendments.

    “No hearings were held concerning the proposal,” it said. “Instead the change was inserted at the eleventh hour deep within a lengthy budget bill that otherwise would have nothing to do with the election of members of the boards of trustees of Indiana’s higher education institutions.”

    Vasel and the ACLU of Indiana also questioned the constitutionality of the budget’s targeting of Indiana University’s board selection.

    The process for appointing trustees varies among the state’s other public universities. But the alumni of each institution have the ability to vote on or nominate graduates to the board, the lawsuit said. The change Braun signed into law takes that ability away from Indiana University alone.

    “Every other four-year public university in the state has a process for allowing alumni to select at least some members of the board of trustees, and there is no justification for denying that ability to the alumni of IU,” Ken Falk, legal director of ACLU of Indiana, said in a Tuesday statement.

    Indiana Republicans, who control both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s mansion, have attempted to control other aspects of Indiana University.

    Earlier this year, the state comptroller and two lawmakers joined an event where an advocacy group questioned if the university was illegally routing state funds to the Kinsey Institute, a sexuality and gender research center housed on its Bloomington campus.

    Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith joined the opposition of the institute and said he and Braun are committed to ensuring Indiana University “is not using taxpayer dollars to fund something that is rooted in this wickedness,” according to WFYI.

    Beckwith also threatened the university and its editorially independent student newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student, over the publication’s coverage of President Donald Trump. 

    The lieutenant governor derided a November cover story that showcased quotes critical of the president made by former Trump officials, though Beckwith misattributed the quotes as from the paper’s staff. He went on to call the story “WOKE propaganda at its finest.”

    “This type of elitist leftist propaganda needs to stop or we will be happy to stop it for them,” Beckwith said in a social media post.

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  • Bank holiday reading: Government control of US universities

    Bank holiday reading: Government control of US universities

    • Gill Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge.

    In early March 2025, the Trump administration sent letters to 60 US universities warning them that they faced ‘potential enforcement actions’ for what it described as ‘failure to protect Jewish students on campus’ during the widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campuses during the last year. This Government direction not only permitted terms to be set on which continuing funding was to be conditional for a specific higher education provider, but also allowed those terms to encroach on the academic freedom of an institution to choose what to teach and how. This ‘Project 2025’  also allowed the President to require a significant proportion of funding to go to the provision of ‘business’ courses. 

    There were wider consequences of these Government directions. The resulting limitation of funding for research quickly prompted hints of restricted publication of results and encouraged US academics to seek employment in Canada, the UK and Europe.

    Though it was joined in its active resistance by Yale and Princeton, Harvard became a test case. It objected to the Government demand that it immediately agree:

    to implement the Trump administration’s demands to overhaul the University’s governance and leadership, academic programs, admissions system, hiring process, and discipline system—with the promise of more demands to come

     and thus ‘overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the University to punishing disfavored speech’. [1] The US Education Department speedily responded, announcing on 14 April that it was freezing about $2.3bn of Harvard’s funding. On 15 April, Trump threatened to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status,

    US universities are divided into the ‘private’ and ‘public’ on the basis of their funding and therefore differ in the extent to which they are at risk of loss of funding in attacks on their academic freedom. The ‘private’ Ivy League universities enjoy substantial endowments, making them less dependent on their supplementary Government funding than their ‘public’ counterparts.

    The Office for Students funds and regulates higher education in England. MEDR, the Welsh Commission for Tertiary Education and Research, funds and regulates higher education in Wales, taking these responsibilities over from the former Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. The counterpart body for Scotland is the Scottish Funding Council. This depends on the Scottish Government for the funding it disburses to providers.

    English higher education providers enjoy an institutional autonomy, strengthened by the fact that Government funding for English higher education was greatly reduced with the progressive ending of a ‘block grant’ under the Higher Education Act of 2004 and the raising of tuition fees in 2012. That was replaced by much higher student tuition fees under the Higher Education and Research Act of 2017.

    Under the same legislation the autonomy of higher education providers in England is protected, with express reference to their right to design their own courses, choose their students and appoint their academic staff.  This extends to higher education at tertiary education levels 4 and 5 as well as to ‘degree-level’ 6 and postgraduate degrees at levels 7 and 8.

