Tag: Events

Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, DEI

After yet another rocky year for higher education, student success administrators retain high confidence in their institution’s core mission: Some 95 percent rate the quality of undergraduate education delivered as good or excellent, according to Inside Higher Ed’s second annual Survey of College and University Student Success Administrators with Hanover Research.

About the Survey

On Wednesday, Dec. 10, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a free webcast to discuss the results of the 2025 Survey of College and University Student Success Administrators. Please register here—and plan on bringing your questions about student success going into 2026.

This survey was conducted Aug. 20–Oct. 6 with Hanover Research. Respondents number 204 student success leaders, most of whom work in student affairs at the executive level at public and private nonprofit institutions. The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus seven percentage points. A copy of the free report can be downloaded here.

This independent editorial survey was made possible by support from the Gates Foundation and Studiosity.

Most student success administrators (85 percent) also report strong feelings of connection to students served, and nearly as many say they’re satisfied in their roles. Yet leaders continue to worry about the forces holding students back. Selecting up to three options from a longer list, administrators cite mental health challenges (51 percent describe this as a top challenge), financial constraints (49 percent) and lack of adequate preparation before college (48 percent) as the top barriers to student success at their institution. Community college leaders are disproportionately concerned about students needing to work while enrolled (67 percent).

Just about half of all administrators believe their institution is highly responsive to student needs for flexibility, such as in times of personal or academic crises.

A larger share of respondents, 61 percent, believe their institution is highly effective in prioritizing student success. Just 35 percent say it’s highly effective in using student success data to drive decisions, however. Both of these figures are similar to last year’s survey, meaning the gap between aspiration and data-driven change remains.

Student affairs leaders who responded to NASPA’s own annual Top Issues in Student Affairs survey this year flagged “using dashboards and other data communication tools to help senior administrators translate data into actionable insights for decision-making” as a top issue for institutions, behind only “protecting the institution against cyberattacks” and “navigating political and legislative pressures affecting institutional policies and practices.”

Colleges can certainly do more to harness the extraordinary number of student data points available to them every day. But Amelia Parnell, NASPA’s president, told Inside Higher Ed that she’d give student success leaders “a little more credit” for their use of data—especially the qualitative kind.

“We need both quantitative data to see scale and impact and qualitative data to understand the nuances,” including around learning and engagement, she said. “I think professionals have quite a bit of qualitative context about students’ experiences because they spend a lot of time connecting directly with them.”

Other top areas of concern for student success administrators include affordability, artificial intelligence and policy impacts on campus life, finds Inside Higher Ed’s survey.

Affordability and Value

A third of student success administrators say that their trust in higher education has waned in recent years, and many point to concerns about affordability (64 percent) and long-term value of a degree (62 percent) as top drivers of declining public confidence. Leaders also highlight tighter alignment between academic programs and career pathways as a key lever for rebuilding trust.

About six in 10 respondents are highly confident that their institution is actively working to keep costs affordable, with public institution leaders especially likely to say so (69 percent versus 49 percent of private nonprofit peers).

But just 11 percent of leaders think students at their institution clearly understand the total cost of attendance, beyond tuition. They raise similar concerns about students’ awareness and understanding of emergency funding resources at their institution.

In Inside Higher Ed’s main Student Voice survey this year, just 27 percent of students said they understand the total cost of attendance fully and can budget appropriately. More than three in five didn’t know if their college offers emergency aid. Yet 61 percent of student success administrators say this kind of help is available at their institution.

Some additional context—and evidence of misalignment between student experience and administrator perception: In Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers, most CBOs (88 percent) said that their institution is transparent about the full, net cost of attendance, including tuition discounts and counting fees and other expenses—though just 42 percent said this of colleges and universities as a whole. Most CBOs also said that their institution’s net price is sufficiently affordable.

Parnell of NASPA noted that financial aid “is but one part of the cost of attendance discussion for some students.” But she added that financial aid offers represent an opportunity for colleges to improve clarity and transparency around total cost—something the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and others have urged.

Preparing Students for an AI Future

Just 2 percent of student success leaders say their institution is very effective in helping students understand how, when and whether to use generative artificial intelligence in academic settings. On promoting academic integrity, specifically, 77 percent endorse educating students about ethical AI use rather than emphasizing punitive measures. Faculty and staff development and efforts to standardize use policies also rank high.

In the Student Voice survey, just 13 percent of students said they didn’t know when, how and whether to use generative AI for coursework—but most of the remainder attributed their knowledge to individual faculty efforts rather than broader institutional ones.

Student success administrators also describe a gap between the extent to which high-impact teaching practices, such as those endorsed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, are highly encouraged at their institution and widely adopted (65 percent versus 36 percent, respectively). And while 87 percent agree that students graduate from their college ready to succeed in today’s job market, half (51 percent) believe their institution should focus more on helping students find paid internships and other experiential learning opportunities.

Tawnya Means, an innovation consultant who recently joined Bowling Green State University and its Schmidthorst College of Business as a strategic innovation and AI adviser, said that all three of these concerns—lack of institutional guidance on AI, high-impact teaching practices and other opportunities for experiential learning and internships—are connected.

