Tag: Events

Pepperdine Closes Exhibit Featuring “Overtly Political” Art

Pepperdine officials modified a sculpture to delete the text.

Henry Adams/Pepperdine Graphic

Last month Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., opened an art exhibit titled “Hold My Hand In Yours,” which was scheduled to run for six months in the on-campus Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art. But On Oct. 6, the university closed the exhibit after artists learned their work had been removed or altered for being “overtly political.”

The exhibition, curated by Weisman Museum director Andrea Gyorody, centered on the imagery of hands in paintings, drawings, sculpture and videos, among other media, with a focus on hands as a means of labor and care, according to the museum’s website.

Last week, one of the artists in the show learned her video had been turned off at the university’s request, and a sculpture had been modified to hide text that said “Save the Children” and “Abolish ICE,” Hyperallergic reported. The creators requested their pieces be removed from the museum, and several other contributors followed suit in solidarity with the affected artists and in opposition to the university.

Pepperdine administrators alleged the pieces went against the museum’s policy to “avoid overtly political content consistent with the university’s nonprofit status,” Michael Friel, senior director of communication and public relations at Pepperdine, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.

In addition to removing pieces, the university inquired about posting signage that notifies visitors that “the artwork does not necessarily reflect the views of the university,” Friel noted. “That process has not been successful.” With the addition of the artists pulling their work, the museum decided to close the gallery. All compensation agreements are being honored and inconvenienced artists have received an apology, according to Friel.

“For the past week, the administration’s rationale for the initial censorship and removal has been murky and opaque, and honestly, still unclear to me. It didn’t have to be this way,” Stephanie Syjuco, an artist who was featured in the show, wrote on Instagram.

The Weisman Museum is housed under the university’s advancement office. “Our intent is to maintain the highest standards of excellence as we celebrate artistic expression through the visual arts,” Friel said.

In 2019, Pepperdine censored a senior art student’s gallery because the art featured nude bodies; officials placed the art in a mobile gallery instead of in the Weisman Museum, which featured work by the artist’s peers.

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October 13, 2025
Trump Fires More Education Dept. Employees

As of Friday afternoon, it remained unclear how many staff members would be affected.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images | BraunS and Prostock-Studio/iStock/Getty Images

Staff members at the Department of Education will be affected by the mass layoffs taking place across the federal government, a spokesperson said Friday.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has threatened the layoffs for weeks, citing the government shutdown. Vought wrote on social media Friday that his promised reduction in force had begun.

A department spokesperson then confirmed in an email to Inside Higher Ed that “ED employees will be impacted by the RIF.” The spokesperson did not clarify how many employees will be affected or in which offices. Other sources say no one who works in the Office of Federal Student Aid will be laid off.

Trump administration officials said in a court filing that an estimated 466 employees were given reduction-in-force notices. About 1,100 to 1,200 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services also got laid off. Overall, more than 4,200 workers across eight agencies were fired.

At the Education Department, the estimated layoffs will leave the department with just over 2,001 employees. The agency, which President Trump wants to close, already lost nearly half its career staff members during a first round of mass layoffs in March. In the wake of those layoffs, former staffers warned that the cuts would lead to technical mishaps, gaps in oversight and a loss of institutional knowledge. College administrators have also reported delays and issues in getting communications and updates from the department, though agency officials say critical services have continued.

The federal workers’ union and multiple outside education advocacy groups challenged the first round of layoffs in court. Lower courts blocked the RIF, but the Supreme Court overturned those rulings in July. Affected staff members officially left the department in August.

Another lawsuit challenged this latest round when Vought threatened the layoffs – before the pink slips had even been distributed today. It was filed at the end of September.

The union representing Education Department employees as well as sources with connections to staffers who were still working at the department as of Friday morning said that the latest round of cuts will at least affect staff members from the offices of elementary and secondary education and communications and outreach. A union representative added that all of the employees in the communications office’s state and local engagement division were laid off.

A senior department leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Inside Higher Ed that the layoffs were directed by OMB and came as a surprise.

“Last week the [education] secretary’s office had said no RIFs at all,” the senior leader explained. “We heard on Tuesday that OMB sent over a list of people for ED to RIF … ED apparently edited it and sent it back.”

In neither case were cuts planned for the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages the Pell Grant and student loans, the senior leader added.

