Tag: Events

The Gray Zone

This academic year marks year seven—our last, if all goes well—of paying college tuition for our kids. (TB’s senior year and TG’s first year were the same year.) My brother has just joined the ranks of tuition payers, with his oldest arriving at college a few days ago. We’ve both found ourselves in the increasingly common spot of making too much to get much aid, but too little to reasonably afford tuition without significant aid.

We’re not alone. That gray zone of “theoretically affordable, but not really” has become normal.

If anything, it seems to be expanding. We’re lucky enough that for us, it’s annoying rather than prohibitive. That’s not true for everybody.

People land in the gray zone in any number of ways. Sometimes the FAFSA calculation is simply unrealistic, whether because of fluctuating income, multiple siblings, divorce or the actual cost of living. Need-based aid is usually based on the FAFSA (or the CSS) or income tax return data, each of which is based on formulas that reflect political compromises rather than the cost of living. “Need” is a judgment, and judgments at scale tend to be blunt instruments at best. In practical terms, they pretty much have to be. Sometimes, though, the issue is even worse than the quirks of the FAFSA calculation. To save money, many colleges engage in “gapping,” or offering less aid than even the FAFSA recommends. That makes the gray zone even bigger.

And that’s under the relatively rosy scenario of having two-parent families in which both are citizens, both are employed and nobody has a disability requiring massive economic support. People with disabilities are often subject to unrealistically low savings thresholds before they lose Medicaid coverage; ABLE accounts help, but they go only so far, and relatively few eligible people know that they exist. Undocumented parents may be increasingly unwilling or unable to submit financial information, even if their children are citizens. And divorced and/or mixed families introduce variables that no algorithm will anticipate. (I had personal experience of that in my student days. It wasn’t pretty.) Include any of those in the picture, and the shortfalls of the current system become more dramatic.

I had hoped that the free community college movement would make many of these issues moot. But it fizzled at the federal level, as did most student loan forgiveness. Some states adopted versions of free community college, which is great, but states don’t have the fiscal flexibility that the federal government does. Most states aren’t allowed to run deficits, and public college enrollments are usually countercyclical to the economy, which means demand for college goes up at the same time that state tax revenues go down. Without a mechanism to offset the imbalance, public scholarship programs tend to get shorted when they’re most needed. Worse, even when they’re funded, state programs often include means-testing phase-outs that create gray zones of their own.

With all of those ways into the gray zone, it’s unsurprising that so many people are there. But as an industry, I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to how people on the ground experience it.

It comes across as insulting. Being told that aid is for other people, but you have to pay what seems like an unreasonable amount, leaves a bad taste.

I’ve had conversations with parents who can’t believe that they’re judged too rich to help. They aren’t happy, and there isn’t much to say to make them happy. I can’t help but think that part of the reason the public hasn’t rallied to our side in response to recent political attacks is that after years of being directly and personally insulted, as they see it, they don’t mind seeing some payback. We can offer structural explanations, but structural explanations don’t help when you’re facing a tuition bill higher than you expected and the institution essentially tells you to suck it up. Heck, when UVA had the gall to raise TB’s tuition for a fully remote year, I was personally offended. Years later, I still grumble at the memory. The causes may be long-term and structural, but the offense is direct and personal.

Answers to the gray zone exist, in big and small ways.

The best big answer, of course, is recognizing the social benefit of education generally and supporting it with enough public funding that tuition becomes an afterthought. Public libraries don’t have the gray zone because they don’t charge for access to books. That’s an excellent model, and it has ample precedent. The challenge there is political.

A small but institutionally actionable answer involves strategic philanthropy. We recently had a donor who specifically wanted to aim scholarship money at students in the gray zone, to ensure that they can finish their programs and get started in their careers. It struck me as a fantastic idea. Yes, it’s hard to scale, and yes, it leaves existing systems intact. But until we can get to a saner political moment, it can make a genuinely positive difference for untold numbers of students. It may even serve as a proof of concept for a larger change.

The main challenge now is to acknowledge the existence of the gray zone and to incorporate that knowledge into policy. The gray zone isn’t just a regrettable imperfection; it’s a direct threat to higher education’s continued existence. It corrodes public support and plays into narratives that make us the bad guys. Every single time a policy includes means-testing, sliding scales, income cutoffs or gapping, we create enemies. We’ve focused so much on immediate economic cost that we’ve lost sight of long-term political cost. I’m much less worried about some scion of the upper middle class getting a free education than I am about folks in the vast middle deciding they’ve had enough and voting for people who will channel their anger at the wrong targets. The cost of that is much higher than simply getting it right in the first place.