“Schools treating AI as a catalyst for pedagogical redesign are simultaneously increasing high-impact practices and preparing students for AI-augmented careers,” she said. And institutions doing this well are using some common strategies: making faculty development about pedagogy, not just “AI compliance,” and designing assignments where AI supports real learning. Unpacking the latter point, Means praised approaches that are experiential, teach discipline-specific or contextual AI use versus abstract rules, and mirror actual workplaces.

While business schools have long understood the power of “messy real-world case studies,” Means said they’re ripe for use across undergraduate education in the generative AI era and “resist simple AI shortcuts.”

Parnell suggested on-campus employment as yet another way to provide “work experience and support students in their learning journey.”

On AI specifically, Asim Ali, executive director of the Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Auburn University, who’s worked with many institutions on faculty development, said the “biggest gap I see is not engaging students in the process.”

At Auburn, he said, student government leaders have taken a “focused interest directly in shaping how we support GenAI learning.” And in discussions between student leaders and faculty, “both groups emphasized that students must also take responsibility for learning the ethics and appropriate use of GenAI.”

The biggest gap I see is not engaging students in the process.”

—Asim Ali, executive director of the Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Auburn University

Financial worries and uncertainty about the future top the list of students’ postcollege stressors, as ranked by student success administrators. And just a quarter of these leaders say their institution makes postgraduate outcomes are easily accessible.

Policy Impacts and Campus Climate

Almost all leaders say students feel welcomed, valued and supported on their campuses, and 87 percent say their institution is doing a good or excellent job promoting a positive campus climate. Yet regional differences emerge: Leaders in the South are somewhat less likely than peers elsewhere to say their institution is highly effective in encouraging diverse perspectives among students.

Nearly two in three leaders (62 percent) say recent federal restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have negatively impacted students, and the rate is higher among public institution leaders than their private nonprofit peers.

In the Student Voice survey, 48 percent of students said such changes had negatively impacted their college experience or that of peers; most of the remainder saw no change, rather than a positive one.

Most administrators also believe new student aid policies, such as those included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will limit access to college rather than expand it. And many already report moderate (39 percent) or significant (29 percent) declines in international student enrollments tied to recent federal actions, such as visa appointment restrictions and targeted actions at specific institutions.

Leaders estimate that 40 percent of students participate in no extracurricular activities, a figure that rises to 67 percent among community college administrators. Respondents are mostly like to say involvement would increase if students saw a clear connection between activities and their career goals.

For institutions struggling to get students in involved, Parnell highlighted the importance of effectively communicating and delivering available activities to students: Are any activities at community colleges, which serve many working students, available after 5 p.m., for example, she asked?

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November 6, 2025
International Graduate Student Enrollment Drops

Master’s programs at some college saw steep declines in international student enrollment.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | skynesher/E+/Getty Images

Federal actions to limit immigration have affected many international students’ decision to enroll at U.S. colleges and universities this fall, with several institutions reporting dramatic declines in international student enrollment.

New data from the Department of Homeland Security from the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System for October shows an overall 1 percent decline of all international students in the U.S. SEVIS data includes all students on F-1 and M-1 visas, including those enrolled in primary and secondary school, language training, flight school, and other vocational programs.

According to DHS data, bachelor’s degree enrollment among international students is down 1 percent from October 2024 to October 2025; master’s degree enrollment is down 2 percent, as well. Associate degree programs have 7 percent more international students in October 2025 than the year prior, and international doctoral students are up 2 percent.

Campus-level data paints a more dramatic picture; an Inside Higher Ed analysis of self-reported graduate international student enrollment numbers from nine colleges and universities finds an average year-over-year decline of 29 percent.

Some groups, including NAFSA, the association for international educators, have published predictions of how international student enrollment would impact colleges’ enrollment and financial health. NAFSA expected to see a 15 percent decline across the sector and greater drops for master’s degree programs.

“Master’s [programs] have been very hit. And in addition to master’s being hit, programs like computer sciences and STEM in particular have been mostly affected,” NAFSA CEO Fanta Aw said in a Sept. 19 interview with Inside Higher Ed.

At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for example, master’s degree enrollment dropped 22 percent from fall 2024. Ph.D. program enrollment declined only 1 percent compared to the year prior, according to university data.

While more selective or elite institutions have mostly weathered enrollment declines among undergraduate international students—reporting little or no change to their enrollment numbers this fall—Aw says graduate student enrollment is down everywhere.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, for example, reported that international students made up 26 percent of its incoming master’s in business administration class, down five percentage points from the year prior, as reported by Poets and Quants (Poets and Quants is also owned by Times Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed’s parent company). At Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, 47 percent of the incoming class in 2024 hailed from other nations, but that figure dropped to 38 percent this fall.

Because master’s degrees are shorter programs than undergraduate ones, averaging two years, Aw anticipates universities to see even more dramatic declines from 2024 in fall 2026.

“The current environment is still too uncertain for [graduate] students to even consider potentially applying,” Aw said. “You cannot have enrollment if they’re not even applying.”

Of colleges in the data set, Northwest Missouri State University reported the greatest year-over-year decline in graduate student enrollment, falling from 557 international students in fall 2024 to 125 in fall 2025. In April, Northwest Missouri State reported that 43 of its international students had their SEVIS statuses revoked; 38 of them were on optional practical training.

