Tag: Events

Beware Illusions of Campus Normalcy This Spring (opinion)

It’s nearing the end of the academic year at Harvard University, where I teach in the Graduate School of Education. Students are preparing for final exams and finishing up capstone projects. Awards ceremonies are being held and celebrations, formal and informal, have begun. The weather has finally warmed up in Cambridge, and the outdoor tables at restaurants and coffee shops are crowded. The women’s tennis team clinched the Ivy League title.

It all feels normal. Yet it all feels discordant, like a scene in a M. Night Shyamalan movie that infuses the quotidian with a barely detectable feeling of dread.

This discordance is of course especially powerful at Harvard, the current epicenter of a ferocious and lawless attack on higher education that might make Viktor Orbán blush. But it is not unique to Harvard. At colleges and universities across the country, classes continue, clubs meet and Frisbees are being tossed even as the government sows fear and confusion by revoking, then restoring, then warning that it might again revoke the visa statuses of more than 1,800 international students.

Lawyers continue to do what lawyers do, while large firms are essentially signing on to be instruments of the government, individuals are being targeted because the president of the United States holds a grudge, bigly, and court orders are being ignored.

Doctors continue to treat patients while billions of dollars of funding for medical research and experimental trials are being withheld and the secretary of Health and Human Services is declaring that autism is preventable and the measles vaccine is maybe, sort of OK.

We get in our cars or on our bicycles and go off to work while the government is pressing before the courts an argument that would allow it to send anyone, citizen or noncitizen, to a foreign prison without cause or legal recourse.

When many of us think about authoritarian takeovers, we imagine military coups and declarations of martial law. But the truth is that the most powerful tool of the aspiring authoritarian is not shock, but normalcy. How bad can things be if we can still shop at Costco or take our families out for Italian food? How bad can they be if we can still download Maya Angelou onto our Kindles or watch Jimmy Kimmel Live!? How bad can they be if I can still publish a piece like this one, critical of the federal government?

Look around not only at the campuses, but at the streets and bars and hardware stores in any city or town in America and it appears to be the same as it was last year and the year before. The NBA playoffs have begun and there’s a new film starring Michael B. Jordan. Normal.

Except it is not, in ways of which we are vaguely aware but unable or unwilling to fully credit.

For most people—the ones not scooped off the street by men in masks or ousted from their jobs with the federal government without cause or forced to stop their research because of the loss of National Institutes of Health funding—life feels more or less the way it did when we were a reasonably functional democracy. This is the way it works: Keep 99 percent of the lives of 99 percent of the people undisturbed for as long as possible so that they will remain unaware of or indifferent to what is happening at the margins. By the time they recognize that the edges of normalcy have drawn closer, it will be too late to do anything about it because the guardrails will have been destroyed.

Begin with the least sympathetic targets. Who will shed tears for the fate of Venezuelan gang members (real or imagined)? Does anyone really like Big Law? Government employees are the problem, not the solution. Harvard, with its giant endowment and Ivy League arrogance, is rarely anyone’s idea of an underdog. Why should we concern ourselves with any of this on the way to McDonald’s or Starbucks? I work at Harvard and most of the time I find it difficult to take seriously the reality that the federal government is trying to destroy a private university simply to prove that it can and because its appetite for both control and chaos appears to have no limits.

Be sure to cite rules and regulations that few people care to understand. What is 501(c)(3) status anyway? “Indirect costs” seem sort of like a scam. The “Alien Enemies Act” sounds like something pulled from the latest Marvel movie. Then cloak it all in the guise of causes to which it seems difficult to object—fighting antisemitism, because Donald Trump and the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Proud Boys are the first things that come to mind when one thinks about protecting Jews. Or perhaps national security, given the threat to the republic posed by international students co-authoring op-eds for the campus newspaper.

Above all, lie. Constantly, relentlessly, shamelessly lie. Since most people don’t spend a majority of their time lying about a majority of things, they appear to find it difficult to recognize when other people do. It’s hard to question a time-tested strategy.

The fight against our current level of inertia is painfully difficult because the allure of the normal, the desire to believe that things are just fine, is so powerful. A tank in the street is hard to ignore. A steady eroding of legal and ethical norms just beyond the limits of our daily vision is easy to miss.

Our greatest hope might be the tendency of authoritarians and those without any moral compass to overreach. If they can change life by 1 percent without much resistance, why not five or 10 or 20? If they can, through executive actions, free hundreds of convicted felons and strip away environmental protections, why not impose arbitrary and irrational tariffs? What made the reaction to tariffs different and what has, at least for the moment, slowed their progress is the fact that they tore a hole in the illusion of normalcy. Plummeting retirement accounts and worries about the cost of groceries will disrupt the normal in a way that canceling student visas or defunding Harvard will not. It was a mistake, and they will, out of arrogance and stupidity, make more.