    This legislative permission does not allow a free-for-all. ‘University’ is a ‘sensitive term’ in English law, as are ‘higher’ and ‘accreditation’ when used of education. New providers may grant their own degrees and call themselves ‘universities’ only if they have powers to do so. In the case of new providers that requires Registration by the Office for Students (OfS). The OfS is subject only to ‘guidance on strategic priorities from the Department for Education’, though its activity is open to expressions of Parliamentary concern. For example, on 2 April 2025, the House of Commons debated ‘the impact of university finances on jobs in higher education’. It was suggested that ‘the funding model, which depends on international students paying higher fees, has harmed universities since Brexit’, but it was recognised that only public funding and such broad policy preferences lay with the Government.

    The accreditation of qualifications in the UK is the responsibility of a number of agencies, some of which are professional and some are public bodies. In the USA ‘relying on private, independent accrediting agencies has been the most important tool for preventing the centralized political control of higher education in the United States’.  The authority of the Trump directive over these seemed clear at first.

    What protects the institutional autonomy of US Universities? The nearest US counterpart to the Office for Students is the Higher Learning Commission, an independent agency founded in 1895. It accredits institutions granting degrees. The University of Michigan, for example seeks renewal of its accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission every ten years. Its ‘evaluations’ are conducted by reviewers from other institutions not the HLC itself.

    The award of ‘University title’ and degree-awarding powers is not restricted in the US as it is in England.  For example they may derive from a Charter establishing the institution. Its own Charter granted the Trustees of Columbia University degree-awarding powers and powers to create such:

    ordinances and by-laws which to them shall seem expedient for carrying into effect the designs of their institution; Provided always, That such ordinances or by-laws shall not make the religious tenets of any person a condition of admission to any privilege or office in the said college, nor be inconsistent with the constitution and laws of this state, nor with the constitution and laws of the United States.

    Private US universities

    The privately funded Ivy League Universities were set up with a degree of constitutional independence. Each had a State-based beginning. Harvard was established as a College by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 with funding of £400. Its stated purpose was to ensure that the Puritans should be provided with educated ministers, by advancing ‘learning’ to meet the needs of ‘posterity’ and to avoid leaving churches with ‘an illiterate ministry’. Princeton, founded in 1746 by the Presbyterian Synod as the College of New Jersey, had its name changed to Princeton University in 1896. Its present charter dates from 1748. It too has Trustees.  In an age when it could be expected that those arriving from England would be practising members of the Church of England, it was insistent about religious freedom:

    Petitioners have also expressed their earnest Desire that those of every Religious Denomination may have free and Equal Liberty and Advantage in the Said College any different Sentiments in Religion notwithstanding.

    Columbia, too, began as a College. It was granted a Royal Charter in 1754, making its governors a ‘body corporate’. In 1912, the corporate name was changed to ‘Columbia University’. A series of amendments followed,  with an Act of the people of the State of New York in 1810 clarifying the position. Its Trustees were to form ‘a body politic and corporate’ ‘in the City of New York’, with ‘continual succession for ever’ and a common seal. The powers of its Trustees as governors were set out in detail, separating them decisively from the ‘professors’ and ‘tutors ‘. The Trustees were to:

    have full power and authority to direct and prescribe the course of study, and the discipline to be observed in the said college, and also to select by ballot or otherwise, a president of the said college, who shall hold his office during good behavior,

    but no ‘professor, tutor, or other assistant officer’ was to be a Trustee.   There was to be an executive body, consisting of eleven of the Trustees, constituting ‘a quorum for the despatch of all [routine] business’.  

    Its Statutes include a ‘Code of Academic Freedom and Tenure’:

    Academic freedom implies that all officers of instruction are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subjects; that they are entitled to freedom in research and in the publication of its results; and that they may not be penalized by the University for expressions of opinion or associations in their private or civic capacity; but they should bear in mind the special obligations arising from their position in the academic community.

    In March 2025, seeking to force the University of Columbia to comply with his instructions, the President of the USA withdrew $400m of federal funding.  Nine specific ’reforms’ had been called for in this case, including a change of Departmental Head and modifications to its provision of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. A Senior Vice-Provost was to review the educational programmes.

    The University published a statement of its own view that certain ‘protests in academic buildings, and other places necessary for the conduct of University activities, are generally not acceptable under the Rules of University Conduct’ because of the likelihood of disrupting academic activities’.  Yet Columbia acceded to the Trump administration’s demands, including an agreement to expand ‘intellectual diversity’ as ‘defined by the Trump administration’.