Rachel Gittleman, president of the union that represents Education Department employees, promised in a statement to fight the layoffs.

“This administration continues to use every opportunity to illegally dismantle the Department of Education against congressional intent,” Gittleman said. “They are using the same playbook to cut staff without regard for the impacts to students and families in communities across the country … Dismantling the government through mass firings, especially at the ED, is not the solution to our problems as a country.”

Through late September and into the first 10 days of the shutdown, both Vought and President Trump used the threat of further RIFs to try to convince Democrats in the Senate to acquiesce and sign the Republicans’ budget stopgap bill. But Democrats have stood firm, refusing to sign the bill unless the GOP meets their demands and extends an expiring tax credit for health insurance.

Health and Human Services Department spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed earlier on Friday that “HHS employees across multiple divisions” received layoff notices. But he didn’t provide an interview or answer written questions about whether the layoffs include employees at the National Institutes of Health, a major funder of university research.

Nixon wrote that “HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy” and “all HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions. HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”

Democrats and some Republicans have warned against the layoffs. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who chairs the powerful appropriations committee, opposed the layoffs in a statement while also blaming Democrats in the shutdown.

“Arbitrary layoffs result in a lack of sufficient personnel needed to conduct the mission of the agency and to deliver essential programs, and cause harm to families in Maine and throughout our country,” she said.

But Democrats in particular have argued that firing federal workers during a shutdown is unconstitutional.

“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers—they just want to,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington State Democrat and vice chair of the appropriations committee, said in a statement Friday afternoon. “A shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers to cause more chaos or permanently weaken more basic services for the American people … This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks.”

Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia democrat and ranking member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, pointed out in a statement that the administration has had to rehire employees who were fired earlier this year.

“In addition to wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to fire and rehire government employees, arbitrarily firing government employees means there are fewer people to help administer essential programs,” he said. “Moreover, I fear the lasting impact of mass firings will be an incredible loss of invaluable institutional knowledge. Furthermore, random and chaotic layoffs will make it difficult to recruit qualified employees in the future.”

Ryan Quinn contributed to this report.

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October 10, 2025
MIT Rejects Proposed Federal Compact

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has rejected the Trump administration’s proposal to sign on to the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would mandate sweeping changes across campus in exchange for preferential treatment on federal funding.

MIT is the first of the nine universities invited to join the compact to publicly reject the proposal that has ignited fierce pushback from other higher ed leaders, faculty and experts who see the document as a way to strip institutions of their autonomy. The Trump administration also asked Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University to sign. Most have provided vague statements saying that they are reviewing the compact, though Texas officials have expressed some enthusiasm about the offer.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth announced the move in a Friday morning letter to the campus community, which included a copy of her response to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Kornbluth highlighted in the response to McMahon a number of areas emphasized by the White House in the compact, such as focusing on merit, keeping costs low for students and protecting free expression.

“These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission—work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law,” Kornbluth wrote.

She also noted that MIT disagreed with a number of the demands in the letter, arguing that it “would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution” and that “the premise of the document is inconsistent” with MIT’s belief that funding should be based on merit.

“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence,” Kornbluth wrote. “In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”

This is a breaking news article and will be updated.

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October 10, 2025
Senate OKs Richey to Lead ED Civil Rights Office

Kim Richey recently served as a senior chancellor in the Florida Department of Education.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee

The Senate voted this week to confirm Kimberly Richey as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights—returning her to a role she held in an acting capacity from August 2020 until November 2021, spanning the end of President Trump’s first term and the start of President Biden’s. Richey also worked in the department during the George W. Bush administration.

The vote was 51 to 47 along party lines, with Democrats and Independents all voting nay.

Over the past few years, Richey worked in state positions as a senior chancellor in the Florida Department of Education and a deputy superintendent in the Virginia Department of Education. She now returns to the federal government to lead a greatly diminished Office for Civil Rights—the Trump administration laid off nearly half the OCR staff in March—with a significant case backlog.

The administration is using what’s left of the office as an arm of its campaign against transgender rights, programs aimed at helping minorities and allegations of antisemitism. The OCR has been investigating both K–12 school districts and universities over these issues. Richey told senators during her June confirmation hearing that she’s committed to pursuing cases related to antisemitism and trans women playing on women’s sports teams.