The set of demands sent to Harvard, for instance, which Harvard refused to comply with, resulting in headlines around the globe, was apparently sent in error. You could make that up, but no one would believe you.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether we can afford to wait. Is it sufficient to hope that they will make things abnormal enough for a large enough group of people to provoke resistance, or do we have to do the difficult work of wrenching ourselves, somehow, out of the reassuring comforts of familiar routines? David Brooks, hardly a radical, has called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” to counter the war being waged on our national civic fabric. Do people, organizations and institutions in the United States, so certain for so long about the permanence of its democracy, even have the energy or the will? Can that happen here or is it something that happens in Seoul or Istanbul and is shown on CNN?

Meanwhile, I have laundry to do and a class to teach this week. Maybe I’ll catch something on Netflix. Pretty normal stuff.

Brian Rosenberg is president emeritus of Macalester College, a visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education (Harvard Education Press, 2023).

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April 28, 2025
Colleges, Students Prefer Inclusive Access Models for Books

College affordability is one of the chief concerns of students, families, taxpayers and lawmakers in the U.S., and it extends beyond tuition prices.

Costly course materials can impede student access and success in the classroom. Over half of college students say the high price of course materials has pushed them to enroll in fewer classes or opt out of a specific course, according to a 2023 survey.

A new report from Tyton Partners, published today, finds that affordable-access programs that provide necessary materials can save students money and improve their outcomes. The report pulls data from surveys of students, administrators and faculty, as well as market research on the topic.

The background: Affordable-access programs, also called inclusive-access programs, bill students directly for their textbooks as part of their tuition and fees. Through negotiations among publishers, institutions and campus bookstores, students pay a below-market rate for their course materials, which are often digital.

This model ensures all students start the term with access to the required textbooks and course materials, allowing them to apply financial aid to textbook costs, which removes out-of-pocket expenses at the start of the term. A 2023 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found that over half of respondents have avoided buying or renting a book for class due to costs.

The first federal regulations for affordable-access programs were set in 2015 to help cap course material costs and spur utilization of inclusive access on campuses. In 2024, the Biden administration sought to redefine inclusive access by making models opt-in to provide students with greater autonomy, but the plan was ultimately paused. Most colleges have an opt-out model of affordable-access programs, requiring students to elect to be removed, according to Tyton’s report.

Critics of affordable-access programs argue that an across-the-board rate eliminates students’ ability to employ their own cost-saving methods, such as buying books secondhand or using open educational resources. Students often lose access to digital resources at the end of the term, limiting their ability to reuse or reference them.

Findings from Tyton Partners’ research point to the value of day-one course materials for student success, which can be provided through opt-out inclusive-access models.

The report: Affordable-access programs are tied to lower costs for participating students, according to the report. The average digital list price for course materials per class was $91, but the average price for course materials for students in an inclusive-access program was $58 per class. (A 2023 survey found the average student spent about $285 on course materials in the 2022–23 academic year, or roughly $33 per item.)

Opt-out affordable-access models have also placed downward pricing pressure on the market; the compound annual growth rate of course materials declined from 6.1 percent to 0.3 percent since the 2015 ED regulations.

A student survey by Tyton found that 61 percent of respondents favor affordable-access models compared to buying (13 percent), renting (11 percent) or borrowing (10 percent) course materials.

Another Angle

The Tyton Partners report identifies opt-out affordable access as one intervention that can ensure all students have access to course materials on day one, which is tied to better student outcomes.

Open educational resources, which are not mentioned in the report, are another method of ensuring students have access to digital course materials at the start of the term at no additional cost to the student.

Among students participating in inclusive access, 84 percent said they felt satisfied or neutral about their user experience, according to a survey by the National Association of College Stores. Students who had a positive view of inclusive access cited the convenience of not shopping for materials (80 percent), day-one access (78 percent) and knowing all their course materials are correct (71 percent) as the top benefits.

Among colleges that do offer inclusive access, those with opt-out models see higher student participation than those with opt-in models (96 percent versus 36 percent, respectively). Administrators report that some students, especially first-year and first-generation students, are less likely to engage in opt-in models and may then struggle because they lack the required materials, which researchers argue enables gaps to persist in student outcomes.

Researchers compared two community colleges and found that students who participated in an opt-out equitable-access program had higher course completion and lower withdrawal rates, compared to their peers who opted in. Learners from underrepresented minority backgrounds, including Black and multiracial students, saw greater gains as well.

While a majority of students indicated a preference for inclusive-access models, it’s still paramount that institutions help students fully understand the benefits of participation and offer them seamless opportunities to opt out, according to Tyton’s report.

After adopting inclusive access, institutions were likely to increase offerings and expand the number of courses within the model. A majority of surveyed faculty members (75 percent) said their institution should maintain or increase affordable-access model usage.

Report authors noted a higher administrative burden in an opt-in model, because costs are applied and resources given to each individual student who opts in, rather than simply removing students who opt out. “Since no technology currently automates the opt-in process, most institutions would need to expand their academic affairs, faculty affairs and information technology teams to handle the increased workload under opt-in models,” according to the report.

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April 28, 2025
Higher Ed Wins a SEVIS Battle, Not the Visa War

International students, colleges and advocates caught a break Friday after weeks of confusion and disruptions. After thousands of students had learned their Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) status was revoked, they were relieved to hear that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement was restoring students’ statuses nationwide.