    Princeton spoke of resistance when the ‘Trump administration suspended dozens of grants to the University from several agencies, including the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Department of Defense’, pending ‘an investigation into antisemitism on campus’. Yale too declared its resistance in a letter signed by 900 of its Faculty, protesting at ‘unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance’. On March 31, Cornell published an op-ed by its President in the New York Times, describing the point which had been made in the interests of freedom of speech when the University held a Panel conversation exploring ‘pathways to peace’ for Israel and Palestine.

    On 24 March, the American Association of University Professors and Democracy Forward explained the decision to litigate. On 11 April 202,5 Harvard began its own litigation about ‘the Trump administration’s unlawful and unprecedented misuse of federal funding and civil rights enforcement authority to undermine academic freedom and free speech on a university campus’. It complained that on March 31 ‘an investigation of Harvard University’ had been announced and on April 3 this had been followed by an order to ‘adopt a list of vague yet sweeping programmatic and structural changes to university management, operations, and curriculum’ as a condition of the University continuing to be the ‘recipient’ of $9 billion ‘federal taxpayer dollars’.

    Harvard argued that the Government had failed to take the required preliminary steps under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. These requirements, it pointed out, existed because ‘Congress recognized that allowing federal agencies to hold funding hostage, or to cancel it cavalierly, would give them dangerously broad power in a system in which institutions depend so heavily upon federal funding’.  It pointed out that the Trump administration had:

    frozen over $1 billion in funding for Cornell University and $790 million for Northwestern University, with an even more shocking lack of process, not even purporting to issue communications providing notice under Title VI or any other legal authority.

    Public US universities

    US public universities are subject to national Government control as recipients of Government funding. State legislation about them is also significant. The University of North Carolina was established by legislation in 1789, becoming America’s first public university. Its many schools and offshoots were brought together by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1972.  The Constitution of the State of Texas states that its legislature shall ‘establish, organise and provide for the maintenance, support, and direction of a University of the first class’ with a new ‘undergraduate curriculum’ and also ‘establish a more demanding standard for leadership of academic departments and research centres’. As a public research university, the University of Texas at Austin (founded 1883) now describes itself as ‘the flagship institution of the University of Texas System’.

    Conclusion

    A wise US university makes provision to respond to both Government and State supervision. Michigan has a Vice President for Government Relations, acting ‘as the university’s bridge between local, state, and federal governments’. Its ‘State Relations team is committed to building and nurturing strong relationships with state government officials and agencies’, seeking ‘to secure funding, influence policy, and represent the university’s interests in state-level discussions.  It also has a Federal Relations team ‘dedicated to fostering and maintaining collaborative relationships between the university and federal government entities including the U.S. Congress’. It too has been subject to Donald Trump’s demands and has stopped the successful diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program it has run since 2016,  and closed the office it had set up to deal with it.

    It remains to be seen how far the present President of the USA will succeed in enlarging Government control of the nation’s institutions of higher education by linking direction of academic activity with their funding. Former President Barack Obama did not hesitate to express his support for Harvard, calling Trump’s action ‘unlawful and ham-handed‘.

    [1] Harvard Faculty Chapter, and American Association of University Professors v. United States Department of Justice, filed 11 April, 2025.

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  • Congress Eying More Control Over Colleges

    Congress Eying More Control Over Colleges

    American voters want to see an overhaul in higher education and Republicans are taking advantage of it. Over the course of its first 75 days, the 119th Congress introduced more than 30 pieces of legislation concerning higher education—more than half of which came from members of the GOP.

    Historically, conservative lawmakers have taken a laissez-faire approach to governing colleges and universities. But at a time when students and families are demanding greater accountability and a solution to the debt crisis, Republicans—who hold majority in both the House and the Senate—are laying the legislative groundwork to increase federal control over colleges.

    But while the bills do in some ways levy penalties against institutions, lawmakers are also aiming to advance key Trump agenda items, an Inside Higher Ed analysis tracking proposed legislation shows. For example, they’ve introduced bills to crack down on immigration and foreign influence by threatening student visas and restricting international donations; to hamper flexibility for borrowers by capping student loan amounts; and to suppress “liberal ideologies,” by establishing penalties for pro-Palestinian protests. Republicans are also escalating their ongoing attacks on wealthy colleges with proposals to significantly increase the tax on university endowments.

    Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Committee on Education and Workforce, has applauded Trump’s “enormous strides” and reinforced that these efforts will be a priority. 

    “Under President Trump, common sense is returning to America, and House Republicans are committed to enacting his bold vision for the country,” he said in a statement after the President’s March 4 joint address. “I will work in lockstep with this administration to protect students, workers, and job creators to ensure every American has a chance to thrive.”

    Meanwhile, Democrats have rallied in defiance, introducing many bills that promote the exact opposite of what Republicans are trying to achieve. For example, the Republican bill that would ban transgender women from participating in female sports has a direct Democrat counterpart that would prohibit discrimination in athletics based on gender identity.  

    And all of that doesn’t even take into account the possibility that Republicans could revive parts of the College Cost Reduction Act—a comprehensive piece of legislation introduced last Congress to overhaul higher education. Although the bill itself has yet to be introduced, many of its provisions—such as requiring colleges to pay back a portion of students’ unpaid loans—could be part of the forthcoming reconciliation bill, a top priority for Congressional Republicans this spring that could mean billions in cuts to higher education. (Reconciliation is a budgetary tool which can be used once a year to quickly advance high-priority—and often controversial—pieces of legislation.)  

    Combined, the proposed legislation and potential for sweeping changes via reconciliation could lead to an unprecedented amount of federal focus on higher ed that college and university advocates say could heavily discourage international enrollment, indirectly increase the cost of attendance and cause a chilling effect on campus free speech.

    “Higher education has moved to the forefront of the minds of our policy makers,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “It has become a point of contention, especially with the increased oversight over institutions themselves by the current administration.”

    But regardless of which party’s behind a bill, Guillory said he’s focused on educating lawmakers on how each piece of legislation could also have unintended consequences for institutions and the students they serve.

    “Oftentimes what we see with Republicans and Democrats is they have good intentions behind what they’re trying to do, it’s just the way that they go about doing it,” he said. “When we begin to have more detailed conversations. Then [lawmakers] are like, ‘Oh, well no, we didn’t think about that. We didn’t realize this would happen. So it’s just a matter of us still continuing to do our job in advocating and educating.”

    Given the emphasis on higher education in this session of Congress and the stakes for colleges, Inside Higher Ed is tracking higher-ed related bills. The searchable database, available here, currently includes 31 bills introduced since January, and we’ll update it regularly. Below you can find a breakdown of the legislation proposed so far.

    Legislating at the federal level is complicated, so below you can find more information about how a bill becomes a law in 2025 as well as more details about the legislation raising concerns for institutions.

    How a Bill Becomes Law

    Few of the introduced bills will ever become law, based on Congress’s recent track record. And while the process is similar to what Schoolhouse Rock! described in the 1970s, partisan divides over policy have led to much gridlock on Capitol Hill.

    A cartoon bill with a graduation hat sits on the stairs of the U.S. Capitol Building.

    An Inside Higher Ed cartoon showing a bill on the steps of Congress.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed 
    dkfielding/iStock/Getty Images

    During the 118th Congress—which ran from 2023 to 2025 with a Republican-controlled House and Democrat-controlled Senate—more than 90 percent of measures introduced died in committee and only about 3 percent became law, according to GovTrack.US. Even during the 115th Congress, the last time the Republicans held a trifecta, 85 percent of bills got stuck in committee and only 8 percent became law.

    Many pieces of legislation introduced are considered nothing more than messaging bills by which a party or lawmaker signals their priorities. For example, it’s highly unlikely the Democrats will advance either the Closing the College Hunger Gap Act or the Affordable College Textbook Act, but they demonstrate a focus on meeting students’ most basic needs.

    But if the legislation comes from Republicans on the House Committee on Education and Workforce and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, it might be more likely to gain traction.

    The chairs of those committees hold a lot of power over whether a bill will move forward. They control the schedule for public hearings and mark up sessions—where a bill is debated, amended and then voted on—so if a bill isn’t a priority for the chairs,  it’s dead in the water.