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August 25, 2025
Racial Discrimination on Campus Where 4 of 5 Students Are White?

Administrators at the University of Missouri told a student organization that it could not proceed with a “Black 2 Class Block Party” because the event qualified as “unlawful discrimination.” Is it possible that students who are not Black complained of being denied access to the annual event in prior years? Probably not. This cancellation is one of numerous examples of how institutions are attempting to comply with the Trump administration’s anti-DEI agenda, as Inside Higher Ed reporter Jessica Blake noted in an article last Friday.

U.S. Department of Education data shows that during the 2023–24 school year, 79 percent of undergraduates on the University of Missouri’s flagship campus were white. Black students were just 5 percent of the undergraduate student body. Put differently, nearly 19,000 students were white and fewer than 1,200 were Black. Numerically, there are not and have never been enough Black students there to create a climate of exclusion for their white counterparts. The same is true among professors—last school year, only 33 of 1,027 tenure-track faculty members at Mizzou were Black, according to statistics published online by the university’s Office of Institutional Research.

Given these demographics, it seems implausible that collegians in the minority have enough power to routinely and unlawfully discriminate against their peers who comprise the majority. This could be confirmed via systematic analyses of discrimination complaints submitted to the university in recent years. When disaggregated by race, the data is unlikely to show that it is overwhelmingly white students who most often experience racism. Surely few, if any, complaints are about encounters with discrimination at Black student organization events.

Activities like Mizzou’s annual welcome-week block party are important for Black students, as most will be expected to successfully navigate spaces where they are the only or one of just a few persons from their racial group in every course they take, sometimes in their entire academic majors. Some will be the lone Black students who live on their residence hall floors. In these and other spaces, too many will be met with racial stereotypes, microaggressions and, at times, explicit racial violence. Black student organization events afford them opportunities to meet others who can affirm their sense of belonging at the institution. They may also meet other Black students who can teach them how to navigate campus environments that are anti-Black and otherwise racist.

The inclusion of “Black” in its title is what made this year’s block party suddenly and presumably discriminatory. Like historically Black colleges and universities, Black culture centers, and African American studies courses, Black student organization events have neither historically nor contemporarily been proven to be spaces that exclude people from other races. Mizzou and universities like it are considerably more likely to find evidence of racial discrimination in predominantly white sorority and fraternity recruitment and member-selection activities, as well as at parties on frat row, than at a student organization event that amplifies black culture.

As previously noted, 5 percent of Mizzou undergraduates are Black. Noteworthy is that Black men are 2 percent of the student body, yet NCAA data shows that they comprised 62 percent of the football team and 56 percent of the men’s basketball team there last academic school year. Despite generating millions of dollars in revenue for the university, these student athletes and their same-race peers are not allowed to have events that have “Black” in the title.

“Black college football and basketball players are the most powerful people of color on campus,” I wrote in a Washington Post article 10 years ago. At that time, Black student athletes at Mizzou threatened to skip a football game that would have resulted in a loss of more than $1 million in revenue. This threat was in response to institutional inaction on racism that Black collegians had long experienced there. Within days, the system president and the chancellor of the Columbia campus both resigned.

Football and basketball players are as powerful there today as they were a decade ago. They can indeed resist anti-DEI efforts that disadvantage them and other students of color. But should they do so in response to a canceled welcome-week block party? Yes, because that one seemingly insignificant event is emblematic of a more expansive demonstration of anti-Blackness on their and other campuses at this time.

The elimination of culturally resonant programs, centers and institutes, and offices denies Black students access to valuable relationships and resources that bolster their first-year transition experiences, sense of belonging, classroom and out-of-class engagement, academic performance, and retention. Some of the most enduring and transformative advancements for Black collegians in U.S. higher education emerged from student activism. Student athletes, student organization leaders and everyday students who are Black, along with allies and supporters from other racial groups, ought to refuse to allow anyone to mischaracterize activities and spaces as discriminatory just because “Black” is in the title.

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August 25, 2025
Letter From a Region of My Mind

Working in journalism left Inside Higher Ed’s co-founder Doug Lederman little time to read for anything but information, so last summer, when he stepped away from 90-hour workweeks, he told me he wanted to watch less Netflix. I said, “Friend, you came to the right place.” Recommending reading is pretty much the only area where I can make solid contributions these days.

I started Doug out with things I knew he’d like. Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding was an early favorite. I moved him along to Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, James (Percival Everett, not Henry), Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and loaded him onto the Louise Penny train.