“I was in class when the news broke, and there was a sense of relief,” said Chris. R Glass, a professor at Boston University’s Center for International Higher Education. “But it’s not the kind of relief that things are getting better, just that they’re not getting worse.”

The Trump administration’s reversal was a key win in dozens of lawsuits across the country that argued that eliminating thousands of students’ SEVIS records without notice was unconstitutional. But threats against international students still loom large, experts say. The most pressing question: will this happen again?

In its notice to a federal judge, the administration did not say that it was finished eliminating students’ SEVIS records, just that “ICE will not modify [a] record solely based on the NCIC [National Crime Information Center] finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination,” according to the court filing. And ICE is working a policy framework for terminating SEVIS records.

Reactivating students’ records doesn’t erase questions about the genesis of “this unlawful policy,” said Miriam Feldblum, co-founder, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. “We need to understand why it happened and what is the policy structure.”

The Presidents’ Alliance filed a lawsuit Thursday night, challenging the SEVIS record terminations, arguing that students “were stripped of valid status without warning, individualized explanation, and an opportunity to respond,” and that the government’s actions harmed member institutions’ ability to attract, retain and serve international students. The Presidents’ Alliance asks the court to enjoin DHS from future terminations affecting students at member institutions.

“We are gratified to see this change of directions to restore records,” Feldblum said. “That does not erase the need for national, systemic litigation.”

The Trump administration’s decision to reinstate student visas also does not negate the legal grounds for cases to continue, said Elora Mukherjee, Director of the Columbia Law School Immigrant Rights Center. Federal courts have the power to enjoin the executive branch on an issue that’s capable of repetition to stop the harm from occurring in the future, which in this case would be another sweeping removal of students’ legal standings, she added.

The Presidents’ Alliance hopes to learn more about the administration’s intentions, policy structure and plans through its lawsuit, Feldblum said.

Advocates for international students emphasized that while students may have regained legal standing to study and work in the U.S., the change in their status can have greater effects on their immigration status.

The federal government said it would restore terminated SEVIS records, but some students had their visas revoked, said Fanta Aw, CEO and executive director of NAFSA, the association of international educators. Students will have to visit an embassy to receive their visa, facing long wait-times, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to regain it.

For those who didn’t lose their visas, terminations can have serious implications for students’ continuity of time in the U.S., Aw said. The stated reason for SEVIS termination and notation in their records can similarly have negative long-term consequences, Feldblum said.

On campuses, administrators and students are still confused about what comes next, but there’s a clear feeling of relief, Feldblum and Aw said.

As of Friday, Inside Higher Ed identified over 1,840 students and recent graduates from more than 280 colleges and universities who have reported SEVIS record shifts.

Most institutions didn’t receive notification when students’ records changed initially, and they’re not getting notice when they’re reauthorized, Aw said. Just like with revocations, staff are checking SEVIS regularly to see if there’s been a status change.

A few colleges—including Harvard University, Rice University, Stanford University, Tufts University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of California, Berkeley—reported that some of their impacted students have had visas or SEVIS statuses restored. Some students still have terminated records.

The slow restoration is possibly tied to the tedious nature of the work, Aw said, as federal workers have to manually restore each student’s status.

NAFSA is starting to track visa restorations and will report numbers on Monday, Aw said, including the number of restorations and institution type.

The Presidents’ Alliance will be in touch with member institutions to provide updated guidance on how to proceed, Feldblum said.

This reversal doesn’t eliminate the harm the policy caused, experts noted. Students who left the country based on communication from the Trump administration or their own colleges and universities will possibly face challenges returning. Others were told to stop attending class, working or conducting research. With restored SEVIS records, students will be able to resume those activities, but it doesn’t fix everything.

Over the past month, international students have experienced high levels of anxiety and stress and a lack of psychological safety, which can impact their personal well-being and retention in higher education.

“You can’t get that time back, that lack of sleep back, that anxiety back,” Aw said. “Trust is broken for students that this is a system that is fair and consistent and transparent. I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to rebuild that.”

Tonight, at least, some students can get a good night’s sleep, Aw said.

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April 25, 2025
UC Berkeley Faces Foreign Gifts Investigation

The Education Department is investigating the University of California, Berkeley, regarding compliance with a federal law that requires colleges to disclose certain foreign gifts and contracts.

It’s the first such review launched since President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday aimed at increasing transparency over the “foreign influence at American universities.”

A notice of the investigation and corresponding records requests were sent to UC Berkeley on Friday morning after the department found that the university’s disclosures might be incomplete.

“There have been widespread media reports over the last several years of Berkeley’s very substantial—in the hundreds of millions of dollars—receipt of money from foreign governments, in this case, particularly China,” a senior Education Department official said on a press call Friday. But while the development of “important technologies” has been shared with foreign nations, the funding that made it possible “has not been reported to the department, as it’s required by law,” in Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, the official added.

