Tag: Events

IHE Reporter and Editors Share Their Favorite Stories of 2025

It’s been a whirlwind year for higher ed—and for Inside Higher Ed. Yes, we rigorously covered President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on higher education, and our readers seemed to appreciate our efforts; according to my (unscientific) analysis of our readership statistics, about 70 percent of our most-read articles this year were about the Trump administration.

But we’ve also found time, somehow, to keep up with our bread-and-butter higher education stories: how technology is changing college campuses, institutions’ financial struggles, academic freedom and free speech issues, student success, college costs and the value of a degree, the continued rise of career and technical programs, and even a few intriguing scandals.

To look back at the work we’ve done over this tumultuous year, we asked the members of our editorial team to share one of their favorite stories published this year. These are stories that may have flown under the radar, highlight a reporter’s unique strengths, or push the boundaries of what a higher ed news story can be. But most importantly, they’re stories that helped our readers make sense of the changing higher ed landscape during a year that was unlike any other.

Our Favorite Stories of 2025

Emma Whitford, faculty reporter: “Inside a Network of Fake College Websites” by Josh Moody and Kathryn Palmer

Josh and Kathryn’s investigation into a network of fake college websites built using generative AI, to me, represents the particular strengths of the small but mighty IHE newsroom. While a couple of the faux institutions had been flagged by officials, it was Josh’s curiosity and close attention to his beat that prompted his digging, which uncovered dozens more fake schools and the fake accreditors that endorsed them. The double-byline teamwork made the depth of reporting in this story possible while the newsroom simultaneously continued to churn out the news of the day.

Susan Greenberg, managing editor: “The Handwriting Revolution” by Johanna Alonso

In this story, Johanna looked at how one of most feared, criticized and occasionally, celebrated developments to upend higher education in recent years—generative AI—is changing how faculty teach and assess students. She spoke to a number of professors who are requiring handwritten assignments to ensure that students don’t use ChatGPT or other AI tools to cheat their way through class. The story is lively, timely and illuminating; it includes the voices of an array of faculty members and experts who share nuanced perspectives about the pros and cons of reverting to traditional handwritten assessments to evaluate students in the age of AI.

Ashley Mowreader, student success reporter: “Charlie Kirk: Hero of ‘Civil Discourse’ or Fount of Division?” by Ryan Quinn

One of Ryan’s many talents as a reporter is being able to take a hot topic in news coverage and deeply report on it to add layers of context, insight and inquiry that could otherwise be overlooked or misunderstood. This piece is exemplary of this type of reporting, peeling past the horror of Charlie Kirk’s murder to investigate what it means to be a figure of civil discourse.

Ryan Quinn, policy reporter: “Spending Soars, Rankings Fall at New College of Florida” by Josh Moody

This story cut through the well-worn conservative/liberal debates about what should be taught in higher ed and showed a truth that has been raising eyebrows across the political spectrum: New College of Florida was spending “more than 10 times per student what the other 11 members of the State University System spend, on average” and politicians were likely discussing closing it behind the scenes. The article also had great quotes, including a faculty member calling NCF’s approach to recruitment “kind of like a Ponzi scheme” and a former administrator saying “academically, Richard [Corcoran] is running a Motel 6 on a Ritz-Carlton budget.”

Sara Custer, editor-in-chief: “The ‘Death Spiral’ of Deferred Maintenance” by Colleen Flaherty

The editors at Inside Higher Ed have a running joke that deferred maintenance is my favorite topic because I get excited when the issue of crumbling brick facades or broken elevators comes up. I’m not a facilities nerd. I just agree with what F. King Alexander told Colleen Flaherty about deferred maintenance for this piece: “This is a huge issue that presidents have to deal with that nobody’s talking about.” The sector has rightly spent 2025 following the Trump administration, college closures and leadership controversies, but Colleen’s story is my favorite because it adds nuance to the conversations about higher ed’s financial health and is a reminder that too many colleges are one leaky roof away from closure. It’s also got a killer headline.

Josh Moody, business, finance and leadership reporter: “International Student Visas Revoked” by Ashley Mowreader

As the Trump Administration began revoking student visas, the indefatigable Ashley Mowreader worked to identify which institutions and how many students were affected, resulting in a widely-read map that was cited in legal filings and by numerous other publications. Inside Higher Ed tracked 1,800-plus students who lost their F-1 or J-1 status as the Trump administration cracked down on immigration. Our reporting helped contextualize the federal government’s broadside against international students and the many subsequent lawsuits via reporting that informed and illuminated and resulted in one of our (deservedly) most-read pieces of 2025.

Sara Weissman, nontraditional students and minority-serving institutions reporter: “Grief Fuels Growth of Turning Point’s Campus Footprint” by Kathryn Palmer

Charlie Kirk’s killing called for a deep, nuanced look at the movement he created, and that’s exactly what Kathryn delivered in this story. The feature was beautifully written and richly detailed. It took Turning Point USA students’ grief seriously while also drawing on a range of scholarly perspectives to add balance and provide context about the movement’s present and future. The story also offered valuable framing for our ongoing coverage about the ways the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting roiled campuses in the months that followed.

Katherine Knott, news editor: “How Trump Uses the DOJ as Tool of ‘Fear-Mongering’” by Jessica Blake

This piece from Jessica helped to illuminate how another federal agency was applying pressure to colleges and universities and what’s at stake for higher ed more broadly. Her reporting came after the Department of Justice played a role in the resignation of Jim Ryan, who was president of the University of Virginia and faced questions from federal investigators about how he handled diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on campus. The timely story took readers beyond the news of the day and behind the scenes into the tactics of the second Trump administration.

Kathryn Palmer, research, technology and innovation reporter: “Preserving the Past of HBCUs” by Sara Weissman

Sara’s story on the effort to preserve the history of HBCUs was timely, well-reported and beautifully written. It featured so many voices and presented HBCUs as institutions that illuminate the complexities of America’s history at a time when the federal government is moving to sanitize it. Her story showed how HBCUs are integral to telling the story of Black America and why it’s an important story to preserve. The historical photos put it over the top.