But just before I headed to D.C. last March for his official farewell party, I assigned him a novel I’d been wanting to reread and liked the idea of book-clubbing with him: John Williams’s beautiful and heartbreaking Stoner. I’ve often given Doug a hard time about—well, everything—but especially the fact that he’s never actually been in higher ed. He’s only peered in from outside with a reporter’s magnifying glass, exposing our flaws and fault lines, doing his essential duty as a journalist.

When Doug asked me to work with him as a thought partner to create a newsletter for upper-level administrators, he wanted to bring tough love to leaders. He confessed to having a case of the fuck-its, disappointed that higher ed has been so slow to change and unwilling to take responsibility for some missteps. As we know, disappointment can only come from love, and is much harder for recipients to bear.

I responded in my typically tactful fashion, asking him, “Who the fuck are you to have a case of the fuck-its? Do not speak to me of the fuck-its! Have you had to read millions of pages of academic monographs? Have you heard academics complain that their names were too small on book covers? Have you denied thousands of qualified applicants admission to their dream college, or sat through interminable Faculty Senate meetings group-copyediting policies? Have you taught classes that flop or graduate students who just can’t?”

In other words, I told the co-founder of IHE he had little idea what it was like to be in higher ed, especially from the perspective of a faculty or staff member. Given his role and prominence in the industry, Doug’s attention is always sought after, a high-value treat. In our world, he is beef jerky, not a Milk-Bone.

I thought it time for him to use his leisure reading to get a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be a regular professor. Not an oversize character like Morris Zapp (my old boss, Stanley) or even Lucky Hank Devereaux (or Lucky Jim).

Stoner follows the fictional life and career of an English professor at the University of Missouri in the early part of the last century. Early in the novel, and just before the sinking of the Lusitania, the sharpest of a group of three young academics asks his fellows, “Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University?”

Mr. Stoner “sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive.” Mr. Finch, with his “simple mind,” sees it as “a kind of spiritual sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter.” Finch goes on, naturally, to become a dean.

But they are both wrong, claims the character named Masters. The university ”is an asylum …. a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, the otherwise incompetent.” His self-diagnosis: ”I’m too bright for the world, and I won’t keep my mouth shut about it.” He concludes, ”But bad as we are, we’re better than those on the outside, in the muck, the poor bastards of the world. We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it.”

The book, published in 1965, presents characters that feel so current and vibrant you can imagine having a cocktail with them. In the times we now find ourselves, Stoner may become popular again—but not for all the right reasons.

I have friends who have long said they’re done reading things by dead white men. When Doug and I were in college, that was pretty much the entire curriculum, with the exception of the 19th century gals, an Emily Dickinson here, a Frederick Douglass there. This reluctance is understandable, given how long the canon excluded previously silenced voices. Yet, I don’t discriminate. Stoner offers profound insights into institutional structures that persist today.

These thoughts were on my mind as I finished my reread just before our flight to D.C. to celebrate Doug’s ~~retirement~~ next chapter, where institutional structures of a different kind awaited us in marble and glass.

We had half a day before the event and my husband, Toby, and I wanted to be tourists. It had not been my intention to speed-walk through four museums in five hours. (Toby could spend hours in front of one painting, but he loves me and is a good sport.)

My childhood consisted of trips downstate to see grandparents in New York City, which often involved visits to museums. A favorite was the one that hosted the squid and the whale. Unconsciously, I bought into the primate visions described by Donna Haraway about hierarchies—her critique of how science museums construct narratives of power and evolution that shape our understanding.

Fifty years later, I was eager to see what had changed. We started at Natural History, moved on to American History, then African American, and ended up at the Holocaust. In March 2025, this journey was not, it won’t surprise you to learn, an uplifting experience. The museums, like higher education itself, told a complex story of American identity that is now under dire threat.

I sped through to parse the presentation. How did the curators choose to tell the stories, some of which I know well, and which, as an adult, I would always prefer to read? Since I began my career publishing books in American history at Oxford University Press, I’ve imbibed a decent amount of quality scholarship.

When I became an acquisitions editor at Duke University Press in 1991, I was intrigued by the work of scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, Derrick Bell and other theorists who used narrative to examine how our legal system perpetuated structural inequalities. Most people weren’t reading law journals back then, and it took a while for those ideas to make it into the mainstream

Academe cranked open the curriculum to face historical truths not always self-evident: We are a country built on a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. At times we fell short of the mark, but the arc of the universe is long, and we were taught the direction in which it bends.

Except. The rise to power documented in that last somber building we visited reads to me like a blueprint for what’s happening today. Before I could remember not knowing it, my father drilled into me that what it means to be a Jew is there’s always someone who wants to put you in an oven. That was made tangible by the numbers I saw tattooed on the arm of Great-Grandpa Max.