At that time, Northwest Missouri State encouraged students who lost their SEVIS status to depart the U.S. immediately “to avoid accruing unlawful presence,” according to a memo from President Lance Tatum published by Fox 4 Kansas City. The university declined to comment for this piece.

Nationwide, international students make up 22 percent of all full-time graduate students, according to Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data. International students often pay higher tuition rates compared to their domestic peers, and some colleges rely on international students to boost graduate program enrollment.

The dramatic changes in enrollment numbers are having budgetary impacts on some colleges.

At Georgetown University, foreign graduate student enrollment dropped 20 percent, which was expected but steeper than anticipated, according to a memo from interim university president Robert M. Groves. In April, Georgetown cut $100 million from its budget due to loss of federal research dollars and international student revenue, and Groves said more cuts may be needed in December.

DePaul University in Chicago saw a 63 percent year-over-year decline in new graduate students from other nations—a sharp drop that administrators, similarly, did not anticipate in this year’s budget.

As more colleges solidify their fall enrollment numbers, the sectorwide decline in foreign students has become more clear.

Inside Higher Ed’s initial data found colleges reported, on average, a 13 percent decrease in international student enrollment. The median year-over-year change was a 9 percent drop.

Small colleges saw significant changes. Bethany Lutheran College in Minnesota, with a total head count of 900 students, reported a 50 percent growth in international students. At the other end, the University of Hartford in Connecticut lost half of its international students, only expecting 50 instead of 100 this fall.

Community colleges are also feeling the loss of international students. Bellevue College in Washington State, a leading destination for international students in the two-year sector, reported a 56 percent year-over-year decline in enrollment.

Southeast Missouri State reported a 63 percent decline in international students, with 494 individuals unable to secure visas, according to a university statement.

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November 6, 2025
Former Texas A&M President Received $3.5M Exit Package

When former Texas A&M University president Mark Welsh stepped down suddenly in September amid a swirling academic freedom controversy, he received an exit package of more than $3.5 million, according to public records obtained by The Texas Tribune.

Welsh, who became president in 2023 after his predecessor, Kathy Banks, stepped down following a controversy of her own, pressed the Texas A&M System Board of Trustees to pay out the remainder of his contract through December 2028, according to recently unearthed records. He earned a $1.1 million base salary with annual retention and housing bonuses of $150,000 each.

Welsh was one of several Texas A&M employees felled by controversy after a conservative state lawmaker accused the university of pushing “leftist DEI and transgender indoctrination” following an exchange between a student and a professor caught on video. In that video, the student objected to a professor’s statement that there are more than two genders. The incident, which the student captured, took place in a children’s literature class.

Welsh initially defended the professor in a conversation with the student but later backtracked, removing the professor and two administrators from their duties over their handling of the issue.

He argued that the incident was not about academic freedom but rather “academic responsibility” and that “the [College of Arts and Sciences] continued to teach content that was inconsistent with the published course description for another course this fall,” prompting his actions.

Despite his reversal, demands for Welsh to resign prevailed.

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November 6, 2025
4 Ways to Support Military Students
An estimated 820,000 students in higher education are military-affiliated, including current and former active-duty service members and their families. These students are more likely to be first-generation or parenting students and often hold competing priorities while pursuing a degree, which can put them at risk of stopping out.

A Nov. 4 webinar by the American Council on Education solicited insights from former and current service members on their experiences navigating higher education and how campuses can improve supports.

“Veterans are not a monolith; they don’t want pity or lower bars,” said Roman Ortega, chief executive officer and founder of Global Integrity Consulting and a member of the Army Reserve. “They want colleges to treat them like they’re mission-driven adults and to remove the friction that keeps them from showing what they already know how to do.”

Veterans shared four key themes that could enhance military-affiliated students’ college experience.
1. College Navigation
About two-thirds of student veterans are first-generation college students, according to data from Student Veterans of America. First-generation students, in general, often lack cultural capital and insight into the bureaucracy of higher education; for former service members, college can be even more mystifying. Effective advising can make a difference, veterans said during the webinar.

“I was enrolled at Northern Illinois University. I didn’t know what to do or where to go,” Ortega said. “I saw a sign for Army ROTC; I walked right into the office and I said, ‘Hey, I really don’t know what I’m doing here, I don’t know where any of my classes are, I don’t know how to be advised on any of this. They said, ‘Hey, we’ll help you out.’”

Bringing in other military-affiliated students can be one way to boost engagement; several veterans mentioned they enrolled in higher education because of positive peer pressure from other service members.

“I didn’t even know what questions to ask. I just knew my peers were going and I wanted to be a part of that,” said Lola Howard, an Air Force veteran and doctoral student at Columbia Southern University.

Not every branch of the military looks at continuing education in the same way, which can have an impact on participation, veterans noted. “The Air Force, the Navy very much culturally encourage continued education in the service,” noted Lukas Simianer, an Army veteran and chief executive officer and founder of VetClaims.ai. “If you would have told the commander of Fort Bragg that you were going to go to college, they would have laughed.”

The University of Texas, San Antonio, has a dedicated first-year seminar for student veterans, which helps them establish a sense of belonging early in their college career and provides them with personalized assistance in obtaining credit for military service.
1. Credit for Prior Learning
Military-affiliated students often enroll in higher education with a wealth of experiences that can translate directly into course learning outcomes. ACE and other organizations have worked to streamline credit for prior learning offerings through the joint service transcript, which can help make college more accessible and affordable for veterans.