Johanna Alonso, admissions and enrollment reporter: “Texas Ban on Transgender Course Content Sows Chaos” by Emma Whitford

No one in the history of hitting the ground running has ever hit the ground running quite like Emma Whitford did when she came on as Inside Higher Ed’s faculty reporter this past September. Since then, Emma, who had previously worked at IHE from 2019 to 2022, has covered near daily clashes between faculty and administrators with persistence, precision and clarity. This story about verbal policies banning professors from teaching about gender identity in Texas perfectly encapsulates her incredible ability to root out the truth of complex controversies. From there, she continued to follow this story for weeks as more information came out about the nature of the ban and as faculty questioned the legitimacy of the verbal policy. The saga also demonstrates conservative leaders’ continued efforts to erode academic freedom, which has been a significant theme for the past several years and will surely continue into 2026.

Reporter

Jessica Blake, federal policy reporter: “Florida Universities Sign Agreements With ICE” by Josh Moody

This was a great scoop that Josh gathered by going back to the basics of journalism and making a public records request. And as someone who completed a bachelor’s degree while working part-time for Investigative Reporters and Editors, I’m a sucker for any story rooted in FOIA. He took an event that was making headlines throughout Florida and across the country and advanced the story, giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at which universities were striking agreements with the Trump administration and how.

Colleen Flaherty, senior editor for special content: The First 100 Days newsletter, Day 88 by Katherine Knott

We were supposed to avoid federal policy pieces due to the onslaught of those this year. But assuming that guidelines are more like suggestions, I have to go with this edition of After the First 100 Days, our weekly federal policy news roundup, by singular news editor Katherine Knott. Back in April, when the newsletter was still called the First 100 Days, the White House was targeting higher ed with such speed and force that it was unnervingly unclear how far things would go. Then came Day 88—or, as Katherine wrote—what “will be remembered as the week that Harvard said no and higher ed started to fight back.” It was a crucial moment for higher ed in 2025, and Katherine’s weekly analyses have otherwise become crucial reading for me. After the 100 Days is an IHE membership perk but I promise this isn’t a sales ploy, hence the gift link!

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December 19, 2025
Public Trust Requires Both Reform and Defense

To the editor:

We are grateful to Inside Higher Ed editor in chief Sara Custer in her recent column “Higher Ed Faces Competing Visions for Its Future” (Dec. 18, 2025) for mentioning Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education, the initiative we co-direct at the American Association of Colleges and Universities. We write to expand upon Custer’s review of the emerging responses to the trust problem and to clarify what our initiative is advocating and doing to invigorate public trust.

Higher ed cannot restore public trust in colleges and universities unless the sector reckons in a clear-eyed fashion with the causes of the current crisis. Simply put, the fundamental problem is that when the sector or its individual institutions draw public criticism, we are unable either to make quick changes in response, to explain compellingly why we should not do so, or to redirect public attention effectively toward the overall value and purpose of our work. Under increased scrutiny from the public and government alike, that paralysis is a recipe for a disastrous decline in public trust.

Solving this crisis will require a multipronged approach that balances internal reform—although not along the lines of the administration’s ill-fated Compact—with better communication and collective defense strategies. Higher education must become better and nimbler at making changes that already have wide support but are held back by parochial interests; better at relentlessly prioritizing engagement with local communities; and better at offering a meaningful welcome to all students, including those with conservative views and others who feel alienated from our institutions. We also need to be better at mounting a vigorous and coordinated sectorwide defense when we are in the right, and at communicating our value and purpose clearly and effectively so that the public can put things into context when we inevitably make mistakes.

Our view is that internal reform, improved communication, and better defense are inseparable parts of a whole; higher education will not regain public trust, or reestablish productive partnerships with the government and our communities, unless we pursue all three goals simultaneously. Our vision is of a sector that is agile, responsive, invitational, humble and trusted to generate new knowledge and transform students’ lives. If colleges and universities act smartly and collectively, we believe that vision is within reach.

We look forward to sharing more specifics about our approach with Inside Higher Ed’s readers over the coming months.

Jeremy C. Young is Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives, and Kathryn Enke is Vice President for Leadership and Strategy, at the American Association of Colleges and Universities

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December 18, 2025
A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus (opinion)

For humanities faculty, the past five years have felt like a relentless assault on our ability to do our jobs. We have endured COVID, generative AI, budget cuts, and bitter fights over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s war on Gaza. At times it has been a challenge to remain human, let alone humanistic: to calm the nervous system enough to read a book, refine an argument, or show up for our colleagues and our increasingly fragile students. Now we are facing the Trump administration’s effort to gut-renovate our universities under the pretext of “combatting antisemitism.” With local enablers paving the way, that destruction may yet succeed.

In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance. We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects. I’d like to share a few examples of what this looks like in practice.

Fearmongering Versus Tea

As a Jewish professor of Arabic at Boston University, I mentor students with many different identities: Arab, Jewish, both or neither. After Oct. 7, 2023, I watched them struggle to metabolize the horrors in Israel and Gaza. They identified with various “sides” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; what they shared was a sense of helplessness and a hunger for facts and insights beyond those found on Instagram. They needed contact with solid reading material, with trusted adults and, above all, with each other. My colleagues and I were in pain too. By mid-October, a few of us began meeting to discuss how to nurture a respectful and humane campus climate for ourselves and our students.

As we looked around for helpful approaches, we noticed one very unhelpful one: Keep people constantly triggered so their brains can’t process new information or perspectives.

Instead of trying to lower the temperature after Oct. 7, one influential institution on our campus immediately began stoking fear of antisemitism. On Oct. 18, they sent out an email telling students to record and report all instances of “antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” They encouraged students to submit videos and screenshots of their classmates. They conflated antisemitism and anti-Zionism, strongly implying that criticism of Israel’s government threatened the identity and even the safety of Jewish students at BU. They ignored the inconvenient facts that a great proportion of anti-Zionists at BU are Jewish and that nationwide, plenty of Israel supporters are antisemitic. Even worse than this bad-faith conceptual stew was the subtext. We know you’re scared. We know you feel everyone hates you. Although this university has 4,000 Jewish undergraduates, you’re basically alone and unsafe here. But don’t worry; we have your back. This gaslighting maneuver only stoked the anxieties it purported to calm.