    But once again, having support and investment from an education committee member is helpful here. If they can make a case for the bill to receive time on the floor, it will face debate, amendments and a final vote. Bills have to pass both chambers and undergo negotiations to settle legislative differences before they go to the White House to become law. And that doesn’t include potential road bumps like the Senate filibuster.

    Long story short, it’s a tedious process that can take months or even years. That’s why having support from Republicans on the education-focused committees—especially committee chairs—is critical to gaining momentum this year.

    As Guillory said, “There are other members of Congress that are introducing legislation in the higher education space, but it doesn’t mean that those bills will necessarily have legs and actually be able to move through regular order.”

    Bills Higher Ed Is Watching

    Much of lawmakers’ attention right now is on reconciliation as they work to cut billions in dollars from the federal budget in order to pay for tax cuts and Trump’s other priorities. But outside of that just a handful of bills have received a hearing and/or a markup session so far. One of the most notable and concerning to higher ed advocates is the DETERRENT Act.

    Scheduled for a vote on the House floor next week, this bill would require colleges to submit much more information about the foreign gifts and contracts that they receive. Republicans have claimed for years that colleges aren’t sufficiently complying with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires them to disclose twice a year all foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more.

    The legislation, which supporters say would discourage foreign influence in higher education, would lower the threshold to $50,000. For gifts and contracts from countries of concern—China, Russia, Iran and North Korea—colleges would have to report gifts and contracts of any amount. Institutions that fail to comply could lose access to federal student aid.

    The House passed a nearly identical bill last Congress, but it died in the then-Democrat controlled Senate. House Republicans argued that as tensions with communist countries like China rise, universities have not taken their reporting obligations and vetting processes for international students seriously and in doing so are risking national security by granting foreign governments access to American research. 

    But institutional advocates say this bill goes well beyond what Section 117 of the Higher Education Act ever intended, making an already time consuming and confusing process more difficult.

    Sarah Spreitzer, ACE’s chief of staff for government relations, said that these added steps and the processing workload that will come with it for the shrinking Education Department could lead to major delays in launching countless research collaborations and study abroad programs

    In addition to the DETERRENT Act, Guillory said ACE is also paying attention to any measures focused on accountability, affordability and transparency of institutional data, many of which represent threads of last year’s College Cost Reduction Act (CCRA).

    For example, the Graduate Opportunity and Affordable Loans Act would put a cap on the amount of loans available to graduate students and terminate their access to PLUS loans. The Endowment Tax Fairness Act would increase the amount of excise tax private institutions pay each year. And the Ensuring Distance Education Act would reverse some components of the Education Department’s 90-10 rule.

    “In a lot of ways, CCRA is still alive, even though it has not been reintroduced this Congress,” Guillory said.

    Lastly, he noted that many of the bills echo the Trump administration’s focus on more culture war facing topics like campus protests and immigration. The Laken Riley Act, which has already been passed, could impact visa access for international students from countries with a large number of undocumented immigrants. And several bills focused on antisemitism are likely to be discussed in the HELP Committee’s first education-specific hearing, Guillory said.

    In general, he noted, a lot of the agenda is left to be determined. “I think it’s a matter of what can we accomplish in reconciliation first? Then, after that, what would we have to move through regular order?”

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  • Outsourcing Managed IT Services for Higher Ed: Navigating Complexity, Cost, and Control Concerns

    Outsourcing Managed IT Services for Higher Ed: Navigating Complexity, Cost, and Control Concerns

    College administrators know that technology can be a powerful tool for improving operations and boosting student success. However, given the rapid pace of technological change and the shrinking pool of qualified IT professionals, getting a real return on IT investments can be a major challenge.

    One way to deal with these challenges is to outsource IT management and operations, and explore managed IT services for higher education.

    While change can seem daunting, IT outsourcing can significantly improve overall IT management and strategic focus while mitigating risk and reducing cost. It’s about more than just maintaining IT infrastructure and operations –– it’s about using technology strategically to create better student experiences and drive institutional success.

    One of the primary concerns I hear from administrators is the perceived complexity of moving to an outsourced IT model. Such a move impacts people, processes, and technology – so if not managed thoughtfully, unintended consequences could occur.

    However, a well-structured transition plan significantly simplifies the process and minimizes risk to business operations during the transition. At Collegis, we employ a phased approach, starting with a thorough assessment of an institution’s current IT ecosystem, including resources, processes, financials, systems, infrastructure, projects, operations, etc. This assessment forms the foundation of a customized transition plan designed around the institution’s unique needs, outlining each step – from stabilization and standardization to technology optimization and, finally, transformation.