“It was very clear what the equivalent courses were that were off of my degree plan,” said Jonny Coreson, a Navy veteran and director of workforce strategy at the Learning Economy Foundation. “It was an opportunity to see that I had few courses [left] to attain an associate’s degree, but I literally had to see it.”

However, not every student veteran is eligible for or benefits from CPL in the same way, Simianer said.

“Be prepared that some of your veterans who have arguably had some of the hardest deployments, hardest service life, most wear and tear on their bodies, they may have the most courses to fulfill,” Simianer said. “Being really good at handling a machine gun does not really translate [to degree programs].”
1. Flexibility
Active-duty service members can experience frequent change as part of their service, including deployment or relocation. Student veterans are also often more likely to be parenting students or working, and these competing priorities can make pursuing a degree more challenging.

Creating a safe space for students to share their obstacles to success can mitigate disruptions to learning.

“As a student, it was important for me to communicate up front what was going on with my life, with my counselor, with my faculty, staff,” Howard said. “There were times that my house is being packed up and I’m trying to finish an eight-page paper and I just had to let my professor know, ‘I’m going from this time zone to that time zone—I’m just asking for a little flexibility.’”
1. Resource Hubs
Some colleges have created dedicated spaces on campus to centralize resources and connect military students with one another. Simianer, an older student who had won a Purple Heart and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, remembers looking at his peers and feeling like he couldn’t relate to traditional students. But getting connected to his college’s student veteran hub changed that.

“Having a place where I could be, where the humor we had would fly or the conversations you needed to have could happen, is the most powerful thing that I am grateful for,” Simianer said. “I would not have continued an education, probably, if I would not have had that at the beginning.”

Javier Marin, a Marine Corps veteran and consultant at Vantage Point Consulting, said his college’s student veteran hub was particularly impactful because it connected him to staff.

“I found that the hardest part wasn’t the academics; it was having a good support system,” Marin said. “You’re working, you’re going to school, you’re being a parent, you have a mortgage—everything that goes along with transitioning and navigating that space without your old support system, which was the military.”

How does your campus seek to improve the college experience for military affiliated students? Tell us more.
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November 6, 2025
U Austin Announces $100M Gift, End to Tuition “Forever”

The University of Austin announced Wednesday that Republican megadonor Jeff Yass is donating $100 million, it’s “ending tuition forever” and it will also “never take government money.” At the same time, it said Yass’s gift represents the first third of “a $300 million campaign to build a university that sets students free.”

University president Carlos Carvalho told Inside Higher Ed he doesn’t plan for this $300 million to become an endowment meant to last forever. Instead, he said it will be invested but spent down as a “bridge” until the institution produces enough donating alumni to keep tuition free. He estimated this will take 25 years, “give or take.”

“We understand there’s risk in this approach,” Carvalho said. But he said he believes in the product, calling his students his “equity partners”—but stressed that “all they owe is their greatness.”

When the institution welcomed its first class of students last fall, it said annual tuition was $32,000, but Carvalho said nobody has ever paid tuition. The university still hasn’t earned accreditation, which can take years, but the state of Texas allowed it to grant degrees and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, an accrediting body, has granted it candidate status on its path to recognition. The university says it expects to complete “the first accreditation cycle” between 2028 and 2031.

Yass—a billionaire co-founder of financial trading firm Susquehanna International Group and a significant investor in TikTok owner ByteDance—was very recently in the news for other gifts. He had backed Republicans in a bid to end the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s Democratic majority, but voters reappointed all three justices up for re-election to another decade on the bench (though one is required to retire in a few years). He’s also provided millions in support of private K–12 school vouchers and electing Republicans to Congress.

He told The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news of the University of Austin gift, that he’s been impressed by the university, wants to eliminate stress for parents and supports separation between education and government. His donation to the fledgling institution—which Carvalho said is atop Yass’s previous $36 million gift—is another example of its continued support from prominent conservatives. Carvalho said the university has raised more than $300 million, including the $100 million going toward the new $300 million campaign. The Journal reported that real estate developer Harlan Crow, who controversially funded trips for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir and friend to Vice President JD Vance, have been among the donors.

Such donations may enable the university to do what other universities can’t: rely neither on student, nor state, nor federal contributions to survive. Instead, the university says it’s banking on alumni sustaining it. The first group of students is slated to graduate in 2028.

“Our bet: Create graduates so exceptional they’ll pay it forward when they succeed, financing the tuition of the next generation,” the university said in its announcement. “When our students build important companies, defend our nation, advance scientific frontiers, build families, and create works that elicit awe, they’ll remember who made their excellence possible. And they’ll give back.”

It went on to say that “other Americans will take notice” and invest. “Every other college gets paid whether students succeed or fail. At UATX, if our graduates don’t become essential to American excellence—and if their work doesn’t inspire others to fund this mission—we’re done.”

Some higher ed observers are skeptical. Mark DeFusco, a principal at Prometheus Education, which performs mergers and acquisitions for troubled colleges, said running a “serious college … a college as we know it” on just a $300 million fund would be “nearly impossible.”