Under Section 117, colleges and universities must report twice a year all grants and contracts with foreign entities that are worth more than $250,000. The department opened a similar review into Harvard last week.

UC Berkeley administrators will have 30 days to respond with the requested records. From there, the Department of Education’s general counsel, in partnership with the Departments of Justice and Treasury, will “verify the degree to which UC Berkeley is or is not compliant.” (Unlike with Harvard, the Department of Education did not disclose the specific records it had requested from Berkeley.)

“The Biden-Harris Administration turned a blind eye to colleges and universities’ legal obligations by deprioritizing oversight and allowing foreign gifts to pour onto American campuses,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a news release. “I have great confidence in my Office of General Counsel to investigate these matters fully.”

Trump and congressional Republicans have been trying to crack down on the enforcement of Section 117 since the first Trump administration. Already this year, House Republicans passed a bill, known as the DETERRENT Act, which would lower the general threshold required for reporting foreign donations from $250,000 to $50,000. Gifts from some countries, like China and Russia, would have to be reported no matter the value. The Senate has yet to move forward with the bill.

When asked how Trump’s executive order differentiates itself from the DETERRENT Act, the department official said the legislation would be “entirely consistent with the EO’s directives” and that the department is “very supportive” of congressional Republicans’ efforts.

“The EO basically just says, enforce the law vigorously, return to enforcement of the law, stop the nonsense and work with other agencies to do it,” the official explained. “So whether the reporting requirement is for $250,000 or more per year or the lower threshold, our approach will be the same.”

Inside Higher Ed asked the department if there would be more investigations but has not yet received a response.

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April 25, 2025
ICE Reverses Course on SEVIS Terminations

Nearly 2,000 students have had their SEVIS records terminated in recent weeks. On Friday, some records began being restored.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | aapsky/iStock/Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Over the past three weeks, several thousand international students received notice that their status in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System was changed, which threatened their legal ability to stay in the country and resulted in some students being detained or self-deporting. But as of late last night, the federal government is reversing course and reinstating students’ SEVIS records.

Elora Mukherjee, director of the Columbia Law School Immigrant Rights Center, first heard Thursday evening that 50 percent of affected students had had their SEVIS records reinstated. At the time, immigration lawyers didn’t know if it would be a blanket reversal.

But Friday morning, a lawyer for the government told a federal judge that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was restoring students’ SEVIS statuses nationwide while ICE develops a policy framework for record terminations. In the meantime, “ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC [National Crime Information Center] finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination,” according to the court filing.

So far, both students who filed lawsuits and those who didn’t have seen records restored, Mukherjee said.

Federal judges across the country have already ordered the government to restore some students’ records in SEVIS, a key database that tracks international students, after those students sued. The judges, for the most part, have expressed skepticism that the terminations were legal. Of the more than 100 lawsuits, judges have granted temporary restraining orders in at least 50 cases, Politico reported.

The sudden terminations have led to widespread confusion and fear for international students. Lawyers said in court filings and interviews that students affected are afraid to leave their homes or have lost out on income because of the terminations, among other consequences.

As of Friday morning, Inside Higher Ed has identified over 1,840 students and recent graduates from more than 280 colleges and universities who have reported SEVIS record shifts. Many institutions didn’t receive clear communication when student records were changed in the first place, making it likely that they won’t receive updates if and when records are restored.

Two colleges have already seen the changes take place. At the University of California, Berkeley, 23 students had their SEVIS statuses changed since April 4, but overnight a dozen students regained their status without warning or explanation, the university’s student paper, The Daily Californian, reported. Stanford University said late on April 24 that one student whose visa was revoked had their record restored.

This reversal doesn’t eliminate harm, Mukherjee noted. A few students elected to self-deport based on communication from the Trump administration or their own colleges and universities. Others were told to stop attending class or working. Among those who did continue their daily lives, a lapse in their SEVIS status could potentially cause them harm in the future, Mukherjee said.

In the policy update shared Friday, government officials provided more clarity about what prompted the sweeping visa revocations: a search in the National Crime Information Center.

Of students who had their SEVIS status changed, many were classified as “OTHER—Individual identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked,” according to court filings. Students who did have criminal records were cited for a variety of reasons ranging from driving without a license and overfishing to underage drinking. Some students didn’t have a criminal record at all.

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April 25, 2025
Cornell Pres. Nixes Kehlani Concert for “Antisemitic” Remarks

Cornell University’s president announced Wednesday that he’s canceling Kehlani’s campus concert, saying the R&B singer has “espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments.”

Kehlani was set to perform May 7 at the annual Slope Day spring festival.

“For decades, student leaders have taken the helm in organizing this event, hiring performers they hope will appeal to the student body,” Cornell president Michael I. Kotlikoff said in a statement. “Unfortunately, although it was not the intention, the selection of Kehlani as this year’s headliner has injected division and discord into Slope Day.”

“In the days since Kehlani was announced, I have heard grave concerns from our community that many are angry, hurt, and confused,” Kotlikoff said, adding that the student Slope Day Programming Board agreed “that this selection has compromised what is meant to be an inclusive event.”