    A key element of our approach is the stabilization phase, where we address immediate pain points and ensure that systems are secure and able to support day-to-day operations with no disruptions. This initial phase creates the foundation from which to build on and, ultimately, a level of confidence that sets the stage for longer-term improvements.

    By breaking the transition into manageable phases and providing clear communication throughout the process, we alleviate much of the anxiety associated with change. Instead of a big “lift and shift,” the multi-year transition plan means current systems and processes continue to be supported. Administrators often express relief once they understand our structured approach and how it addresses their specific needs.

    For example, our managed IT services solution for Saint Francis University involved stabilizing the core technology and infrastructure, standardizing expectations through strong IT governance (including installing a virtual CIO), and optimizing business processes and infrastructure for increased efficiency. This identified $200,000 in budgetary waste that was able to be reallocated toward technology upgrades.

    Cost is, of course, a major factor in any IT outsourcing decision. Administrators are understandably concerned about the financial implications of outsourcing.

    Studies show that many higher education institutions spend more than 75% of their IT budgets on basic support and technology maintenance. This is partially due to the technology debt that accrues after years of neglect and a lack of the precise skill sets needed to address deficiencies and create more efficient and effective operations. Just think of the impact technology could make if schools could reduce this amount by 25%+ and reallocate these dollars to improving student experiences or driving institutional cost savings.

    Outsourcing can free up these valuable financial resources, enabling institutions to focus on projects that drive growth and enhance the student experience. Collegis partners typically experience:

    • Predictable budgeting: We offer all standard IT management services through a clear and transparent fixed fee mutually determined for the life of the partnership so institutions know exactly what they spend for IT management every year. There are no surprises.
    • Access to top IT talent: While Collegis goes out of its way to assess existing staff and rebadge those who have the needed skill sets and cultural fit, we also bring a team of more than 185 IT professionals to our partnerships, ensuring schools have access to the right skillsets at the right time.
    • Better contract negotiations: Schools benefit from Collegis’s expertise in IT contract negotiations and cross-institutional expertise during all technology contract negotiations. We have long-term relationships with third-party vendors and can negotiate from a position of strength because we support dozens of similar institutions.
    • Lower cybersecurity costs: We handle network, application, and data security, reducing a school’s need for additional resources or security solutions. Our partnerships have also helped many schools successfully stabilize or even reduce their cybersecurity insurance premiums.
    • Elimination of consulting fees: Our model also eliminates the need for expensive consultants to fill staffing gaps or deliver strategic projects.

    Most schools find that an IT managed services partnership with Collegis either saves them money or is cost-neutral. Our economies of scale enable us to provide expert services at a lower cost than most institutions could achieve in-house. Plus, we provide clear service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure accountability.

    Beyond cost savings, outsourcing can also improve ROI by ensuring technology investments deliver their intended value. By leveraging the expertise of a dedicated IT partner, institutions can optimize their systems and ensure they are getting the most out of their technology investments.

    Some administrators worry about losing control when they outsource IT. They’re concerned about relinquishing oversight of critical systems and data. However, a well-designed outsourcing agreement includes clear governance structures and communication channels, ensuring they retain control.

    One way we’ve addressed this concern is by establishing a steering committee for IT governance that includes representatives from the institution’s leadership and fosters collaboration and shared decision-making.

    Data security is paramount, and we understand the sensitivity of institutional data. We are a SOC 2-compliant organization that undergoes regular external audits to ensure the security and integrity of the data we manage.

    Our dedicated information security officers (CISOs) work closely with each institution to implement best practices and address any security concerns. We also proactively monitor systems for potential threats, leveraging our experience working with multiple institutions to identify and mitigate risks before they escalate.

    Outsourcing IT management in higher education can be a game-changer for institutions looking to navigate the complexities of the evolving IT landscape. Working with a partner that focuses on open communication, a phased approach to transitioning, a stronger cybersecurity posture, and leveraging your technology’s true potential can eliminate concerns about complexity, cost, and control while enabling schools to achieve strategic goals.

    Finally, when considering IT outsourcing, institutions cannot underestimate the importance and value of cultural fit. Finding a partner who shares your values and can be trusted to run a critical function for your institution is just as important as any of the other considerations I’ve highlighted above.