According to a résumé published by government watchdog American Oversight, Richey has also worked with conservative organizations to draft education legislation and policies. Those policy proposals mostly centered on K–12 and included promoting school choice and banning critical race theory (although the topic is not taught in K–12 schools). A 2022 receipt American Oversight uncovered indicated that Richey’s consultancy, RealignEd LLC, was paid $10,000 to “provide subject matter expertise, review and evaluation, and policy advice related to inherently divisive topics and other provisions” shortly after Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order prohibiting “the use of inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory,” in schools.

Craig Trainor, the principal deputy assistant secretary for civil rights, has led the office as acting secretary since Trump took office earlier this year. In that post, he sent out controversial guidance banning race-based programming and activities, which was later blocked by the courts. He’s now moving to Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he’ll be the assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity.

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October 10, 2025
Democratic Lawmakers Amplify Pressure on UVA

Months after Jim Ryan stepped down as University of Virginia president, state Sen. Creigh Deeds is still waiting for answers on whether political interference and external pressure played a role.

Ryan resigned in late June, citing pressure from the federal government amid Department of Justice investigations into diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the public university. Although the Board of Visitors voted to shutter its DEI office in March, conservative critics accused UVA of failing to dismantle such efforts. The DOJ subsequently launched seven investigations, two of which have been closed. The status of the other five remains unclear.

Deeds, a Democrat who represents Charlottesville and the surrounding area, has been seeking answers since Aug. 1 through a series of letters sent to the Board of Visitors and a far-reaching Freedom of Information Act request. But so far, university lawyers have largely refused to answer the state lawmaker’s questions, citing ongoing investigations. Faculty members have also said they can’t get straight answers from the university or face time with the board.

And complaints over an alleged lack of transparency at UVA are piling up as state lawmakers are applying additional pressure over how the university will respond to an invitation to sign on to the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the Trump administration sent to UVA and eight other universities last week.

Trading Letters

In office since 2001, Deeds has a long relationship with the university. But for the first time in 20-plus years, the senator said, he’s being shut out by a Board of Visitors that refuses to talk to him.

“We’re just trying to get to the bottom of what role the federal government, the Justice Department, the president’s office, the governor, the [state] attorney general played in the decision that Jim Ryan made to resign,” Deeds told Inside Higher Ed in an interview.

Deeds has sent several inquiries to UVA since Ryan resigned. The first letter included 46 questions related to Ryan’s resignation, the DOJ investigations and whether the UVA Board of Visitors “operated within the bounds of its legal and ethical responsibilities.”

But so far, Deeds says, he’s been given “partial answers” and “gobbledygook.”

In a series of letters to Deeds from two law firms (Debevoise & Plimpton and McGuireWoods), the outside legal counsel offered little insights into Ryan’s resignation, arguing in an Aug. 15 response that UVA is “is currently focused on navigating an unprecedented set of challenges,” which includes the ongoing DOJ investigations.

Some information included in the responses is already in the public sphere, such as how the board voted to shutter DEI initiatives, and details on the presidential search committee, which Deeds had also asked about. UVA also included letters sent by the DOJ to the university when it closed two investigations; while the DOJ referenced “appropriate remedial action” by the university, it did not offer specifics. But the focus across several letters sent to Deeds by university lawyers was mostly on why UVA can’t respond.

“Counsel handling the discussions with the Department of Justice has indicated that providing a substantive response to the August 1 letter while negotiations are ongoing would be inconsistent with the need for confidentiality. Counsel has therefore requested that the Board refrain from doing so until a resolution with the Department of Justice is finalized,” wrote David A. O’Neil, an attorney with Debevoise & Plimpton.

UVA lawyers also repeatedly took issue with Deeds’s characterization of the events surrounding Ryan’s resignation.

In an Aug. 29 response, O’Neil wrote that the board “would like to correct a number of inaccurate premises and assumptions in your letter” but was “duty-bound to place the University’s interests above all else” and honor its “fiduciary obligation to the University.” However, UVA legal counsel did not specify what, if anything, was inaccurate.

O’Neil also asked the senator not to “draw conclusions or promote unfounded speculation.”

Deeds responded in a Sept. 4 letter that he was “surprised and concerned” that the Board of Visitors “felt the need to secure outside counsel to respond to a legislative request.” He added that he was equally troubled by the failure to fully answer any questions.