The board didn’t respond to an email Thursday from Inside Higher Ed seeking comment. Kehlani has expressed pro-Palestine views—one of her music videos features the Palestinian flag and the phrase “long live the intifada.” She also said “fuck Israel” and “fuck Zionism” last year.

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April 25, 2025
Florida’s Own DOGE Is Reviewing Faculty Research, Grants

Elon Musk’s days with DOGE appear numbered—the unelected billionaire bureaucrat said Tuesday that his time spent leading the agency-gutting U.S. Department of Government Efficiency will “drop significantly” next month. As Tesla’s profits plummet, the world’s richest man faces opposition from both Trump administration officials and voters.

DOGE’s legacy remains unclear. Lawsuits are challenging its attempted cuts, including at the U.S. Education Department. Musk seems to have scaled back his planned overall budget savings from $1 or $2 trillion to $150 billion, and it’s unclear whether DOGE will achieve even that.

But something may outlive Musk’s DOGE: all the state iterations it has inspired, with legislators and governors borrowing or riffing off the name. Iowa’s Republican governor created the Iowa DOGE Task Force. Missouri’s GOP-controlled Legislature launched Government Efficiency Committees, calling them MODOGE on Musk’s X social media platform. Kansas lost the reference to the original doge meme when it went with COGE, for its Senate Committee on Government Efficiency.

But, as with the federal version, the jokey names for these state offshoots may belie the serious impact they could have on governments and public employees—including state higher education institutions and faculty.

To take perhaps the most glaring example, the sweeping requests from the Florida DOGE team, which is led by a former federal Department of Transportation inspector general, have alarmed scholars.

Earlier this month, the Florida DOGE asked public college and university presidents to provide an account—by the end of last week—of “all research published by staff” over the last six years, including “Papers and drafts made available to the public or in online academic repositories for drafts, preprints, or similar materials.”

“If not contained therein, author’s name, title, and position at the institution” must be provided, according to the letters the presidents received. The letters didn’t say what this and other requests were for.

The Florida DOGE also requested information on all grants awarded to institutions over the last six years, asking for each institution’s policy on allocating grants “for purposes of indirect cost recovery, including procedures for calculation.” Further, it requested an account of “all filled and vacant positions held by any employee with a non-instructional role.”

By the end of April, Florida’s public institutions must also provide the “Length of research associated” with each research publication, funding sources associated with the research and any “publications about the research” from the researcher or institution. In addition, the state DOGE is requesting funding sources for each institution’s noninstructional positions and the names of the nonstudent employees administering the grants.

And that may not be the end of the DOGE demands. In a March 26 letter, the state DOGE team told college presidents that it will conduct site visits “to ensure full compliance” with the governor’s executive order that created it, “as well as existing Florida law.” It said it may in the future request various other information, including course descriptions, syllabi, “full detail” on campus centers and the required end of diversity, equity and inclusion activities.

The requests so far from the Florida DOGE are the latest in a string of state actions that faculty say threaten to infringe on, or have already reduced, academic freedom. Dan Saunders, lead negotiator for the United Faculty of Florida union at Florida International University and a tenured associate professor of higher education, expressed concerns about what he called a “continuation of a chilling effect on faculty in terms of what we research and publish.”

“The lack of any meaningful articulation as to why they’re looking for this data and what they’re going to do with it just adds to the suspicions that I think the state has earned from the faculty,” Saunders said. “It’s clear that this is part of a broader and multidimensional attack” on areas of scholarship such as women’s and gender studies—part of a “comprehensive assault” on the “independence of the university,” he said.

“If Florida DOGE is following the patterns of the federal DOGE, then I think we can expect some radical oversimplifications of nuanced data and some cherry picking” of texts that an “unsophisticated AI will highlight,” he said. Noting how much research is published over six years, he questioned “how anyone is supposed to engage meaningfully” with that much information.

David Simmons, president of the University of South Florida’s Faculty Senate and a tenured engineering professor, said many faculty are “reasonably” concerned that this request is part of an effort to target “certain ideas that are disfavored by certain politicians.” Simmons—who stressed that he’s not speaking on behalf of the Senate or his institution—said such targeting would be “fundamentally un-American and inconsistent with the mission of a public university.”

“We hope that’s not happening. We hope this is just an inefficient effort to collect data,” Simmons said. He noted that much of the research information that the Florida DOGE is requesting is already publicly available on Google Scholar, an online database with profiles on faculty across the country.

“Universities are being required to reproduce information that’s already freely available in some cases, and to do that they’re using considerable resources and manpower,” Simmons said. The initial two-week data request was “so large as to be nearly impossible” to fulfill, he added.

A State University System of Florida spokesperson deferred comment to the DOGE team, which didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for an interview or provide answers to written questions Thursday. A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, which includes the Florida College System, deferred comment to Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s office, which responded via email but didn’t answer multiple written questions.