What my colleagues and I did instead was much smaller in scale. Four tenured humanities professors (all moms, as it happened) started gathering students for tea. We chose to work together because we did not agree about what was happening or should happen in the Middle East, but we respected and liked each other. Each of us personally invited a few students, for a total of about 12 per gathering. This was not an advertised event but a series of private teas. My colleagues brought concerned Muslim and Arab students, liberal Zionist students, and eventually some leaders of BU Students for Israel and the Hillel. I invited Arabic learners from various backgrounds and some pro-Palestinian students I knew, including some leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine. (Others, who had been doxxed, were scared to come.) We brought substantial and slightly awkward snacks, things like pistachios, clementines and pomegranates to keep people’s hands busy. We sat around in armchairs, more conversation circle than summit meeting. And we made one ground rule: For these 90 minutes you can’t talk about the region, which we can’t fix, but only the BU campus, which we share.

When we passed a timer around the room, giving every student and faculty member 60 seconds to say what was on their minds, everyone heard at least one thing they didn’t expect. One male Jewish student who sometimes wore a kippah and sometimes didn’t told of how differently people looked at him in those two situations. The Muslim women—hijab-wearing or not—understood. As trust grew, students felt comfortable asking each other questions like, “Why do people tear down posters of Israeli hostages?” or “Why did your group blast disco music over our die-in?”

The last tea occasioned two tiny breakthroughs. One student suggested BU’s “Jewish trustees and donors” were blocking the student movement to divest from Israel. Really? Together we checked the website: In fact, two of our most senior trustees are Arab. The student was taken aback, changing her view without ever being accused of antisemitic bias; everyone learned something. Later, a Palestinian student asked a pro-Israel Jewish student what the word “Zionism” meant to him. He began defining it, starting with “the right of the Jews to have self-determination in their ancestral homeland, Eretz Yisrael.” As she looked confused, he blushed and stammered, using more Hebrew words she didn’t understand. Finally he stopped: “I’m sorry, I’ve never had to explain this before. I’ve always been in Jewish schools or camps or Hillel or places where everyone just understood what Zionism means.” The conversation moved on. The next day he and his roommate came to my office to worry that he had not “represented his side” well enough; we talked for an hour; I assured him that he represented only himself, a student trying to learn and figure out what he believed. I doubt his politics changed, but the moment of aporia made everyone more human. When CJFS organized a Freedom Seder the next April, both he and his roommate came.

Administrators have asked us how to scale up this effort. My long-term hope is to train students and colleagues to be peer educators in their own networks. But it would need to start small, with faculty and staff who trust each other. There are no shortcuts.

Policing Versus Conversing

Such efforts may soon be complicated by a harmful state-level effort by the politicians and legacy Jewish groups who make up the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism, which was established by the state legislature in 2024 and has been touted as a model for other states.

The Commission furthers a nationwide plan to advance a program of what is fair to describe as “Don’t Say Palestine” policies. It aligns with the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) state-by-state Jewish Policy Index, which calls for such commissions, and follows the exact playbook of the Israel advocacy group ICAN (the Israeli-American Civic Action Network), which aims to bring hyperlocal pro-Israel advocacy to cities, towns and school boards, especially in blue states. A Massachusetts state senator has praised ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt for encouraging the establishment of the commission; ICAN has boasted of its influence on the process.

One reason our group, Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, has grown so fast is that everyone can see the Trump administration weaponizing antisemitism to attack universities and degrade civil rights. But another reason is anger at this state-level commission right here in our beloved Massachusetts, which has taken its eye off actual antisemitism and focused instead on policing discourse about Israel.

The Commission conflates Jewishness with Zionism, pushing the incoherent and dangerously vague International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and other sloppy ideas. But a deeper problem is its punitive approach, which focuses on policing a boundary of what is and isn’t antisemitic. In its 13 months of hearings, the Commission has modeled the punitive approach by attacking educators, publicly haranguing the (Jewish) president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) for two hours last February over some materials on an MTA website. In its final report, released in November, the Commission aims to institutionalize the punitive approach by creating a mechanism through which members of the public can report “problematic curriculum” in K-12 schools, as well as an anonymous reporting system for suspected acts of bias in K-12 schools “which may not rise to the level of a hate crime.” If adopted in any city or town, these measures will create an unpedagogical climate where teachers are afraid to teach and students hesitate to speak up in class: No one wants to be reported as an antisemite, even if the charge is disproven later. At best, such a climate will only drive anti-Jewish bias underground; at worst, because schoolchildren and college students are sensitive to hypocrisy, it will spark resentment and feed an anti-Jewish backlash. Several Concerned Jewish colleagues have written movingly on this commission’s dangers; CJFS has released a Shadow Report detailing its faulty assumptions and missteps.

The question is what to do instead. What is a humane, pedagogical response to rising tensions and the ambient normalization of bigotry in all forms? Again, learning can happen only in an environment of respect and trust.

Let’s take an example of casual classroom antisemitism. In March 2024, my Core Curriculum class was reading Foucault and discussing the Panopticon surveillance regime. When the talk turned to Internet culture and public discomfort with social media, one normally tuned-out student suddenly piped up: “The Jews want to ban TikTok. They’re against its pro-Palestine content.” The Jews. Because we all automatically love Israel and hate free speech? Luckily, I was the teacher; I could explain why it was incorrect to say some entity called “the Jews” either wanted or were able to control social media. I could cite a 2020 Pew research poll saying 41 percent of Jewish Americans are emotionally unattached or weakly attached to Israel. (Among secular Jews, that figure is 67 percent.) I could point out that the great majority of Israel’s U.S. supporters are not Jewish at all: One Evangelical lobby group, Christians United for Israel, claims ten million members, 2.5 million more than the total number of Jews in America. If this discussion happened today, I could cite a survey from The Washington Post finding that about 4 in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. And because I feel safe in my classroom—because my university does not endorse the conflation of Jewishness with Zionism—I could personally vouch that many Jewish people disavow nationalism altogether.

Now, let me share an example of misperceived classroom antisemitism from my 40-person general education course, War in Arabic Literature and Film. The course confronts some difficult material set in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. We learn how war can harden sectarian identifications and gender roles. We read some American and Israeli authors as sidelights. We do a lot of social-emotional scaffolding and role-taking; students sit in small discussion groups, and I collect exit notes.