Frustrated by UVA’s response, Deeds filed a FOIA request Sept. 18, seeking a trove of documents related to Ryan’s resignation and the DOJ investigations. UVA has not yet fulfilled the FOIA request but did send Deeds a $4,500 bill to process the information, which he plans to pay.

Deeds then followed up in a Sept. 29 letter, pressing the university on what it agreed to in exchange for the DOJ closing two investigations and for more details on where the other five currently stand.

To date, Deeds is still seeking answers.

UVA spokesperson Brian Coy told Inside Higher Ed by email that the university has offered “as much information as possible at the time” in its multiple responses to Deeds. However, he said, the university is constrained by “active discussions with the Department of Justice regarding several investigations, and publicly disclosing information that relates to those investigations could hamper our ability to resolve them in a way that protects the institution from legal or financial harm.” He added that UVA is processing Deeds’s FOIA request in accordance with state law.

Coy did not address several specific questions sent by Inside Higher Ed asking about potential political interference, remedial action for closed investigations or the status of the active DOJ investigations.

Mounting Pressure

Deeds isn’t the only one struggling to get answers from UVA’s Board of Visitors.

Jeri Seidman, UVA Faculty Senate chair, said the board has declined to answer faculty questions about Ryan’s resignation and DOJ investigations. She added that the board has been less responsive since the Faculty Senate voted no confidence in the Board of Visitors in July.

“We have not had interactions with the rector or the vice rector since July 11,” Seidman said, adding that the board had declined an invitation to address the Faculty Senate last month.

Seidman credited UVA interim president Paul Mahoney with being accessible, though, she noted, he and other leaders have also declined to answer faculty questions due to DOJ investigations.

“We appreciate his willingness to come and answer questions. Those questions are never gentle. But it’s disappointing that the rector has not acknowledged any [faculty] resolutions or requests for information, even if the response were simply to say that now is not the right time,” Seidman said.

Recent Faculty Senate resolutions include demands for an explanation on Ryan’s resignation, the no-confidence vote and calls for UVA leadership and the board to reject the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The compact would require changes in admissions and hiring and a commitment to institutional neutrality, while simultaneously suppressing criticism of conservatives, among other demands. In exchange, the administration says signatories would receive preferential treatment from the federal government on research funding, though the document also threatens the institution’s funding if it doesn’t sign or comply.

Virginia Democrats have also opposed the compact and threatened to restrict funding to the university if it signs on. That threat comes as lawmakers are ratcheting up pressure on UVA and waging a legal battle to block Republican governor Glenn Youngkin’s board appointments.

The letter, sent Tuesday by Senate majority leader Scott Surovell, expressed “grave concern” over the compact and referenced Ryan’s resignation, which, he wrote, was “forced” by the DOJ via alleged “extortionate tactics—threatening hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the livelihoods of employees, researchers, and students unless he stepped down.”

Surovell warned that “the General Assembly will not stand by while the University surrenders its independence through this compact” and that there would be “significant consequences in future Virginia budget cycles” for UVA should the Board of Visitors agree to the arrangement.

Surovell’s warning shot comes amid a broader dispute over who can serve on Virginia boards. While a Senate committee has blocked a recent slate of gubernatorial appointments, including at UVA, Youngkin has insisted that members can still serve until they are rejected by the full Legislature. A related legal case will be heard by the Virginia Supreme Court later this month.

Board leadership and Mahoney replied to Surovell’s letter Wednesday with a noncommittal reply shared with Inside Higher Ed that did not indicate whether the university intended to sign on to the proposed compact or not. They wrote in part that UVA’s “response will be guided by the same principles of academic freedom and free inquiry that Thomas Jefferson placed at the center of the University’s mission more than 200 years ago, and to which the University has remained faithful ever since.”

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October 10, 2025
Institutions, Over Peers and Tribes, Bolster Indigenous Student Belonging

At all institution types, students living off campus reported a 16 percent higher sense of belonging than those living on campus.

Daniel de la Hoz/iStock/Getty Images Plus

A new study from the American Indian College Fund and National Native Scholarship Providers found that Indigenous students report a stronger sense of belonging on campus when their college provides “perceptions of a sense of acceptance, inclusion and identity.”

They call this “institutional support,” and it’s the primary predictor of belonging, trailed by peer support, campus climate and tribal support, the study showed.