How much longer will busloads of boisterous students milling around these repositories of culture be able to learn our history? When will the whitewashing take hold so that the ideas contained in the curators’ vision—in the works we’ve published since the latter part of the last century—are mummified?

One of many chilling moments: coming on a small story I knew from the film Who Will Write Our History? Historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939 to document unprecedented actions. He collected materials, placed them in milk cans and buried them throughout the city. The archive known as the Oneg Shabbat is housed in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem.

It was impossible in March not to feel that my colleagues at IHE and other media outlets are busting their butts at a similar task: chronicling the last days of an era of inclusion.

How long before these exhibits come down, replaced by gold toilets in buildings repurposed for hotels and casinos?

Just as the bright shining moment of Camelot disappeared for a previous generation, many of us already look back on Hamilton with nostalgia. A too-quick tour of museums in our nation’s capital filled me with love for America and the things that made us great. When I left, all I felt was grief. What happens if we don’t rise to today’s challenge?

This sobering experience in D.C. brought me back to my conversation with Doug about higher education’s resistance to change. A reading of Stoner should not feel as resonant and familiar as it does. Little about faculty structure and the ethos of academe has evolved in the last century.

Walking through those endangered halls of American memory, what Doug has long been saying to leaders is urgent: We need more than just better storytelling about higher education—we need to fundamentally reimagine it. And we need to do it now.

The buried milk cans of our moment will someday be unearthed. The articles, reports and assessments documenting higher education’s struggles will serve as testimony to what we did—or failed to do—in this critical period. My only hope is that they’ll reveal how colleges and universities finally broke free from institutional inertia to continue to do the work of educating our citizenry toward truth and justice for all.

Note: This reflection was published March 22, 2025, as an issue of The Sandbox. I wanted to share it as part of my new column here for two reasons (and with apologies to subscribers). First, if you’ve been reading the news, you’ll see that I wish I’d been wrong. Just a week after this first came out, the dismantling began. And now we’re seeing a scrubbing of our nation’s history in essential cultural institutions and not just in D.C.

Also, I got a ton of responses from readers thanking me for putting them onto Stoner. So now, you’re welcome, friends.

Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed and the co-founder of The Sandbox, a weekly newsletter that allows presidents and chancellors to write anonymously. She is also a professor of creative writing and the author of books on weirdly diverse subjects. Reach her here with questions, comments and ~~complaints~~ compliments.

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August 25, 2025
Howard President Steps Down, Former President Appointed Interim

Vinson has led the Washington, D.C., HBCU since 2023.

Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Howard University president Ben Vinson III will step down Aug. 31, two years after assuming the role and two weeks after the start of fall classes, university officials announced Friday. Former Howard president Wayne A. I. Frederick will serve as interim president.

“It has been an honor to serve Howard,” Vinson said in a statement. “At this point, I will be taking some time to be with my family and continue my research activities. I look forward to using my experiences as president to continue to serve higher education in the future.”

University officials declined to comment about why Vinson is leaving only two years after he took up the helm. During his tenure, the Washington, D.C.–based HBCU became an R-1 research institution and brought on several high-profile faculty, including journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and historian Ibram X. Kendi. The university also hosted Kamala Harris’s election night watch party.

But the past year has also brought its share of challenges. In May, the Trump administration proposed cutting Howard’s federal funding by $64 million in fiscal year 2026, bringing it back to its 2021 funding level. Over the summer, the administration took heat from students over surprise bills that appeared on their accounts when the university transitioned to a new student financial platform, and some students turned to crowdfunding to pay those bills.

“On behalf of the Howard University Board of Trustees, we extend our sincere gratitude to Dr. Vinson for his service and leadership as president,” board chair Leslie Hale said in a statement. “We extend our very best wishes to him in his future endeavors.”

Frederick, who served as president of Howard from 2014 to 2023, will remain interim president while the board conducts a nationwide search for a permanent replacement.

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August 25, 2025
$Fewer Young People See Math Skills as Very Important in Work$

Fewer Young People See Math Skills as Very Important in Work

Higher education stakeholders have noted that math anxiety can hold students back from pursuing some disciplines or major programs, but a new analysis from Gallup finds that young Americans over all place less importance on math skills compared to the general population.

While over half of all Americans rate math skills as “very important” in their work (55 percent) and personal (63 percent) lives, only 38 percent of young people (ages 18 to 24) said math skills are very important in their work life and 37 percent in their personal life, according to a December survey of 5,100 U.S. adults.

The survey highlights generational divisions in how math skills are perceived, with adults older than 55 most likely to see math as very important compared to younger adults, and Gen Z least likely to attribute value to math skills.