One student, a self-described “proud Zionist,” was a wonderful presence in the course’s fall 2024 first run. But one day she was crying after class, and her exit note said: “I loved this course and was about to recommend it to all my Jewish friends, but now I can’t, because I feel today’s discussion was antisemitic.” That day’s session had focused on Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, a stunning Israeli film about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, paired with a student presentation on Edward Said’s classic essay, “Permission to Narrate.” (Incidentally, Waltz violates the IHRA definition of antisemitism, comparing the Sabra and Shatila massacre to Auschwitz.)

I caught up with my student and we talked for an hour in the street and in my office. Raised to sincerely experience criticism of Israel as antisemitic, she felt hurt by the student presentation. I did not try to tell her about Edward Said’s humanistic outlook, deep empathy for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, or anything else. Instead, trusting her seriousness and troubled by her distress, I suggested: What if she was upset not by the reading material, but by the frame? Would she have preferred me to assign the Said essay as a primary source to analyze rather than an authoritative secondary source for a presentation? She said yes, that would be different. I offered to revisit that part of my syllabus the following year, empowering students to talk back to Said if they wished. She contributed enthusiastically to class for the rest of the semester.

I am so grateful that this brave young woman shared her concerns with me rather than running to a dean, a “problematic curriculum” hotline, or a politico-religious organization, as students are being urged to do. By talking to each other honestly like intelligent adults, we both learned something.

These experiences have convinced me that policing “antisemitic” speech about Israel is not only unjust but deeply counterproductive: it breeds suspicion between well-meaning people, making it harder for us to unite when genuine neo-Nazism rears its head. You can’t stamp out antisemitism, fear of Palestinians, or any other prejudice; only slow heart-changing conversations can melt it away. So, to foster a campus climate of real inclusion, we need to convene and converse, not record and report. The details are tricky, but teachers and students can figure them out together. Our administrations and governments just have to give us the respect, job security and academic freedom to do so.

Margaret Litvin is an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University and a co-founder of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff.

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December 18, 2025
Safeguarding the Integrity of College Sport

In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on state-authorized sports betting, opening the floodgates to an industry that dumps billions of dollars into state budgets. According to the American Gaming Association, Americans wagered $119.84 billion on sports events in 2023, up 27.5 percent from the previous year. Professional leagues attract the highest betting volumes, but gambling in college sports is growing, according to Jim Borchers, president and CEO of the U.S. Council on Athletes’ Health (USCAH) and chief medical officer for the Big 10 Conference.

Digital platforms, gamification and prop betting are driving this boom, he says. A former Ohio State football player, Borchers argues the influx in gambling threatens the integrity of college sports and risks athletes’ mental and emotional health. Name, image and likeness payments, combined with media revenue-sharing, contribute to a new reality for college sports that is more transactional than ever, with huge sums of money flowing in and out.

To help students and institutions respond to the new environment, USCAH developed an accreditation process mapped to the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s best practices and standards of care. USCAH launched the program in September and is already working with 40 institutions at every level of college athletics from the power four conferences (the Big 10, SEC, Big 12 and ACC) to Division III institutions.

Gambling is now an integral part of college athletics, Borchers acknowledges, but he is hopeful the new accreditation system will guarantee that student athletes’ health isn’t lost along the way.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: In 2018, the Supreme Court ended the federal ban on sports gambling. From your vantage point, how has that changed gambling in college athletics?

A: It’s been in the back rooms and dark corners, but I think gambling always existed, and there was always a concern around integrity in sport. But in the last five to seven years, gambling has exploded, and it’s really become part of the fabric of sport, so much so that many people consider it like a video game. It’s so easy make a wager on so many different things in sport. And it seems like it’s just a normal part of what goes on. So the technology piece of it—the predictive markets, the prop bets, the things that go beyond “is Team A going to beat Team B by a certain number of points?”—have a huge effect on the individual and that’s something that we have to take into account when we think about how this affects sport.

Jim Borchers, president and CEO of the U.S. Council on Athletes’ Health and chief medical officer for the Big 10 Conference

Q: Prop betting is where gambling gets more sophisticated, but also a bit wacky. How does prop betting, in particular, affect athletes?

A: It gets really wacky because you’re betting on things that individuals may or may not do, or things that you would expect them to do in real time during the course of a game. I’ve explained it to people as: If you play a team sport and the overall objective is to play well and have your team win, you can have a good outcome. You and your coach could feel like you played pretty well. But if you didn’t meet these prop bets, all of a sudden you start seeing negativity around the way you performed, and you start thinking, “Wait, am I really doing what I should be doing?”

How does that affect someone who’s 18 or 20 years old? It creates a whole outside amount of stress that obviously can become pretty specific for the individual. It can be very harassing. It can be malignant. It can be damaging. And I think that’s where you’ve seen a lot of the movement to try to get prop bets and predictive markets out of the sport betting market. But I just don’t think that’s realistic. The train has left the station, and we need to think of different ways to address it.

Q: Especially because these betting companies buy TV ads during the games. Gambling is totally integrated in the college sport business. There’s just no way that you can separate them.

A: And their number one market is males, ages 18 to 24. They give you free bets. They’re trying to create habits. Gambling, in and of itself, can be a very addictive and malignant behavior and lead to all sorts of health issues and personal issues. But there are a lot of people who don’t think anything of, “Yeah, I’ll take 20 bucks and make a few bets and see if I can hit something this weekend.” I think they see that as part of the fun of sport, rather than being invested in the sport or the game itself.

Q: Give me some examples of the impact you’ve seen gambling have on student athletes.

A: This whole financial marketplace now exists in college athletics—even high school athletics now has NIL payments—and so sport as a financial vehicle is growing, and these markets are growing, and that causes them stress. Young athletes are developing physically and mentally. Do we expect them to have a skill set to manage that financial stress like an adult, or the experiences and the ability to develop that skill set? I think it is misguided.

You add into that the pressure of outside influences who now have their own financial market where they’re making these bets and providing those bets. And they can make comments to that person directly either on social media or direct messaging. It’s easy for me as a 55-year-old to say, “I’ll just turn my phone off,” but that’s not how these folks operate. It impacts their mental and emotional health, and that impacts their performance. We know athletes have to be physically, mentally and emotionally well to perform at their best.

Q: You mentioned that these betting agencies are focusing on 18- to 24-year-old men, and I would take a guess that most of the games they’re betting on are football and men’s basketball. Is there enough discussion about this being an issue for males in particular?