“If they can pull it off, God bless ’em,” DeFusco said. “While I really understand their urge, the practicality doesn’t seem like it’s possible, and I’d like to see the details.”

Carvalho said the university currently has 150 students in its freshman and sophomore classes, and he plans to grow total enrollment to 400 to 500 for now. “We need this first phase of growth to be small,” he said.

“We talk about building the Navy SEALs of the mind,” he said. “The Navy SEALs are not a class of thousands and thousands.”

He said the university offers courses in, among other things, computer science, journalism and prelaw, and wants to launch programs in all three areas. One of the university’s founders is Bari Weiss, who also founded The Free Press and recently became editor in chief of CBS News.

Other universities have also tried to jettison tuition in favor of alumni support. In 2021, Hope College in Michigan aimed to raise $1 billion for its endowment in order to go tuition-free. As part of that plan, students would commit to donate to the college after graduation. The first cohort graduated this past spring, and 126 students have participated over the first four years, according to an annual report from the college. Roughly 85 percent of the graduating seniors and 70 percent of freshmen through juniors have donated.

Neal Hutchens, a university research professor and faculty member in the University of Kentucky’s College of Education, said the no-tuition, no-government-funding plan raises questions about how large UATX could grow and whether its model could be replicated elsewhere.

He also noted that the university’s marketing of itself as against the grain of academe isn’t unique. A video on UATX’s homepage critiques “coddling,” “virtue signaling” and the “disastrous” state of higher ed “in the Western world,” complete with images of a building with a rainbow-colored sign above an entrance, people wearing cloth masks while blowing into instruments and pro-Palestine protesters being arrested. In the video, Weiss says to understand why “the museums you love, and the publishing houses you love, and the newspapers you used to trust” are “hollowed out, you have to look at the nucleation point for this—and that is the university.”

Hutchens said New College of Florida, a public institution taken over by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s conservative board appointees, appears to be charting “a similar iconoclastic path.” He noted New College took a public stand early against what some call wokeness.

“That’s not necessarily been an easy fix for New College to just automatically thrive,” he said. He said he’s curious if such institutions are going after the same donors, and they may eventually be competing more with one another than the institutions they’re setting themselves apart from.

However, Hutchens said, UATX might be able to gain currency in the tech industry and make further inroads with people with deep pockets.

“It doesn’t take too many $100 million gifts to add up to a pretty good endowment,” he said.

Asked about assertions that his university pushes conservative ideology, Carvalho said, “We have a core curriculum that is teaching the best that has been done and has been seen in the Western tradition,” from philosophy to science, literature and more. He said none of those things are conservative.

“We do have an institution that’s very patriotic,” he said, adding that if that’s a “conservative statement these days—again, not my choice.”

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November 5, 2025
University President Elected Lt. Gov. of New Jersey

Caldwell has served as president of Centenary University since 2023.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

As running mate to Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, Centenary University president Dale Caldwell, a Democrat, won the New Jersey gubernatorial race on Tuesday in a 56 percent–to–43 percent victory over Republicans Jack Ciattarelli and James Gannon.

“Every single day of this campaign has been a reminder of what a special place New Jersey is,” Caldwell wrote on X Wednesday. “I’m humbled and honored to be your next Lieutenant Governor.”

Caldwell has served as president of Centenary, a Methodist university in Hackettstown, N.J., since 2023. Prior to assuming the presidency, he served on Centenary’s board, and he is also a pastor at Covenant United Methodist Church in Plainfield. Caldwell was the university’s first Black president and in January will become New Jersey’s first Black lieutenant governor.

“Centenary University would like to congratulate Gov. Elect Mikie Sherrill and Lt. Gov. Elect Dale Caldwell, Ed.D., on their victory in the recent New Jersey gubernatorial election,” university officials wrote in a statement Wednesday.

Centenary officials have not yet announced who will serve as interim president or their plans to find a permanent replacement when Caldwell departs in January.

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November 5, 2025
Partial Victory for Freedom of the Press at Indiana U

The decision by Indiana University administrators to allow the Indiana Daily Student newspaper to resume occasional publication is a victory for the advocates of free expression on campus. The Student Press Law Center, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the American Association of University Professors, along with student newspapers across the country, spoke out loudly in defense of Indiana student journalists. Particular praise goes to the students at the Purdue Exponent, which printed the censored homecoming issue of the Indiana Daily Student and distributed it around Bloomington, Ind., in solidarity with fellow journalists.

It’s rare for administrators to quickly reverse course and effectively admit they made a mistake. But while we need to celebrate a win, we also need to recognize how partial and temporary it was—and the enormous threat to freedom of the press that still exists at Indiana and beyond.

What Indiana University administrators did was one of the worst attacks on a free press at a public university in the history of American higher education. It combined three of the most terrible types of censorship of the press: 1) imposing massive content restrictions by attempting to ban the newspaper from printing any news, 2) banning the newspaper completely from being printed when the editors refused to obey these unlawful demands and 3) firing the professor who served as newspaper adviser, student media director Jim Rodenbush, for defending freedom of the press.

While the first two forms of repression have now been (temporarily) lifted, the last one still remains. When the newspaper adviser who was fired for opposing censorship remains fired, it’s still censorship. And Chancellor David Reingold’s decision to allow the newspaper to publish still includes severe budget cutbacks and elimination of university support for the publication.