“In alignment with previous announcements and correspondence with all 67 counties, 411 municipalities, and 40 academic institutions the Florida DOGE Task Force aims to eliminate wasteful spending and cut government bloat,” a DeSantis spokesperson wrote. “If waste or abuse is identified during our collaborative efforts with partnering agencies and institutions, each case will be handled accordingly.”

‘DOGE Before DOGE Was Cool’

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January and announced DOGE’s creation, he suggested it was an effort to cut the alleged waste his Democratic predecessor had allowed to fester. But DeSantis—who lost to Trump in the GOP presidential primary—launched his own DOGE in a state that he’s been leading for six years.

“Florida was DOGE before DOGE was cool,” DeSantis posted on X Feb. 24. (His actions in higher education have, in many ways, presaged what Trump is now doing nationally.)

So, perhaps not surprisingly, DeSantis’s executive order creating the Florida DOGE that day began by saying the state already has a “strong record of responsible fiscal management.” A list of rosy financial stats followed before DeSantis finally wrote, “Notwithstanding Florida’s history of prudent fiscal management relative to many states in the country, the State should nevertheless endeavor to explore opportunities for even better stewardship.”

“The State of Florida should leverage cutting edge technology to identify further spending reductions and reforms in state agencies, university bureaucracies, and local governments,” DeSantis wrote, echoing, at least in language, the tech-focused approach of the federal DOGE.

He established the DOGE team within the Executive Office of the Governor, tasking it in part to work with the statewide higher education agencies to “identify and eliminate unnecessary spending, programs, courses, staff, and any other inefficiencies,” including “identifying and returning unnecessary federal grant funding.” The executive order says state agencies must set up their own DOGE teams, which will identify grants “that are inconsistent with the policies of this State and should be returned to the American taxpayer in furtherance of the President’s DOGE efforts.”

This executive order expires about a year from now. In an emailed statement, Teresa M. Hodge, the statewide United Faculty of Florida union president, said the request for faculty publication records “is not about transparency or accountability; it is about control.”

“Our members should not be forced to defend their scholarship, or their silence, in a political witch hunt,” Hodge said. “We stand united in ensuring that Florida’s faculty are free to teach, conduct research, and to speak without fear of retaliation.”

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April 25, 2025
We Already Have an Ethics Framework for AI (opinion)
For the third time in my career as an academic librarian, we are facing a digital revolution that is radically and rapidly transforming our information ecosystem. The first was when the internet became broadly available by virtue of browsers. The second was the emergence of Web 2.0 with mobile and social media. The third—and current—results from the increasing ubiquity of AI, especially generative AI.

Once again, I am hearing a combination of fear-based thinking alongside a rhetoric of inevitability and scoldings directed at those critics who are portrayed as “resistant to change” by AI proponents. I wish I were hearing more voices advocating for the benefits of specific uses of AI alongside clearheaded acknowledgment of risks of AI in specific circumstances and an emphasis on risk mitigation. Academics should approach AI as a tool for specific interventions and then assess the ethics of those interventions.

Caution is warranted. The burden of building trust should be on the AI developers and corporations. While Web 2.0 delivered on its promise of a more interactive, collaborative experience on the web that centered user-generated content, the fulfillment of that promise was not without societal costs.

In retrospect, Web 2.0 arguably fails to meet the basic standard of beneficence. It is implicated in the global rise of authoritarianism, in the undermining of truth as a value, in promoting both polarization and extremism, in degrading the quality of our attention and thinking, in a growing and serious mental health crisis, and in the spread of an epidemic of loneliness. The information technology sector has earned our deep skepticism. We should do everything in our power to learn from the mistakes of our past and do what we can to prevent similar outcomes in the future.

We need to develop an ethical framework for assessing uses of new information technology—and specifically AI—that can guide individuals and institutions as they consider employing, promoting and licensing these tools for various functions. There are two main factors about AI that complicate ethical analysis. The first is that an interaction with AI frequently continues past the initial user-AI transaction; information from that transaction can become part of the system’s training set. Secondly, there is often a significant lack of transparency about what the AI model is doing under the surface, making it difficult to assess. We should demand as much transparency as possible from tool providers.

Academia already has an agreed-upon set of ethical principles and processes for assessing potential interventions. The principles in “The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research” govern our approach to research with humans and can fruitfully be applied if we think of potential uses of AI as interventions. These principles not only benefit academia in making assessments about using AI but also provide a framework for technology developers thinking through their design requirements.

The Belmont Report articulates three primary ethical principles:
1. Respect for persons
2. Beneficence
3. Justice
“Respect for persons,” as it’s been translated into U.S. code and practiced by IRBs, has several facets, including autonomy, informed consent and privacy. Autonomy means that individuals should have the power to control their engagement and should not be coerced to engage. Informed consent requires that people should have clear information so that they understand what they are consenting to. Privacy means a person should have control and choice about how their personal information is collected, stored, used and shared.