To Sheila Tabanli, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, the low ratings point to a lack of perceived connection between math skills and career development, despite the clear correlation she sees.

Tabanli said it can be hard to convince many Gen Z and Alpha students that math content is necessary for their daily lives, in part because access to information is so convenient and they can perform calculations on their phones or online.

“We need to transition from focusing too much on the concept, the domain, the content—which we do love as math people, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it for a living—but students don’t see that connection [to employable skills],” Tabanli said.

When asked how important math skills were for the majority of the U.S. workforce, 40 percent of young adults rated having math skills as very important—the lowest rating of nine skills evaluated, including reading, language, technology and leadership, according to Gallup.

Young people also rated the importance of math skills for the general workforce, as compared to their own lives, the lowest of all age cohorts. Adults ages 55 to 64 (71 percent) and 65 and older (68 percent) were most likely to say math is a very important skill for the general workforce.

Most career competencies that colleges and universities teach, such as those by the National Association for Colleges and Employers, focus on broader skills—including critical thinking, leadership, communication and teamwork—as essential for workplace success. Math can teach students how to solve problems and engage with difficult content, which Tabanli argues are just as important for an early-career professional.

One reason a young adult might not rate math skills highly is because many students face undue math anxiety or a skepticism about their own ability to do math, falling into the belief that they’re not “math people,” Tabanli said.

In response, Tabanli believes professors should help students apply computational skills to their daily lives or link content to other classes to encourage students to invest in their math learning. While this may be an additional step for a faculty member to take, Tabanli considers it a disservice to neglect this connection.

Professors can also strive to make themselves and the content more human and approachable by sharing information about their lives, their careers and why they’re passionate about the subject, Tabanli said.

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August 25, 2025
Federal Grants for Area Studies and Foreign Language at Risk

For 67 years, the Department of Education has administered grants to universities to create centers devoted to foreign languages and area studies, a field focused on the study of the culture of a particular area or region. Now, those centers are under fire by the Trump administration, which has not released the funding the grantees expected to receive in July.

The grants support what are known as National Resource Centers, which were originally developed as a national security tool to help the U.S. increase its international expertise in the midst of the Cold War and the aftermath of Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. Since then, their purpose has shifted with the times, now focusing not only on producing scholars but also on community outreach and collaboration with K–12 schools.

The office responsible for administering the grants—International and Foreign Language Education—was dissolved and its entire staff laid off as part of the March reduction in force at the Department of Education. But it seemed IFLE’s programs, which were authorized under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965, would live on; they were moved under the ED’s Office of Higher Education Programs, according to an internal communication shared with Inside Higher Ed at the time.

Since then, funding has come through “in fits and starts,” Halina Goldberg, the director of Indiana University’s Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute (REEI), told Inside Higher Ed in an email, though ultimately, the center received all its promised funds for fiscal year 2024–25. REEI was part of the first cohort of NRCs and has been continuously funded by the program since then.

But NRC directors, including Goldberg, are concerned the funds for the upcoming year—the final year of the program’s four-year cycle—may not come through, and that the Trump administration may be planning to demolish the program altogether. NRC leaders have received no notice from ED about whether or when the funds are coming, and some say their contacts at the department have expressed uncertainty about the program’s future.

The funding cuts appear to be caused by the Office of Management and Budget; records show that the agency has not approved appropriations for programs formerly housed in IFLE, including the NRC program, as well as the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, which fund scholarships and stipends for undergraduate and graduate students studying these disciplines. In total, about $85 million was appropriated for IFLE programs for FY 2025–26, including $60 million for NRCs and FLAS.

“We’re just kind of in this holding pattern to learn whether our funds are going to be released or not. And there is some time pressure, because if that fiscal year 2025 funding is not allocated by Sept. 30, which is when the fiscal year, the government fiscal year ends, then it’s gone and we’re without funding,” said Kasia Szremski, associate director for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A Discipline in Crisis

NRC grant recipients worry about what the funding freeze and potential elimination of the program will mean for the disciplines of foreign language and area studies, which have already taken a beating in recent years; many colleges have eliminated such programs as cost-saving measures— including West Virginia University, which gutted nearly all of its language programs in 2023. More recently, the University of Chicago has paused admissions to all its humanities Ph.D. programs, including a slew of language programs, for the coming academic year.

Emanuel Rota, a professor in the Department of French and Italian at Urbana-Champaign who leads the university’s European Union Center, said he was already worried about the future of area studies and foreign language education, but “now I’m terribly scared.”