The “Power in Culture Report,” released Wednesday, examined Indigenous students’ sense of belonging at the institutional and state level. NNSP surveyed more than 560 students enrolled at 184 institutions across multiple sectors, including tribal colleges and universities, predominantly white institutions, Hispanic-serving institutions, and other minority-serving institutions. The survey was conducted between March and April of 2024.

Unsurprisingly, tribal colleges foster a greater sense of institutional belonging among Indigenous students than other institution types. At nontribal institutions, Indigenous students must create belonging via “informal networks and cultural resilience amid institutional neglect or performative inclusion.” Indigenous students at nontribal campuses also report experiencing more microaggressions and cultural isolation. Students at institutions with larger populations of Indigenous students report a 14 percent higher sense of belonging than those at schools with fewer Native peers.

When looking at Indigenous student belonging at the state level, students attending college in states with larger tribal populations actually report a lower sense of belonging and say they feel less supported than students in states with smaller tribal populations, “suggesting that population size alone does not equate to meaningful support,” the study noted. Students in states with a tribal college or university reported an 18 percent lower sense of belonging than students in states without a tribal institution.

At all institution types, students living off-campus reported a 16 percent higher sense of belonging than those living on-campus.

The report includes several policy recommendations to bolster Indigenous student belonging, including recruiting Indigenous faculty and staff, funding Native language revitalization courses, and establishing meaningful relationships with local tribal nations.

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October 10, 2025
College Degree Aspirations on the Decline

As public skepticism about the value of a college degree persists, the number of students who expect to earn one is also on the decline.

Between 2002 and 2022, the percentage of students surveyed who said they expected to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher fell from 72 percent to 44 percent, according to a research brief the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education published Tuesday.

During the same time frame, the percentage of first-generation students who aspired to earn a degree fell from 60 percent to 33 percent; among students with at least one college-educated parent, degree aspirations dropped from 83 percent to 53 percent.

“The decline in college aspirations among first-generation students is deeply concerning,” Kimberly Jones, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, which oversees the Pell Institute, said in a news release. “These students have long faced systemic barriers to higher education, and this data underscores the urgent need for renewed investment in outreach, support, and affordability—including through programs like TRIO and the Pell Grant.”

But in his quest to shrink the size of the federal government, President Donald Trump has proposed cutting funding for TRIO—a set of federally funded programs that support low-income, first-generation college students and students with disabilities as they navigate academic life.

Major cuts to the federal government also mean it will be harder to produce reports like the one the Pell Institute released this week. That’s because such studies rely on data from now-discontinued longitudinal surveys that were administered by the National Center for Education Statistics; the Trump administration fired all but a handful of NCES employees earlier this year.

“Without the continuation of these programs, it will be much harder to track the progress of high school, first-generation, and college students and to learn how to improve education outcomes,” Sean Simone, vice president of research at COE, said in the news release.

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October 10, 2025
“New Collaborations Needed” as U.S. Cuts Global Health Funds

Universities focused on global health will have to collaborate more with each other and with industry and philanthropic organizations in the face of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar aid cuts, according to academic leaders from around the world.

Funding covering projects tackling conditions such as AIDS, tuberculosis and Ebola has been upended since Donald Trump returned to power in January, and speakers at Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit said that it would be impossible to replace the lost dollars overnight.

Mosa Moshabela, vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said that his institution had been one of the largest recipients of National Institutes of Health funding outside the U.S., supporting projects in areas such as HIV and tuberculosis prevention, and that his institution had been “impacted a lot” by the White House’s decisions.

“We realize the danger of having placed all our eggs in one basket, pretty much,” said Moshabela, himself a leading public health researcher.

“We know that, in terms of scale of funding, we’re not necessarily going to have one source that can replace the amount [we received] from the NIH, but by spreading our partnerships we can still achieve similar results—and we are strengthening our partnerships in the Middle East, in Asia, across the globe, and also looking at new donors that are coming through.”

Moshabela said that Cape Town was also putting pressure on the South African government to increase research spending, highlighting that it currently spent only 0.6 percent of gross domestic product in this area, despite a long-standing target for the outlay to reach a minimum of 1.5 percent.

“Even between universities, we are adopting the principle of cooperation over competition,” Moshabela continued.

“For a long time, we were competing for the same sources of funding, but now what we’re trying to do as a strategy is to cooperate more rather than compete over sources of funding.”