    — Kim Fahey, CEO Collegis Education

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  • Why higher education must take control of AI training

    Why higher education must take control of AI training

    In the rush to adopt artificial intelligence, many institutions are making a critical mistake: assuming that off-the-shelf AI solutions will seamlessly integrate into their unique academic environments. This oversight undermines the very essence of what makes each institution distinct and valuable.

    Higher education stands at a unique crossroads. Our institutions possess three powerful advantages that make us ideally suited to shape AI implementation:

    • Deep expertise in learning science and pedagogy,
    • A fundamental commitment to inclusion and accessibility, and
    • Vast repositories of specialized knowledge across disciplines.

    Consider this: Every institution has its own distinctive DNA—unique terminology, specific policies, particular processes and individualized pathways for student success. A campus chat bot trained on generic data can’t possibly understand that your first-year experience program is called Launch Pad or that your student success center is actually The Hub. These aren’t just semantic differences; they reflect your institution’s culture, values and approach to education.

    The stakes are high in an era of contracting budgets, unpredictable enrollment patterns, information overload, and increasing student needs. We cannot afford to misallocate our most valuable resource: human talent.

    The Real Power of Properly Trained AI

    When AI is trained with your institution’s specific context, it becomes more than a cost-cutting tool. It becomes a force multiplier that:

    • Handles routine queries with institutional accuracy,
    • Identifies at-risk students before they struggle,
    • Directs resources where they’re needed most, and
    • Frees staff to focus on meaningful student interactions

    AI transforms our approach from broadcasting general information to providing targeted support. Imagine AI that recognizes your unique early alert indicators, understands your specific financial aid processes, knows your specific mental health resources and protocols, and speaks in your institution’s voice and values.

    Relying on vendor-trained AI means that you are missing crucial institutional context, perpetuating generic solutions and losing opportunities for personalized support or potentially misguiding students with incorrect information.

    Higher education institutions must take an active role in training their AI systems. Remember: Every time you allow an untrained or generic AI to interact with your students, you’re missing an opportunity to provide the personalized, institution-specific support that sets your school apart.

    Breaking It Down

    A generic AI is like a new employee who has read every manual but doesn’t understand your institution’s unique culture, language or processes—it has broad knowledge but lacks specific context. Untrained AI systems, while powerful in general applications, are essentially operating on publicly available information without the benefit of the institutional expertise, proprietary processes or specific student success patterns that make your organization unique.

    Fear of Failure

    The fear of AI implementation manifests in various ways across higher education, often masquerading as practical concerns while hiding deeper anxieties. Like an untrained AI system that lacks institutional context and produces generic responses, an unprepared organization can generate resistance that undermines successful AI adoption.

    • Process guardians: These experienced professionals, while openly complaining about overwhelming workloads, harbor deeper concerns. They worry that AI might not just streamline their processes but potentially replace their expertise. Their resistance often appears as skepticism about AI’s accuracy or reliability—a valid concern that actually points to the need for proper AI training rather than AI avoidance.
    • Generational tensions: Some view AI adoption through a generational lens, suggesting that retirement is the solution to resistance. This perspective misses a crucial point: Seasoned professionals possess valuable institutional knowledge that should be captured and used to train AI systems, not lost to retirement. Their experience isn’t an obstacle; it’s an asset for effective AI implementation.
    • Faculty concerns: In academia, faculty members wield significant influence in approval processes. Their hesitation often stems from legitimate concerns about academic integrity and the quality of education. However, this anxiety about reopening settled decisions can be addressed through proper training and demonstration of how AI can enhance, rather than diminish, academic rigor.

    The Bottom Line

    In higher education, we don’t just need AI—we need AI that understands our individual institutional contexts, speaks our unique language and supports our specific student success goals. This level of customization only comes through intentional, institution-specific training.

    Our mission isn’t just to adopt AI; it’s to shape it into a tool that authentically represents and serves our individual institutions and students. The time and resources invested in proper AI training today will pay dividends in more effective, personalized student support tomorrow.

    The choice is clear: Either train AI to truly understand and represent your institution, or watch as generic solutions fail to meet your unique needs and challenges. In an era where personal attention matters more than ever, can we afford to leave this critical tool untrained?

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