“I think this seems to be, at this point, slightly part of a trend to provincialize the United States in a way that is troubling for the future of this generation of students, who are, at this point, used to learning from other experiences around the world; knowing about ways of teaching, other ways of learning; establishing collaborations early on; and being able to be multicultural and multilinguistic like their peers around the world,” he said. “And all of a sudden they are told, ‘You only speak one language, you only know one culture and you only know your local environment, and you have to live with that.’”

It also comes amid efforts to quash other forms of cultural education and intercultural exchange. OMB also recently cut funding from a number of State Department exchange programs, according to Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange, which represents organizations that administer such programs.

Larger entities like the Fulbright program are being spared, he said, but the cuts include critical programming aiming at increasing STEM education access for girls around the world, fostering intercultural exchange with students in the Middle East, bolstering the study of foreign affairs in the U.S. and more.

International students and immigration broadly are also being targeted by the Trump administration, which has recently revoked thousands of student visas and increased barriers for overseas students studying in the U.S.

“I think international exchange programs, mobility, the presence of international students on our campuses have long been something that is supported in a bipartisan way, and that has been played out for decades in tangible ways,” Overmann said. “One would be increases in funding in both Democrat and Republican administrations, as well as Congresses. This is something we have seen transcend party lines and those across the political spectrum see that the mobility of our students, of our young professionals—both Americans going abroad and international students and professionals coming here—is something that supports our national security, our diplomatic interests, our influence around the world and our economy, down to very local levels.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted NRCs. In 2018, during his first administration, ED criticized a Middle Eastern studies consortium at Duke University and the University of North Carolina for delivering programs it alleged had “little or no relevance to Title VI.” The programs under scrutiny included a conference about “Love and Desire in Modern Iran” and another focused on film criticism in the Middle East.

“It was probably a harbinger of what’s happening now,” said Brian Cwiek, a former IFLE program officer who lost his job when the office was dissolved. “I think that’s really where a lot of the same folks became intent on shutting down this same program.”

Area studies funding is also singled out in Project 2025, an agenda developed by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration is following closely.

“Congress should wind down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities (Title VI of the HEA), which, although intended to serve American interests, sometimes fund programs that run counter to those interests,” Project 2025 reads. “In the meantime, the next Administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.”

Outreach at Risk

Although funding may still come through before the September cutoff date, some centers are already feeling the pressure.

At the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, which is home to two National Resource Centers, Kathi Colen Peck was responsible for administering an NRC-funded program focused on providing faculty development to professors at community colleges in upstate New York. Although the center has funding sources outside of ED, the community college program was almost entirely funded by an NRC grant.

The program involved bringing international speakers—a dance instructor from Benin, for example—to give workshops in community college classrooms, as well as administering a fellowship for community college professors to create curricular projects.

Once it became clear this year’s funding wasn’t going to become available when expected, Peck was laid off and the partnerships with community colleges for the upcoming academic year had to be discontinued.

“The intention of [the outreach program] is really to sort of bridge resources and help the community college faculty have connections to the area studies expertise at, for example, Cornell. They’re able to leverage resources at Cornell where they wouldn’t necessarily have access to that in any other circumstances,” she said. “It’s really about trying to help the community college faculty internationalize their curricula.”

At other campuses, cultural events and educational programs that NRC leaders say are immensely valuable to their communities could be on the chopping block. Hilary V. Finchum-Sung, the executive director of the Association for Asian Studies, said that the University of Michigan’s Korean Studies center, for example, hosts a free Korean film series at an off-campus theater that is open to members of the public. It’s an opportunity for members of the Ann Arbor community to see a film they likely never would otherwise—and to glean something new about a culture that they might be unfamiliar with.

On the flip side, NRC programs can sometimes give immigrants a rare chance to connect with their culture on American soil. Szremski, of UIUC’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, said the center has partnered with local libraries to hold a Latin American Story Time Program for about 15 years. At these events, they read children’s stories in English and Spanish, but also in other Latin American languages including Portuguese, Guaraní, Q’anjob’al, and Quechua.

“This is particularly important in Champaign and Urbana, because even though we’re in central Illinois, we have a very large and very vibrant Latino community, many of whom are native speakers of Indigenous languages,” she said.

Once, after a Latin American Story Time event, a library worker once told her, an older woman “came up to her in tears because she was a native Guaraní speaker and had never thought [she would] hear her native language again, really, now that she was living in the United States.”

Cwiek noted that some faculty positions may also be at risk without NRC funding; though the grants usually cover only a small portion of a professor’s salary, that portion may be the difference that allows a college to offer certain world languages.