Vivek Goel, vice chancellor of Canada’s University of Waterloo, agreed that it would take time to fill the funding gap left by U.S. cuts.

“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that overnight we are going to fill those gaps,” he said. “I think we became very reliant on a certain model … I think in collaboration between governments, philanthropy, industry and our institutions we can come up with new ways of working that can replace that work [on global health, but] not necessarily all of that funding.”

Goel, another public health researcher, highlighted that it was not just U.S. funding that was being lost, pointing to research that was funded by Canadian sources or philanthropic organizations but that depended on clinics or infrastructure operated by the United States Agency for International Development. Researchers may also lose access to Centers for Disease Control data, he warned.

Drawing down funding for global health research in the future will require a change of mindset, Moshabela argued, such as focusing on solutions with wider commercial benefit to attract the support of pharmaceutical companies and working to develop broader ecosystems and not just clinical interventions to win funding from philanthropists.

Deborah McNamara, president of RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, said that Western universities should approach the funding challenges “with humility.”

“Our partners in the Global South have been doing more with less for a very, very long time,” she noted.

“I think we’ve all observed over time waste in development funding, and in the surgical arena certainly we often discover [that] at hospitals that we work with they have large amounts of donated equipment that perhaps can’t be maintained, can’t be run, [and] isn’t operational.

“By listening more we can reduce the waste that happens and direct [funding] more effectively.”

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October 10, 2025
Improving Academic Supports for Incarcerated Students

In 2023, Congress reinstated use of Pell Grants for students in prison, expanding their access to higher education.

One of the stipulations was that colleges would provide them with the same access to resources that on-campus students have, including academic supports, career advising, tutoring, mental health resources and study halls. However, a recently published report from the University of Puget Sound finds that this provision has been difficult to fulfill, in part because of prison systems, but also because of the overly bureaucratic processes at higher ed institutions themselves.

The report identifies existing barriers, as well as opportunities to better serve incarcerated students.

What’s the need: Higher education programs in prisons can help incarcerated individuals improve their educational attainment and career opportunities upon release, as well as increase socioeconomic mobility for affected individuals and their families.

Providing education to incarcerated individuals, however, can be a challenge due to their lack of access to technology and learning materials, restrictions on when they can participate and policies like lockdowns that impede learning opportunities.

“Prison rules and staff often limit the ability to study, work together, possess books and supplies in cells, and meet outside the classroom,” according to the report. Students can also lack access to faculty outside of the classroom.

Students often are unaware of or unable to access traditional campus resources such as research databases, learning management systems, disability and mental health resources, and tutoring.

The findings: Puget Sound’s report includes survey data from alumni of higher education in prison (HEP) programs and faculty. Researchers also relied on in-depth interviews with 25 stakeholders involved in such programs, as well as any affiliated teaching and learning center staff members. Interviews were conducted between August and November 2024.

In conversations with faculty, researchers learned that silos often exist between teaching and learning centers and HEP programs, which can leave professors without sufficient resources or supports to be effective instructors. Even at the national level, pedagogical or student success–oriented conversations often don’t take into account incarcerated students.

For instructors, working with incarcerated students can be demanding because it’s not part of their regular teaching load, they have long commutes or they have to adapt their materials and syllabi to a low- or no-tech teaching environment, according to the report. Some professors reported feeling isolated from peers or unable to share or receive feedback about their teaching.

Keep Reading

The University of Puget Sound compiled resources from higher education in prison programs to improve teaching and learning, including trainings, sample faculty and student handbooks, models for mental health support, and more.

See the full guide here.

What can help: The researchers identified a variety of innovative programs to enhance incarcerated students’ learning and educational outcomes.

Some HEP programs, including those at Rutgers University and Scripps College, established peer tutoring opportunities among incarcerated students, in which graduates provide feedback on writing, research, time management and study skills.

“The implementation of peer-to-peer tutoring does not just help the students receiving support. It builds professional development skills, volunteer or employment histories, and confidence for the tutors themselves as they continue their learning journeys,” the report says.

The University of Utah Prison Education Program pays incarcerated students about $600 per month to provide peer support in a one-stop location. Student employees offer homework assistance, help organize events and educate their peers on health and wellness topics.

The report also advocates for developing college prep and student success courses for incoming incarcerated students to help them get familiar with resources and technology that they may not know about. Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College offers a two-semester foundation of academic success course, for example.