A: I don’t think there’s enough discussion at all, because the focus gets drawn away from the actual event. The other piece of it is, oftentimes, it’s peer groups that are engaging in these behaviors. It’s people that athletes see on campus or in their classes. It’s led to more isolation and more silos. College athletes feel like they have to wall themselves off from all of those parts of the college experience that are important to the overall development of a young adult.

Look, higher education serves a lot of roles. There’s a knowledge base and building a foundation in a field of study. But there’s developing as a young adult through social interactions—being on your own for the first time and learning to engage in the community and interact with people with similar beliefs or maybe different beliefs. I think you’re seeing athletes become more isolated and unable to participate in that. In some way it’s stunting their development, and they leave college then, as young adults, without having had a lot of those experiences.

Q: Division I sports and the big four conferences are where we see big sums of NIL payments and revenue sharing. Is gambling concentrated in those areas of college sport too?

A: Gambling is universal. There’s a marketplace for everything. With the recent NCAA basketball issue you saw how it seeps down into schools, where people would have thought, wow, really, people are betting on these events? It’s misguided to think this is only happening at the highest level of sport. And I think it’s misguided to think that athletes themselves aren’t invested in it and doing it.

Q: I even read a story about a bus driver who saw an athlete was limping and then capitalized on that.

A: Yeah, information and the ability to gain information is key. You’re seeing people go to all sorts of lengths to try to find out information. And that introduces a whole different set of malignant consequences to that part of this industry. They’re trying to find out information from the individuals: people that are working with the medical staffs, as you mentioned, a bus driver. Are you a food services person? Are you doing something with athletes where you’re able to garner some information and pass that information off? And then there are the athletes themselves. If they are being approached for information and maybe think, “Well, I’m just giving an injury update on someone,” but they don’t realize the effect that’s having in the larger environment around wagering and sport.

Q: To your point about integrity earlier, the amount of money in college athletics points to a greater question around the integrity of college athletics as a whole. Where is this all going?

A: To me, it’s asking, “What is the purpose of sport?” Is sport, and your ability to participate in a sport and be good in sport, a financial vehicle? And if it is, what role does it play in education-based athletics? In the United States, sport is so much a part of what the community is and how people identify with an institution. But the financial markets are creating a transactional nature to it. I think most college athletes just want sport to continue to be part of their college experience, because it’s what they’ve known. They want to go to school, have a peer group and play a sport they enjoy. When it becomes a financial vehicle, there’s a whole different aspect to sport because now your efforts and what you’re doing in sport are objectively equated with a dollar amount.

And how do we reconcile those two? It’s really challenging. Now that you have athletes in college making seven figures, they’re probably the financial engine for their families. Their purpose and why they’re there has changed. Not that sport hasn’t always been a big part of the collegiate experience, but if you’re paying somebody a million dollars or $500,000 to participate in sport, I don’t think they’re going to have much focus on any of the other reasons why they’re in college.

Q: From my conversations with university leaders, it’s clear they’re not happy about how much money is flowing through athletics. But here we are. What can colleges do?

A: Our most recent initiative is accreditation for athletic departments on health, safety and well-being. The other reality is I don’t know that athletic departments are complex enough to handle those and all the issues around the financial part of the business. Now there’s a whole different risk profile to sport when people are making this kind of money. I think you’re going to see more lawsuits because there’s going to be lost wages or an inability to earn income.

We have to acknowledge that and then be very transparent about what the expectations are when people come to sport. As much as we want to say college athletics is still a relationship-driven industry where parents and their kids made an investment in going to school to play sport because they built great relationships with coaches or felt great about the institution, we’ve now allowed this transactional nature to take place. There are representatives, agents and other influences in college athletics. We have to allow it to be part of what we’re talking about every day, and thinking about as an athletic department or an institution. Unless you think of it that way, you’ll have outcomes that you’re just not prepared for.

Q: Where did the accreditation standards come from?

A: A group of higher education leaders asked the U.S. Council for Athletes’ Health about 18 months ago to develop an accreditation program that shows institutions are meeting best practices and standards of care based on the NCAA roadmap. We met with legal and education experts and have developed a program that focuses on ongoing self-study and assessment and education. It’s a four-year process. We’ve met with the NCAA and they acknowledge that it meets their best practice standards. We feel like accreditation is a step in the right direction because it’s something people in education understand—this is a four-year cycle, we educate people every year on these topics, we do a self-study every year, and once every four years, we do a more comprehensive self-study with an audit or an evaluation from the accrediting body, where we share our information and get feedback.

Q: For academic accreditation, you either get access to Title IV funding or you don’t. Is there an incentive for what you’re talking about here?

A: The incentive, in my opinion, is the risk and liability that exists if you’re not doing this. Because as somebody who sits in as an expert in cases, when there are unwanted outcomes, it’s the system failure that is the biggest issue. And it’s a reputational harm. I tell people all the time—you drop your child off at a daycare for eight hours a day. Would you drop your child off with coaches or with other people that aren’t going to meet best practices? It’s a process that you should be invested in and, if you choose not to be invested in it, that says something about what you’re doing.

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December 18, 2025
How Excessive Phone Use Can Hinder Student Success
Many of today’s college students are digital natives, having grown up in a world dominated by cellphones, the internet, social media and rapid technological advancements.

Coming of age alongside smartphones, however, has been linked to high rates of mental health concerns among Gen Z. A 2024 brief by the National Center for Health Statistics found that half of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17 spent four or more hours on screens per day, and those teens were more likely to experience anxiety or depression symptoms. In 2025, 32 percent of college students reported moderate or severe levels of anxiety and 37 percent said they experience moderate or severe depression, according to the Healthy Minds Study.

As a result, more primary and secondary schools are introducing phone-free policies to improve children’s interpersonal skills and mitigate the harms of social media on their developing brains.

At some colleges and universities, students, faculty and administrators have identified opportunities to encourage healthy device habits and promote student success.

By the numbers: Students, in large part, are aware of their heavy device use and its potential link to poor academic outcomes.

A fall 2025 survey by Echelon Insights found that 54 percent of U.S. students say they spend five hours or more on recreational screen time, including scrolling social media, streaming or gaming. Of those students, 18 percent say they spend over six hours on their devices doing non–coursework-related tasks.