Scholarship Uncertainty

Students are also in imminent danger of losing scholarships due to the funding pause. Graduate students relying on Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships to fund their education in the new academic year still don’t know whether they will receive that money. Szremski said on Friday that one incoming fellow recently made the choice to withdraw from UIUC and instead study in Colombia for the upcoming academic year due to funding fears. With UIUC’s academic year beginning this week, others were forced to make the decision about whether to come to campus without knowing if they would receive the scholarships they’d been promised. Across the university’s NRCs, 53 students are awaiting FLAS funds.

Other universities are in a similar position. At Cornell, 18 students will be impacted if the money doesn’t come through, according to Ellen Lust, the director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies and a government professor.

These fellowships provide the cultural awareness, understanding and skills that the U.S. “has relied on to be a world leader. Students who benefited from NRC support have gone on to join the US Foreign Service, engage in international business, and educate new generations of global citizens. They have conducted international collaborations and research that that ultimately benefit Americans,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

While the stipends allocated to undergraduate students are not as sizable as those for graduate students, Szremski said those recipients have told her they may have to take out private loans or start part-time jobs to fill the gap created by the missing FLAS money.

The future of these grants remains unclear. The Senate’s appropriations bill maintains funding for IFLE programs, so even if the funding doesn’t come through this year, the program may be able to resume the following year.

But if the NRC and FLAS programs are shuttered permanently, the effects will “be felt for generations to come,” wrote Lust.

“Our current and future students are the foreign service officers, intelligence analysts and CEOs of the future,” she wrote. “Within a generation, US citizens will be ill-equipped to live, work and lead in a global world. They will be outmatched by those from other countries, who speak multiple languages, understand diverse cultures and have built relationships across borders. Ultimately, these policies weaken the US’ global position and will make America less secure and prosperous.”

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August 25, 2025
SCOTUS Ruling Has “Bleak Implications” for Researchers

Researchers will have to challenge grant terminations in federal claims court.

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

Hope is fading that federally funded researchers whose grants were terminated by the National Institutes of Health earlier this year will be able to resume their work as planned.

On Thursday, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that any legal challenges to the grant terminations should be litigated in the Court of Federal Claims, not the federal district court system they’ve been moving through for months.

It’s the latest twist in federally funded researchers’ legal fight to claw back nearly $800 million in medical research grants—though accounting for the multiyear grants that the NIH is refusing to fulfill puts that figure closer to $2 billion—the NIH terminated for running afoul of the Trump administration’s ideological priorities. Many of the grants funded programs that advanced diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and research projects focused on topics such as LGBTQ+ health, vaccine hesitancy and racial disparities.

Researchers sued the NIH in April and got a win in June when a federal district court judge in Massachusetts ordered the agency to reinstate the grants immediately. Although the NIH has since reinstated many of those grants, Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University and former lawyer who’s been tracking grant cancellations, told Inside Higher Ed that after Thursday’s ruling those reinstated grants will “almost certainly” be re-terminated. If that happens, “I don’t think they’ll get their money back.”

That’s in part because the Supreme Court said researchers will have to re-file their lawsuits in federal claims court, which generally doesn’t have the power to issue injunctive relief that could keep grant money flowing during the litigation process. And it could take months or even years for the claims court to decide if researchers are owed damages.

“Nobody has that kind of time. The nature of research is that you can’t just stop and restart it many months later,” said Delaney. “Folks have already had to do that once and many aren’t able to—they’ve had to lay off staff and lost contact with study participants. This additional delay probably renders the research unviable going forward.”

Trump ‘Always Wins’

Delaney is among numerous experts and advocates who say the decision is both a blow to the scientific research enterprise and the latest evidence that the Supreme Court is inclined to interpret the law to favor the Trump administration’s whims.

“Make no mistake: This was a decision critical to the future of the nation, and the Supreme Court made the wrong choice,” the Association of American Medical Colleges said in a statement. “History will look upon these mass NIH research grant terminations with shame. The Court has turned a blind eye to this grievous attack on science and medicine, and we call upon Congress to take action to restore the rule of law at NIH.”

Jeremy Berg, who served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that while “many (but not all) grants from the lawsuits that had been terminated have been reinstated at this point,” the big question the Supreme Court’s ruling raises now “is whether NIH will start to re-terminate them.”

Although a 5-4 majority did agree on Thursday that the district can review NIH’s reasoning for the terminations and kept in place a court order blocking the guidance that prompted the cancellations, Berg said the mixed ruling is “potentially very damaging” because redirecting the case to a different court means “the stay blocking the required reinstatements could go into effect.”

He added that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent sums up his interpretation of the ruling’s implications. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: That one, and this Administration always wins.”

That’s how Samuel Bagenstos, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Michigan and former general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services, interpreted the decision, too.