Incarcerated students may also have mental health needs or disabilities that require extra intervention from the institution. Loyola University in Chicago’s HEP program employs a social worker who meets with students individually to understand their needs and connect them with support.

Administrators can also institutionalize support for instructors of these programs by counting teaching in prison settings as a part of a regular course load or providing training for such programs during new faculty orientations. Learning communities, course development stipends and certifications can also incentivize effective teaching practices among instructors who teach in prisons.

Connecting campus staff, particularly those in teaching and learning centers, with HEP faculty and students can also break down silos between campus and incarcerated students and ensure learners are being best served, according to the report.

In the future, researchers hope to establish a national learning community for pedagogy in prison and a convening of stakeholders in this space to share resources.

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October 10, 2025
Changing the Default Setting

Earlier this week the presidents of three of the formerly regional accreditors—Middle States, SACSCOC and WASC—hosted a webinar on AI and transfer credit. I watched, as did several colleagues; both topics are important, and since we’re covered by Middle States, it’s useful to know where its policies and expectations are heading. Credit loss upon transfer is a chronic issue on which accreditors have historically been muted; serious attention would be welcome.

It was … frustrating My colleagues and I tried afterward to isolate actual concrete changes and came away befuddled. It reminded me a bit of “strategic plans” that say things like, “We will achieve excellence.” OK, but that’s neither a strategy nor a plan. At best, it’s an intention.

Heather Perfetti, the president of MSCHE, stated that she doesn’t want accreditors to be seen as barriers to credit transfer; if anything, they’re urging a shift in the burden of proof for credit transfer from yes to no. That’s good, as far as it goes, but the key word is “urging.” Urging is not requiring. Kay McClenney famously noted that “students don’t do optional.” I’ve seen too many cases of universities not doing optional when it comes to accepting credits in transfer.

The stated reason is usually something about standards; the real reason is economic self-interest. Departments don’t want to “give away” any more credits than they have to, so they don’t. That changes only when orders come down from above—say, from a provost’s office because the college is desperate for enrollment, or from a State Legislature that got sick of shenanigans and passed a law, like MassTransfer in Massachusetts. Accreditors could conceivably play that role—it would be naïve to think that outcomes assessment would have gained the momentum it did without pressure from accreditors—but they’d have to put some force behind it. I didn’t catch any mention of that.

To be fair to the accreditors, that’s much harder now that they’ve lost their de facto regional monopolies. The regional accreditors are membership-driven organizations whose imprimatur opens up access to federal financial aid. Membership-driven organizations aren’t normally tough on their members, but the unusual combination of regional monopoly and access to federal financial aid gave them the leverage to push their members harder than they otherwise could. That didn’t always work out ideally—some colleges went bankrupt having recently satisfied accreditors that they were financially sound—but the structure made it at least possible for the accreditors to carry real weight.

The first Trump administration broke the regional monopolies and opened the door to alternative accreditors. Now there’s an entirely new body emerging in SACS’s territory, and colleges are empowered to shop around. When members can shop around for more lenient or ideologically aligned accreditors, it becomes more difficult for the legacy accreditors to issue mandates.

The new preference—I can’t call it a mandate or a policy—seems to mean that colleges should “default to yes” on credit transfer, in the absence of evidence that they shouldn’t. It wasn’t immediately clear what would constitute evidence that they shouldn’t. Lack of regional accreditation isn’t supposed to be dispositive in itself. Over time, a college could track success rates of students in Calc II who transferred in Calc I from College X, and if the rate were low enough, they could cite that. But that would require first allowing everything in for several years to build a track record; after that, the politics of saying no would be more complicated.

The connection to AI, as near as I could tell, was that it would allow colleges to assess transcripts and issue transfer decisions much more quickly at scale. That would actually help. As one of the presidents put it—I should have written it down, but alas—the current system works like trading in a car for a new one but not being told the value of your trade-in until you’ve had the new one for a few months. It’s not consumer-friendly at all. If transfer credit decisions could be issued at the same time as admission and financial aid decisions, students would be much more able to make informed decisions. I have concerns about AI hallucinations in this context (and many others), but if defaulting to yes is built in, it might work at least as well as the current system.

So, I’ll give this shift a cheer and a half out of three. The direction is positive; I just hope they can find a way to move from an intention to a plan.

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October 10, 2025