Another 2025 study of smartphone use surveyed students in the U.K. and found that among young adults aged 18 to 22, 73 percent spend more than four hours on their phone each day. Over three in four students also believe their smartphone negatively impacts their academic performance.

Finding ways to unplug, however, is difficult.

One research study from San Jose State University found that students who logged daily social media use reported a slight decrease in overall screen time over the course of a month, but simply monitoring screen time didn’t change the students’ high internet use. A Northwestern study of Americans who deactivated their Facebook account found leaving the platform did improve their mental health, but many just spent their time on other platforms rather than go offline entirely.

DIY: A 2023 survey of college students found that over 80 percent of respondents believe colleges and universities should do more to support breaks from technology. For practitioners looking to support students who are glued to their phones, other institutions and experts offer interventions that can encourage them to disconnect from devices.
- Encourage sleep. Excessive screen time is linked to poor health outcomes; it has been shown to disrupt students’ sleep and energy levels as well as their emotional health and cognition. First-year seminar instructors at the New York Film Academy require incoming students to complete a sleep log. Students track how many hours they sleep in a week, and the log provides a space for reflection and links healthy habits to academic and personal performance.
- Provide tech breaks. Fluid Focus’s survey of U.K. students found that 67 percent of students struggle to disconnect while they’re at home studying; an additional 16 percent said they have trouble disconnecting “during class.” Faculty and staff can help make it possible by assigning classroom activities that don’t require a device or creating phone-free class sessions.
- Establish phone-free environments. New York University’s president announced this fall that the university would implement device-free spaces, classes and events at campuses in New York, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi. Wyoming Catholic bans phones outright on campus; it also limits students’ internet access in the dorms to college emails and selected websites for class. Students leave their phones at the student life center and can check them out before they leave town.
- Support student leadership. The fear of missing out can also hinder students from spending less time on their smartphones, according to U.K. survey respondents. Some colleges and universities house student clubs that promote device-free engagement.
- Provide incentives. Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Texas at Austin evaluated how an app that rewards students for staying off their phone during class could change behaviors. They found that app users were more likely to be focused, attend class and be satisfied with their academics, but weren’t necessarily more likely to study using the time saved by staying off their phone.
Do you have a wellness intervention that might help others promote student success? Tell us about it.
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December 18, 2025
Udemy, Coursera to Merge in $2.5B Deal

Coursera and Udemy both launched during the MOOC boom of the early 2010s.

Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library

To keep pace with advances in generative artificial intelligence technology, two big online learning companies are planning to merge in a deal valued at $2.5 billion.

Coursera announced its plans to absorb Udemy in a news release Wednesday; both companies launched during the massive open online course provider boom of the early 2010s. Coursera, which offers a variety of courses, certifications and degrees, expects the all-stock merger to be finalized by the second half of 2026 and to generate more than $1.5 billion in annual revenue.

Combining the two companies is also estimated to save $115 million in operating costs over the next two years and allow for sustained investment in “AI-driven platform innovation, rapid product development, and durable growth initiatives,” according to Coursera’s statement.

Since Open AI launched ChatGPT three years ago, nearly every industry has moved to incorporate generative AI into its operations, and higher education is no exception. Although still contentious, students and faculty are increasingly using generative AI to help with research, writing and studying; a number of universities have launched campuswide AI partnerships with technology companies. In addition, learning management systems are touting their new AI capabilities, and employers say they want AI-ready graduates.

Greg Hart, CEO of Coursera, said the companies are merging to better help learners, instructors, and enterprise, university and government customers keep up with the changes.

“We’re at a pivotal moment in which AI is rapidly redefining the skills required for every job across every industry. Organizations and individuals around the world need a platform that is as agile as the new and emerging skills learners must master,” he said in the release. “By combining the highly complementary strengths of Coursera and Udemy, we will be in an even stronger position to address the global talent transformation opportunity, unlock a faster pace of innovation, and deliver valuable experiences and outcomes for our learners and customers.”

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December 18, 2025
Higher ed should look to limited series podcasts.

Pressing record is not a plan.

Last November, I wrote in Inside Higher Ed about the expanding opportunities for scholars and mission-driven organizations to embrace audio. According to eMarketer, U.S. adults spend about 21 percent of their media time with audio, yet brands devote only about four percent of ad budgets to it. That gap is a missed opportunity and a signal to communicators and institutions ready to build real loyalty through sound.

And since that article was published, I have seen more teams start to recognize and implement audio as an essential channel for embedding important ideas into the culture. University centers, institutes and nonprofits are launching shows, and some are even building podcast “networks.” HigherEdPods, a community for higher ed podcasters, already counts 133 members, and its directory lists 1,205 podcasts from 210 colleges and universities. This is good, and it should definitely be happening.

But the boom in podcasting has also created a new problem: It’s increasingly a one-percenter’s game. A small slice of shows capture most of the listening, and everyone else is left fighting over whatever attention remains. You can see this in higher ed’s own backyard. Click over to the “Podcasts by popularity” tab on HigherEdPods and you’re greeted mostly by celebrity science and psychology shows—Huberman Lab, The Happiness Lab, WorkLife with Adam Grant, No Stupid Questions—and by the usual institutional suspects, the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, and other major brands, at the top. (One delightful outlier in the top 20 is History That Doesn’t Suck, run by a fellow in Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University, a regional public school in my home state of Utah.)

And this pattern isn’t unique to higher ed. As Axios’s 2025 Media Trends report notes, top creators across formats are capturing a disproportionate share of engagement.

The legacy advice to build a podcast audience is to “stick it out”—to publish weekly or in seasons, and to expect it to take 50 to 100 episodes before an audience begins to form. That might be fine advice for an independent creator whose main product is the show.

For institutions, it’s terrible advice. Most don’t have the mandate, appetite, budget or capacity to grind out 100 episodes and hope. A few marquee institutions can launch a weekly interview show and pull in listeners on brand name alone, for a while. But keeping them is another story. For other institutions and centers still building their reputations and networks, asking an audience to commit to an endless series is an even taller order. The appetite for podcasts is still strong; people simply have more, and more polished, choices than ever.

When podcasting got easy, formats got generic.

Part of how we got here is that podcasting became easy, in all the best and worst ways. The tools improved, the price of decent audio gear plummeted, and platforms made it almost frictionless to publish. That lowered barrier is great for access and experimentation. It also means “we should have a podcast” is now a default instinct, not a strategic decision.