Suppression of a free press at Indiana is linked to its broader repression of free expression. FIRE recently ranked Indiana University as the worst public university in America for free speech (and the student newspaper’s article about this ranking reportedly was one of the reasons why the administration cracked down on the free press). The repression by Indiana administrators has been astonishing. In December 2023, Indiana University suspended professor Abdulkader Sinno for the crime of reserving a room for an event critical of Israel. At the same time, the administration also canceled its art museum exhibit of abstract art paintings by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian American artist who had been critical of the Israeli government. In 2024, Indiana officials banned all expression on campus between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., which a federal judge paused while an ACLU lawsuit against the censorship continues.

In my 2020 report for the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement about freedom of the press on campus, I noted some of the severe threats to free expression: punishing independent media advisers who fail to rein in student newspapers, censoring campus papers directly, restricting access to campus, limiting the rights of faculty and staff to speak to reporters, and many more. But perhaps the greatest threat to journalism on campus is economic, when student newspapers are defunded and eventually decline from a thousand budget cuts.

The dire economic environment for newspapers across the country has also affected student publications. The drop in advertising revenue has hit campus newspapers, and many universities would rather put resources into public relations staff under the control of administrators rather than support student journalists who challenge them.

What universities can do to respect freedom of the press: First, do no harm. Stop trying to censor newspapers. Enact free expression policies that protect freedom of the campus press and the rights of their advisers and sources.

Second, integrate journalism into the curriculum. Offer classes about journalism, but recognize that many different classes (and especially writing-focused classes) can encourage students to publish their work, both online and in print. Good journalism is just good writing, and colleges should encourage students to publicly express their ideas on a wide range of topics.

Third, support campus journalism financially. Colleges ought to provide a substantial fund to campus newspapers to publish ads promoting events and activities on campus. By allocating this money for newspaper ads and then allowing campus programs and student organizations to freely use it for their events, colleges can promote what they are doing while supporting independent journalism. The belief that student newspapers shouldn’t be subsidized and must independently finance every word they print is a strange concept for colleges that are devoted to subsidizing the free exchange of ideas.

Student newspapers are the most important extramural activity on college campuses, and more essential than much of the courses, research and administrative work that receives vastly greater funding. A campus newspaper is more than just a critical source of information about what happens at colleges: It’s an education for writers and readers alike. It’s a bridge between the campus and the community, where growing news deserts make student papers more important than ever. And the campus newspaper is a symbol of intellectual debate, the most public place at a college where ideas are exchanged and arguments between different viewpoints are heard.

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November 5, 2025
UC to Stop Funding Systemwide Postdoc Program

To date, the system has spent $162 million on fellows’ salaries, averaging about $7.36 million per year.

Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Starting next fall, the University of California system office will no longer pay for the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a fellowship established in 1984 to encourage more women and minority Ph.D.s to pursue academic careers.

The fellowship program, available at all 10 UC campuses and three national laboratories, has inspired numerous copycats at other state universities, including at the University of Maryland, the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, the University of Michigan and Pennsylvania State University. But its focus on recruiting diverse candidates has also been criticized by conservatives who claim it’s a pipeline for young hires with radical leftist politics.

The UC system office will stop providing financial support for the program beginning with fellows hired after summer 2025, a system spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. Since 2003, the UC system office has paid the $85,000 salaries of PPFP fellows for their first five years on the faculty; then the UC campus where they are employed takes over. To date, the system has spent $162 million on PPFP faculty salaries, averaging about $7.36 million per year.

“Due to the severe budget constraints currently facing UC, the PPFP faculty hiring incentive is sunsetting as of fall 2025,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “While the University will continue to provide five years of salary support to PPFP fellows hired by summer 2025 and in earlier years, no new incentives will be provided going forward. Campuses will still be able to hire PPFP fellows as part of their normal search and hiring processes, but the additional financial contribution from the incentive program will no longer be available.”

The University of California system is facing a decline in state funding and pressure from the Trump administration to implement a number of changes that weaken or abolish diversity, equity and inclusion practices. In March, former system president Michael Drake announced a systemwide hiring freeze and other cost-saving measures. At the same time, the system board prohibited campus officials from asking job candidates to submit a diversity statement as part of the hiring process. In August, the Trump administration demanded that the University of California, Los Angeles, pay a $1.2 billion fine for allegedly failing to address antisemitism on campus, as well as overhaul numerous policies related to admissions, hiring, athletics, scholarships, gender identity and discrimination.

In a thread posted to Bluesky, Sarah Roberts, a professor of information studies, gender studies and labor studies at UCLA, called the PPFP program a “jewel in the crown for faculty development and recruitment at the University of California.”

“To my mind, not only is this a direct attack by a UC central admin content to capitulate and emulate the federal position that arrived via extortion letter, it is part of a much larger plan, congruent with UC central admin, of weakening and eliminating faculty governance and power,” Roberts wrote about the decision to end funding for the program.

Despite its origins, the PPFP no longer explicitly seeks women and minority candidates and instead considers applicants “whose life experiences and educational background would help to broaden the perspectives represented in the faculty of the University of California,” according to the website.