Following are some questions we might ask to assess whether a particular AI intervention honors autonomy.
- Is it obvious to users that they are interacting with AI? This becomes increasingly important as AI is integrated into other tools.
- Is it obvious when something was generated by AI?
- Can users control how their information is harvested by AI, or is the only option to not use the tool?
- Can users access essential services without engaging with AI? If not, that may be coercive.
- Can users control how information they produce is used by AI? This includes whether their content is used to train AI models.
- Is there a risk of overreliance, especially if there are design elements that encourage psychological dependency? From an educational perspective, is using an AI tool for a particular purpose likely to prevent users from learning foundational skills so that they become dependent on the model?
In relation to informed consent, is the information provided about what the model is doing both sufficient and in a form that a person who is neither a lawyer nor a technology developer can understand? It is imperative that users be given information about what data is going to be collected from which sources and what will happen to that data.

Privacy infringement happens either when someone’s personal data is revealed or used in an unintended way or when information thought private is correctly inferred. When there is sufficient data and computing power, re-identification of research subjects is a danger. Given that “de-identification of data” is one of the most common strategies for risk mitigation in human subjects’ research, and there is an increasing emphasis on publishing data sets for the purposes of research reproducibility, this is an area of ethical concern that demands attention. Privacy emphasizes that individuals should have control over their private information, but how that private information is used should also be assessed in relation to the second major principle—beneficence.

Beneficence is the general principle that says that the benefits should outweigh the risks of harm and that risks should be mitigated as much as possible. Beneficence should be assessed on multiple levels—both the individual and the systemic. The principle of beneficence demands that we pay particularly careful attention to those who are vulnerable because they lack full autonomy, such as minors.

Even when making personal decisions, we need to think about potential systemic harms. For example, some vendors offer tools that allow researchers to share their personal information in order to generate highly personalized search results—increasing research efficiency. As the tool builds a picture of the researcher, it will presumably continue to refine results with the goal of not showing things that it does not believe are useful to the researcher. This may benefit the individual researcher. However, on a systemic level, if such practices become ubiquitous, will the boundaries between various discourses harden? Will researchers doing similar scholarship get shown an increasingly narrow view of the world, focused on research and outlooks that are similar to each other, while researchers in a different discourse are shown a separate view of the world? If so, would this disempower interdisciplinary or radically novel research or exacerbate disciplinary confirmation bias? Can such risks be mitigated? We need to develop a habit of thinking about potential impacts beyond the individual in order to create mitigations.

There are many potential benefits to certain uses of AI. There are real possibilities it can rapidly advance medicine and science—see, for example, the stunning successes of the protein structure database AlphaFold. There are corresponding potentialities for swift advances in technology that can serve the common good, including in our fight against the climate crisis. The potential benefits are transformative, and a good ethical framework should encourage them. The principle of beneficence does not demand that there are no risks, but that we should identify uses where the benefits are significant and that we mitigate the risks, both individual and systemic. Risks can be minimized by improving the tools, such as work to prevent them from hallucinating, propagating toxic or misleading content, or delivering inappropriate advice.

Questions of beneficence also require attention to environmental impacts of generative AI models. Because the models require vast amounts of computing power and, therefore, electricity, using them taxes our collective infrastructure and contributes to pollution. When analyzing a particular use through the ethical lens of beneficence, we should ask whether the proposed use provides enough likely benefit to justify the environmental harm. Use of AI for trivial purposes arguably fails the test for beneficence.

The principle of justice demands that the people and populations who bear the risks should also receive the benefits. With AI, there are significant equity concerns. For example, generative AI may be trained on data that includes our biases, both current and historic. Models must be rigorously tested to see if they create prejudicial or misleading content. Similarly, AI tools should be closely interrogated to ensure that they do not work better for some groups than for others. Inequities impact the calculations of beneficence and, depending on the stakes of the use case, could make the use unethical.

Another consideration in relation to the principle of justice and AI is the issue of fair compensation and attribution. It is important that AI does not undermine creative economies. Additionally, scholars are important content producers, and the academic coin of the realm is citations. Content creators have a right to expect that their work will be used with integrity, will be cited and that they will be remunerated appropriately. As part of autonomy, content creators should also be able to control whether their material is used in a training set, and this should, at least going forward, be part of author negotiations. Similarly, the use of AI tools in research should be cited in the scholarly product; we need to develop standards about what is appropriate to include in methodology sections and citations, and possibly when an AI model should be granted co-authorial status.

The principles outlined above from the Belmont Report are, I believe, sufficiently flexible to allow for further and rapid developments in the field. Academia has a long history of using them as guidance to make ethical assessments. They give us a shared foundation from which we can ethically promote the use of AI to be of benefit to the world while simultaneously avoiding the types of harms that can poison the promise.

Gwendolyn Reece is the director of research, teaching and learning at American University’s library and a former chair of American’s institutional review board.
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April 25, 2025
Majority of AP Tests to Be Delivered Online

Put down your pencils: The Advanced Placement test will take place entirely online.

Starting this May, the College Board will discontinue paper exams for 28 of the 36 AP subjects that offer end-of-year exams, reflecting a growing transition to digital testing.

All the AP exams will be offered via Bluebook, a digital testing application that also hosts the SAT and PSAT.