The result is a glut of weekly interview shows that all feel vaguely the same: a host, a guest, 45 minutes of conversation and a title that reads like a panel description. When these shows fall flat, they usually fail in one of two ways. They sound like a lecture (overstructured, dense, information-first) or a meeting (under-edited, meandering, inside baseball). Both signal the same problem: no designed listener experience.

What’s been lost in the rush is not enthusiasm or expertise, but form.

Weekly shows encourage institutions to think in terms of slots to be filled rather than journeys to be designed. The question becomes “Who do we put on the podcast next?” instead of “What story are we telling, and who actually needs to hear it?”

There’s a better fit for how institutions work and how people listen: the limited series.

From Endless Feed to Bingeable Arc

A limited series treats audio not as an endless stream but as a complete experience. Instead of promising listeners “new episodes every Tuesday,” you promise them something like:

“Five episodes that will change the way you think about X.”

That simple shift does three important things.

First, it aligns with how people actually listen. A recent Podcast Trends Report found that about 60 percent of listeners say mini-series or seasonal podcasts are easier to complete than ongoing shows. And SiriusXM notes that among binge listeners, roughly 60 percent say they finish an entire series within the first week of its release, and nearly 9 in 10 say they’re happy to listen to episodes that are several months old. In other words, a well-crafted limited series can pull people through quickly and keep working long after launch.

Second, it matches how institutions actually operate. Universities and mission-driven organizations already think in projects and initiatives: a new center launch, a major report, a grant, a campaign, an anniversary. A three- to 10-episode arc maps cleanly onto that reality. It becomes a narrative companion to the work and a way to walk a specific audience through the why, the how and the stakes.

Third, it forces craft. When you only have a few episodes, you can’t afford to wander. You have to choose a central question, decide whose voices matter most and design an arc that gives each episode a clear job to do. You’re not filling airtime; you’re building a story people can binge and remember.

We’re already seeing this in higher education. Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service recently produced Mosaic: 40 Years of the Haas Center, a three-episode limited series on the past, present and future of public service at Stanford, all organized around the question of why service learning is an essential part of student life and how its impact extends beyond the university.

And this isn’t an either/or choice. Limited series can live inside an existing weekly show as clearly branded “special seasons,” giving loyal listeners something to sink their teeth into while also creating a front door for new audiences who want a finite, bingeable story before they decide whether to subscribe. They can also be packaged and repurposed long after the initial release as a project you can point to in syllabi, campaigns, grant reports and fundraising campaigns.

The AI, Unscripted podcast from the University of Maryland shows what this kind of nested limited series can look like. This seven-part arc, designed to guide faculty from AI-curious to AI-confident, lives within the broader Moving the Needle teaching-and-learning podcast. It opens with a “host handover” episode between Moving the Needle host Scott Riley and the AI, Unscripted co-hosts—Mary Crowley-Farrell, Michael Mills and Jennifer Potter—and then rotates those co-hosts through episodes on AI in business, journalism, nursing, psychology, English and graduate education. The episodes are published in the same Moving the Needle feed and clearly tagged as a “Special Edition,” making the series easy to find while still drawing traffic to the main show.

For institutional podcasters, that’s the big opportunity in this crowded, one-percenter landscape. You don’t need to win the “most episodes” game. You need to make a small number of episodes so compelling, so clearly scoped and so bingeable that the right people choose to press play, and then keep going.

Danielle LeCourt is the founder and principal of De LeCourt, a strategic communications studio that helps universities, research institutes and mission-driven organizations turn complex ideas into stories that people care about. A longtime strategist and podcaster, she has worked with institutions such as Harvard, Southern Methodist University, the University of Delaware, and Genentech to elevate the visibility and impact of their work through storytelling and sound.

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December 17, 2025
NSF Lowers Grant Review Requirements, NIH Hunts for Phrases

The NIH and NSF, which both fund research, gave staff new grant review instructions this month.

sorbetto | DigitalVision Vectors

Two major federal research funding agencies are altering their grant review processes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, according to a Dec. 1 internal memo that Science obtained and published, while STAT reported that the National Institutes of Health distributed guidance Friday ordering staff to use a “text analysis tool” to search for certain phrases.

The NSF memo says the government shutdown, which ended in November, hampered its progress toward doling out all its funding by the end of the new fiscal year. It said “we lost critical time” and “now face [a] significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels. In parallel, our workforce has been significantly reduced.”

The memo said the changes “enable Program Officers to expedite award and decline decisions,” including by moving away from the “usual three or more reviews” of proposals. It said that, now, “full proposals requiring external review must be reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers or have a minimum of two reviews. An internal review may substitute for one.”

NSF spokesperson Mike England didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed the memo. He said in an email that the changes are “part of a comprehensive approach to streamlining processes and reducing administrative burden” and “also help expedite the processing of shutdown-related backlogs while maintaining the rigor of the external merit review process.”

As for the NIH guidance, while it instructs program officers on how to review and possibly terminate grants, STAT reported that “some outside experts said the guidance is a positive step, making future terminations more of a dialogue that researchers can push back on.”

But another media outlet, NOTUS, published a more critical article on the guidance, saying the “Trump administration is pausing new funding for National Institutes of Health grants that include terms like ‘health equity’ and ‘structural racism,’ pending review.” NOTUS reported that the guidance says new funding won’t be provided to “misaligned” grants until “all areas of non-alignment have been addressed.”

Both articles said NIH ordered staff to use a “computational text analysis tool” to scan current and new grants for terms that may mean the submissions are misaligned with NIH priorities. (The NSF memo similarly said “Program Officers are also expected to maximize their use of available automated merit review tools, especially tools that identify proposals that should be returned without review.”)

Andrew G. Nixon, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department, which includes NIH, didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed a copy of the NIH guidance. In an email, he wrote that “claims that NIH issued a ‘banned words list’ or conducted word searches to remove specific terms from grants are unequivocally false. NIH has never prohibited the use of any particular words in grant applications.”

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December 17, 2025
Come and be an AI meat widget!
Joining their Big Ten brethren, Purdue University recently announced that they will be adding an “AI working competency” graduation requirement that will go into effect for first-year students entering Fall 2026.

I have some questions. And also some concerns.