This is a recent change; in 2024, the PPFP webpage included the tagline “advancing excellence through faculty diversity.” The criteria also stated that “faculty reviewers will evaluate candidates according to their academic accomplishments, the strength of their research proposal, and their potential for faculty careers that will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity through their teaching, research and service. Faculty reviewers also may consider the mentor’s potential to work productively with the candidate and commitment to equity and diversity in higher education.”

The PPFP, and fellow-to-faculty programs at large, have drawn criticism from conservatives including John D. Sailer, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has written extensively on the programs. He believes they allow universities to recruit scholars who “embrace positions on the fringes of leftist politics.”

“Ideological screening has downstream consequences for our sensemaking institutions,” Sailer wrote in a February article. “Ultimately, the fellow-to-faculty model pushes conformity across once-distinct academic fields. As the UC professor put it, ‘it erodes disciplinary boundaries,’ flattening all forms of inquiry into a discussion of race and oppression.”

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November 5, 2025
UC Can Hire Undocumented Students

The California Supreme Court chose not to review a lower court’s decision that concluded the University of California system is discriminating against undocumented students by not allowing them to work in on-campus jobs. As a result, the lower court decision stands, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The California Supreme Court’s move not to take up the case is the latest development in a lawsuit filed by a University of California, Los Angeles, alumnus and lecturer last year. The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Altshuler Berzon LLP, UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

Undocumented students, backed by a legal theory developed by scholars at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, have argued that state entities, such as the public university system, are permitted to hire undocumented individuals. But the UC Board of Regents rejected the idea last year.

A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeal for the First District ruled in August that the UC system’s employment policy “facially discriminates based on immigration status and, in light of applicable state law, the discriminatory policy cannot be justified.” The ruling asked the system to reconsider its hiring policy. But the UC Board of Regents appealed that decision two months ago.

UC spokesperson Rachel Zaentz said in a statement that the California Supreme Court’s decision “creates serious legal risks for the University and all other state employers in California.”

But undocumented students and their advocates are celebrating. Iliana G. Perez, a plaintiff and former UCLA lecturer, said as a formerly undocumented immigrant, she’s seen how employment restrictions can hold immigrant students back.

“The California Supreme Court’s decision not only reaffirms that discriminating against undocumented immigrants from accessing on-campus employment cannot continue to be tolerated, but it also gives the UC the clarity to finally unlock life-changing opportunities for the thousands of immigrant students who contribute to its campuses, and to the state’s economy and workforce,” Perez said in a news release from the Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

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November 5, 2025
Would We Rather Humanities “Be Ruined Than Changed”? (opinion

Like most of my colleagues in art history, English, history, modern languages, musicology, philosophy, rhetoric and adjacent fields, I am concerned about the current crisis in the humanities. Then again, as a student of the history of the modern university, I know that there haven’t been too many decades over the last 150 years during which we humanities scholars have not employed the term “crisis” to portray our place in the academy.

Our Greek forebears, as early as Hippocrates, coined the term “kρίσις” to describe a “turning point”; kρίσις, a word related to the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, is etymologically connected to practices like “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging.” In fact, the most widely mentioned skill we humanists offer our students, critical thinking, originates from the same practice of deliberate “sieving.” Thus, when we call ourselves critics and write critical theory, we admit that crisis might just be our natural habitat.

What’s Different This Time Around?

A look at the helpful statistics provided by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences indicates that this latest crisis in humanities enrollments and degree completions is not like the previous fluctuations in our history, but more foundational. Things sounded bad enough when a state flagship like West Virginia University slashed modern languages (and math!) two years ago. But when that beacon of humanistic learning, the University of Chicago, pauses Ph.D. admissions across all but two of its humanities programs, we know the crisis is existential. Wasn’t it Chicago’s Kalven report that once stated boldly, and for the entire nation, that the university was “the home and sponsor of critics”?

Cultures of Complaint, and a Pinch of Hubris

Feeling powerless in the face of dwindling enrollment and support for our disciplines, some of us have resorted to digging up conspiracy theories, perhaps because, as Stanley Fish opined, in the psychic economy of academic critics, “oppression is the sign of virtue.” The tenor of such virtue-signaling complaints is that an unholy alliance of tech and business bros and their programs, together with politicians and academic leaders, promote only “useful” disciplines and crowd out interest in the humanities.

I think intellectual honesty would demand we remember that it was the humanities, custodians of high-culture education (Bildung), that once upon a time crowded out the applied arts, crafts and technologies, accusing them of lacking intellectual depth. Humanistic Ivy League and Oxbridge schools championed the classics, philosophy and literary studies as “liberal” and sneered at professional education in the “mechanical arts” (engineering, agriculture, business, etc.) as “servile.” When the humanities (and natural sciences) faculty at these elite colleges refused to open their classist “gentlemen’s education” to larger publics, land-grant universities and technological institutes emerged to increase access and to educate teachers, lawyers and engineers.

Could it be that today’s humanists still retain some of this original hubris toward technical, vocational and applied training, which makes the current inversion of disciplinary hierarchy even tougher to accept? Are warnings against instrumentalizing the humanities for economic gain (Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit) or applying them to support vocational or technical disciplines (Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors) echoes of such hubris? Will this mentality, based on the knowledge economy of the late 19th century, convince today’s students to work with us?