Students will take the exam completely online or with a mix of online and handwritten responses, depending on the subject matter. Essay-based exams, like AP U.S. History and AP English Language and Composition, will be fully online, while computational tests, like AP Biology and AP Statistics, will be a mix of multiple-choice online and free response on paper. The remaining paper exams are language and music exams, which require audio files.

College Board has offered digital AP exams for select subjects since 2022, after first providing at-home online test taking for students in 2020, when the pandemic caused challenges in administering and collecting students’ tests.

The transition to digital testing hasn’t been smooth for the College Board; thousands of students experienced difficulties completing the English and Chinese tests in 2023.

Cheating has also hurried College Board’s digitization plans, as the organization seeks to improve security after a higher-than-normal share of student scores had to be canceled in 2024 due to alleged academic misconduct.

Changes to the AP exam have raised doubts about the rigor of the tests and scoring methodology. College Board acknowledged an overhaul of its AP scoring system in 2024, which it claims creates a more data-informed approach to scoring, though critics argue it is boosting student scores.

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April 25, 2025
College Offers Free Housing, Meals for Dependents of Students

College students who live on campus are more likely to feel a sense of belonging to their institution and have better educational outcomes, but on-campus housing facilities frequently neglect parenting students, thus limiting their opportunity to be more engaged at their institution.

Additionally, students with dependents are more likely than their nonparenting peers to experience financial hardships and lack access to basic needs, according to a 2021 survey by Trellis Strategies. Three in five student parents had experienced housing insecurity in the previous 12 months, and one in five had very low food security.

A January brief by Generation Hope identified housing as a key area for colleges to expand support for parenting students, since a lack of secure housing can impede students’ degree progress as well as negatively impact the socioemotional development of their dependents.

For decades, Wilson College in Pennsylvania has offered special housing to single parents enrolled at the institution, alleviating financial barriers to on-campus living and providing greater access to educational resources. The Single Parent Scholar Program has helped dozens of single parents persist and opened doors for their children to be exposed to postsecondary education in a unique way.

“It breaks my heart to think people would ever have to choose between your child and your education, so we’re trying to take that awful choice away,” said Katie Kough, dean of students at Wilson College. “You don’t have to make that choice.”

Paving new ground: Wilson College was founded as a women’s college in 1869 and in 1996 first started the Single Parent Scholar Program—then called the Women With Children program—as a way to serve single mothers in the area.

Historical data shows single parents are less likely to enroll and complete a degree, which negatively affects their earning potential over time and can create generational impact on their socioeconomic situation.

A brief by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that only 28 percent of single mothers who entered college between 2003 and 2009 earned a degree or certificate within six years, compared to 40 percent of married mothers and 57 percent of women without children. Single mothers are also more likely to have higher levels of debt and financial insecurity while enrolled, according to the brief.

“I’ve always said [supporting single mothers] was the right thing to do, but it was a brave thing to do,” Kough said, noting that Wilson was one of the first colleges to do so. “There’s obviously been growing pains throughout the years, but since that time, the college has made a commitment to this population in helping them earn their degree.”

How it works: As the name suggest, the Single Parent Scholar Program is open to unmarried students who have a dependent between the ages of 20 months and 10 years old. Wilson College has been coed since 2014, so single fathers are also eligible to participate.

Program participants and their dependents reside in a modified student housing complex; each unit includes two bedrooms and a bathroom, and residents share a common lounge and kitchen space with their peers. The Single Parent Scholars Program can accommodate up to 12 students per year.

The college subsidizes childcare in the local community, though the parent is responsible for providing transportation and shuttling their dependents on and off campus.

Single parent scholars must purchase a meal plan, but their dependents eat for free at on-campus dining facilities. Many opt for the lowest-priced plan to maintain their SNAP eligibility, Kough said.

Parents are also allowed to stay on campus during academic breaks and summer term, which helps provide some stability.

The impact: Program eligibility is dependent on the age of the child, not the parent, so the students range in age from teens straight out of high school to those in their 20s or 30s. To date, all participants have been single mothers, which could be due in part to the type of student who seeks out Wilson, Kough said, or the small number of single fathers who enroll in higher education.

The campus is welcoming to the parents and their dependents, offering various events and activities geared toward families, such as kid-friendly movie screenings and visits to the college farm. Many parents engage in athletics, clubs and other on-campus activities, allowing them to have the full college experience.

“The kids are a blast—they’re a lot of fun and they bring a lot of joy to this campus,” Kough said. Dependents of program participants are given their own cap and gown to walk at graduation, and some children have returned to Wilson as legacies.

Wilson College Single Parent Scholars alumnae say the program helped them achieve their dreams through providing housing and community.

Program alumnae also note the value of living in community with other single parents who are working toward the same goal of earning a bachelor’s degree.

“I’m proud of the women who have come in, perhaps giving up a lot. In some cases, they gave up houses and apartments and jobs with some immediate gratification of a paycheck, just putting all that aside for a dream that was down the road,” Kough said. “It’s hard to put into words but it certainly makes a lot of the struggle and the work absolutely worth it.”

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April 25, 2025