Back in October I shared my impressions and experiences having travelled to a number of different institutions that are directly confronting the challenge of how to evolve instructions and operations to deal with the existence of generative AI technology.

I identified a number of common approaches that seemed to be bearing fruit when it comes to engaging and energizing the entire university community at meeting these challenges.

This is, above all, a chance to refresh and renew the work of the institution and in the places operating in that spirit I’ve witnessed considerable hope for a good future.
1. Administrations must lead, but they should lead from a position of institutional values that are centered in the discussion.
2. The challenge must be viewed as a collaboration between administration, faculty, staff and, yes, students, where each constituent group has an opportunity to articulate their views under the umbrella of those root institutional values.
1. As part of this process, there must be space for difference that preserves individual freedoms. Faculty should both have the resources necessary to experiment with AI use and the power to refuse its integration. Students must ultimately be respected as the chief agents behind their own educations.
2. The discussion must go beyond merely adding another untethered competency. As I say in that previous column, we must “do more than doing school.” Layering AI on top of the status quo is a missed opportunity to reimagine the work of teaching and learning in ways that will make institutions far more resilient to whatever additional technological changes are coming.
Working from the reporting at Forbes, I can declare with some confidence that what Purdue is proposing is the opposite of these emergent best practices that I have seen elsewhere.

Here is how the initiative is characterized:

The requirement will be embedded into every undergraduate program at Purdue, but it won’t be done in a “one-size-fits-all” manner. Instead, the Board is delegating authority to the provost, who will work with the deans of all the academic colleges to develop discipline-specific criteria and proficiency standards for the new campus-wide requirement. Chiang [Purdue President Mung Chiang] said students will have to demonstrate a working competence through projects that are tailored to the goals of individual programs. The intent is to not require students to take more credit hours, but to integrate the new AI expectation into existing academic requirements.

This is, in a word, impossible. At least it’s impossible in any way that’s genuinely meaningful or useful to students.

Purdue has over 40,000 undergraduate students. They have more than 200 majors. They offer thousands of different courses. They have thousands of faculty. The expectation is that specific proficiency standards will be created for every single one of these programs, and after that, students will have to be held accountable to these proficiencies by next Fall by doing “projects.”

Does that sound possible? Because it’s not.

As a source of comparison, consider how long it takes to redo an institution’s general education curriculum which involves many fewer courses and fewer faculty.

Consider, also, as should be clear to anyone paying attention, we “don’t know how to teach AI.”

The fact that we don’t know how to teach AI is why the institutions engaging in the best practices have provided resources to the people best placed to figure out what kinds of proficiencies, experiences and projects may be useful, the faculty. They are treating the problem seriously as a challenge for the university to figure out how to serve its constituents.

Purdue is offering a press release, not a plan. It’s not even a policy. They are cooking up a recipe for chaos and demoralization, for half-assed B.S. meant to satisfy a bureaucratic box-checking exercise. This is serious stuff, and Purdue is treating it unseriously.

It’s worth asking why. One reason may be that Purdue is well-enmeshed with their corporate partners (primarily Google) and locking in experiences that use the products of these partners is pleasing to those partners. Purdue Provost Patrick Wolfe said, “it was ‘absolutely imperative that a requirement like this is well informed by continual input from industry partners and employers more broadly,’ and therefore he has ‘asked that each of our academic colleges establishes a standing industry advisory board focusing on employers’ AI competency needs and that these boards are used to help ensure a continual, annual refresh of our AI curriculum and requirements to ensure that we keep our discipline-specific criteria continually current.”

But guess who else doesn’t know what AI competencies employees need? Employers!

And guess who else doesn’t know what we’re supposed to be doing with this stuff? The tech developers themselves! Microsoft recently “scaled back” its AI sales targets because “nobody is using copilot.”

Purdue is sending clear signals to both students and employers that they are in the business of producing certified meat widgets for the AI-mediated future, even as we have no idea what that future may entail. There may be some students who find this proposition attractive, but it is not a leap in logic to imagine that the endpoint of this future is one where large, costly entities like Purdue University are not a necessary part of the equation.

Also, I think there is significant evidence that AI meat widget is not what students are looking for from their university experiences.

I will lay down a marker and predict there will be much sound and fury to meet the demands of the board, but it will signify nothing.

There is no need to waste everyone’s time chasing phantoms. We know how to work this problem, and what Purdue is doing ain’t it.
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December 17, 2025
Turning Point’s Student Membership Keeps Growing

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed Sept. 10.

Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Three months after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the footprint of the right-wing youth organization he founded continues to grow on college campuses.

This week, Turning Point USA chapters at both Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Oklahoma reported membership surges. According to the Indiana Daily Student (IDS) and Indy Star, IU’s chapter says its membership has tripled this fall, from 180 to 363. At the University of Oklahoma—which put an instructor on leave after the Turning Point chapter accused them of “viewpoint discrimination”—the group’s membership has grown from 15 to 2,000 over the past year, NBC reported.

Those increases follow other local media reports about new chapters and membership growth at scores of other universities across the country, including the University of Missouri, and Vanderbilt and Brigham Young Universities. Within eight days of Kirk’s death, Turning Point said it received messages from 62,000 students interested in starting a new chapter or getting involved with one.

“I think that our club has kind of become a beacon for conservatives,” a Turning Point chapter member told IDS, Indiana University at Bloomington’s campus newspaper. “So, after his death, more people showed up, more people got involved, and it was really nice to kind of see a scene in the way people wanted to get involved.”

Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012, with the mission of “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.”

He gained notoriety in conservative circles by traveling to college campuses across the country, challenging students to prove wrong his conservative stances on topics such as race, gender, abortion and immigration.

On Sept. 10, Kirk was speaking to a crowd at Utah Valley University when a gunman fatally shot him in the neck. After his death, Trump and his allies moved to canonize Kirk as an exemplar of civic debate—and called to punish anyone who publicly disagreed. Numerous colleges and universities have since suspended or fired faculty and staff who criticized Kirk for his political views.

Although some faculty and students have objected to new Turning Point chapters, the students growing the organization insist they’re committed to considering all perspectives.

“You have a place here, you’ll always have a place here,” Jack Henning, president of Indiana University’s Turning Point chapter, told IDS. “We don’t discriminate against any viewpoints at all, we debate them. That’s what American democracy was built upon.”

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December 17, 2025