Angsting About Ancillarity

The modernist poet W. H. Auden, in his book-length poem about anxiety, wrote that “We would rather be ruined than changed / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” For sure, some among us deny the signs of the time, yearning for the golden days when humanities departments were ever expanding, arguing that an essential third Victorianist (focusing on drama) be added to the colleagues already focusing on fiction and poetry. If these golden days ever existed (in the early 1970s?), they are gone now. Nostalgia for the simulacrum persists.

Closer to reality, many colleagues in the humanities have been “climbing the cross of the moment,” adapting to the inversion of disciplinary hierarchies at our institutions and accepting the mandate to show at least some measurable outcomes instead of our beloved unquantifiable humanistic critique. We have been aligning with the new lead disciplines by creating a vast infrastructure of certificates, degrees, journals, book series and organizations in the medical, health, digital, environmental and energy humanities, in science and technology studies, computational media, and music technology.

However, as Colin Potts observed, when we partner with our colleagues in these better-funded and high-visibility disciplines, we are rarely “co-equal contributors.” We are like alms seekers, condensing our lifelong training and knowledge into an ethics, civics and policy module required for our partners’ accreditation, or infusing technical writing and communication skills into a STEM curriculum to amplify their majors’ impact. These collaborations offer a modicum of recognition and an honorable mention in a holistically minded National Academies consensus report. But they also make us feel dreadfully ancillary.

Institutional strategic plans that exalt the value of the humanities with terms like “cornerstone,” “core” and “heart” only deepen our suspicions, especially when our budgets don’t match the performative strategic grandiloquence. From the medieval through the 18th-century university, the humanities suffered the trauma of being “handmaidens to theology” (ancillae theologiae), then the doctrinal master discipline. Now, technology has taken theology’s place, and we are once again “pleasant (but more or less inconsequential) helpmeets.” Trauma redux.

Hyperbole Won’t Help

In an existential crisis, hyperbole in the defense of our field no longer feels like a vice. Therefore, some of us now claim that the end of the humanities heralds the end of humanity and human civilization. Brenna Gerhardt, for example, warned that, because of the 2025 funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, “we may find that a society that forgets to ask what it means to be human forgets how to be one.”

Similarly, the 2024 World Humanities Report asserts that “the humanities are of critical importance” at a time when the “world and planet [are] under duress” and in dire need of “tools and concepts that will foster change and help us live under these shared, if still uneven, conditions.” These kinds of well-meaning statements, and the desperate daily news item (preferably from Oxbridge) amplifying our relevance and adaptability, burden the academic humanities with a responsibility incommensurate with the cultural and educational work we can perform. Their claim that “either you support the humanities, or inhumanity prevails” scares only us, but nobody else. As the authors of WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse find, “The humanities appear to the public to be siloed in universities (unlike the sciences).”

This I Believe

If the previous paragraphs didn’t sound resilient and hopeful enough, please remember that my first obligation as a humanist is to be a critic, not a cheerleader. I believe that the humanities do have an important place in the ecosystem of higher education and at each university, that integrating STEM and liberal arts practices increases student success and leads to better research and scholarship, that humanistic considerations contribute to a more just and benign world, and that we need to continue our important work in core education.

However, I don’t think that we academic humanists have sufficient standing to make hyperbolic claims about what we can achieve. Just consider: Have we ever advanced how many majors and faculty positions would be enough to keep the world humane and civilized? Have we, as Roosevelt Montás asks in Rescuing Socrates, ever overcome the “crisis of consensus … about what things are most worth knowing”? And should we lecture our STEM colleagues on ethics and gender equity when, as recently as 2019, fewer than one-third of tenure-track faculty and fewer than one-fourth of non-tenure- track professors in U.S. philosophy departments were women?

We humanists are really good at asking critical questions, “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging” at the highest levels of abstraction, but we are not so good at offering solutions. When we do, they often come from the same intellectual heights that have alienated us from undergraduate populations and the public. In a recent essay for the Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Wayne Stables takes us beyond hyperbole. He asks us to envision our lives and work “as if the humanities were dead,” thereby (he hopes) freeing us to consider collective action based on the likes of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Wendy Brown. He believes this kind of “critical orientation” may help us survive “the troubling interregnum” in which we now find ourselves.

While I sympathize with Stables’s call to action (though I would add Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, bell hooks and Judith Butler to his list), I believe it takes us back to the time when the humanities strove to be “all breathing human passion far above.”

I recommend we befriend the idea that our humanistic values and practices may relate to more public-oriented and holistic goals, as exemplified by the University of Arizona’s successful degree in the public and applied humanities, which wants “to translate the personal enrichment of humanities study into public enrichment and the direct and tangible improvement of the human condition” and offers a “fundamentally experimental, entrepreneurial, and transdisciplinary” educational experience that “focuses on public and private opportunities that straddle rather than fall between purviews, or are confined by them.”

Since the introduction of this new kind of humanities program, connected with such fields as business, engineering and medicine, the number of students majoring in the humanities at Arizona has increased by 76 percent. This true kind of integrated partnership, and similar initiatives at St. Anselm College, Virginia Tech and my home institution of Georgia Tech, give me hope for a turning point—kρίσις—for the humanities in higher education.

Richard Utz is senior associate dean for strategic initiatives in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology.

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November 5, 2025