“The message the courts sent yesterday is very strong that they are going to let the Trump administration shut down the grants right now and remit grantees to the really uncertain process of going to the Court of Federal Claims and potentially getting damages in the future,” he said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed Friday.

“But that’s really cold comfort for the grantees,” Bagenstos added. “If they can’t get the grants restarted right now, they probably can’t continue their research projects, and the prospect of maybe getting damages in the future doesn’t keep those research projects alive. It’s a bad sign for the entire research community.”

The NIH is far from the only federal agency that has canceled federal research grants that don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideologies. The National Science Foundation, the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Humanities are all facing legal challenges in federal district courts after freezing or canceling grants.

And the Supreme Court’s ruling on the NIH’s terminations has implications for those cases, as well.

“The message seems to be pretty clear that if you have an ongoing grant that’s been terminated and you want to go to court to keep the money flowing, you’re out of luck,” Bagenstos said. “It’s got very bleak implications for all researchers who are depending on continuing the flow of federal grants.”

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August 25, 2025
Federal Judge Rules in Favor of Religious Colleges in Minn.

Religious colleges that require students to sign a faith statement cannot be shut out of a Minnesota program that funds the dual enrollment of high school students in the state’s public and private postsecondary institutions, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel’s ruling overturns a Minnesota law prohibiting Christian colleges that participate in the state’s 40-year-old Postsecondary Enrollment Options program from forcing students to pass a religious test. The state Education Department and LGBTQ+ advocates had sought such legislation for years on the grounds that faith statements discriminate against students who are not Christian, straight or cisgender. It finally passed in 2023, under a Democratic State Legislature.

The families of several high school students seeking to earn credits at two Christian institutions in the state, Crown College and the University of Northwestern, then sued, arguing that the law violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom. The ban on faith statements was suspended while the legal battle played out.

“This dispute requires the court to venture into the delicate constitutional interplay of religion and publicly-funded education,” Judge Brasel said in her 70-page ruling. “In doing so, the court heeds the Supreme Court’s instruction that the First Amendment gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.”

Brasel noted in her ruling that the two Christian colleges have received nearly $40 million to cover the costs of the PSEO program since the 2017–18 academic year; she wrote that the University of Northwestern admits about 70 percent of dual-enrollment applicants. Over all, some 60,000 high school students have benefited from PSEO, The Minneapolis Star Tribune noted.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the plaintiffs, applauded the decision.

“Minnesota tried to cut off educational opportunities to thousands of high schoolers simply for their faith. That’s not just unlawful—it’s shameful,” said Becket senior counsel Diana Thomson, according to the Associated Press. “This ruling is a win for families who won’t be strong-armed into abandoning their beliefs, and a sharp warning to politicians who target them.”

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August 25, 2025
DOJ Deems Definition of HSIs Unconstitutional, Won’t Defend

Arizona State University (left) and the University of California, San Diego, are two HSIs.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | InnaPoka and yongyuan/iStock/Getty Images

The country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions are in peril of losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the federal government, after the Department of Justice said it won’t defend the program against a lawsuit alleging the way HSIs are currently defined is unconstitutional. The suit challenges the requirement that a college or university’s undergraduate population must be at least a quarter Hispanic to receive HSI funding.

U.S. solicitor general D. John Sauer wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson July 25 that the DOJ “has determined that those provisions violate the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.” Federal law requires DOJ officers to notify Congress when they decide to refrain from defending a law on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.

Citing the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action in student admissions, Sauer wrote that “the Supreme Court has explained that ‘[o]utright racial balancing’ is ‘patently unconstitutional’” and said “its precedents make clear that the government lacks any legitimate interest in differentiating among universities based on whether ‘a specified number of seats in each class’ are occupied by ‘individuals from the preferred ethnic groups.’”

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, first reported on the letter Friday. The DOJ subsequently provided Inside Higher Ed with the letter but gave no further comment or interviews.

The Free Beacon wrote that “the letter likely spells the end for the HSI grants, which the Trump administration is now taking steps to wind down.” The Education Department wrote in an email, “We can confirm the Free Beacon’s reporting,” but didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview or answer further written questions.

Just because the executive branch has given up defending the program doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over—or that the group Students for Fair Admissions and the state of Tennessee have won the lawsuit they filed in June. The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities moved to intervene in the case late last month, asking U.S. District Court judge Katherine A. Crytzer to add the group as a defendant. She has yet to rule, but the Education Department and education secretary Linda McMahon, the current defendants, didn’t oppose this intervention.

The legal complaint from Students for Fair Admissions and Tennessee asks Crytzer to declare the program’s ethnicity-based requirements unconstitutional, but not necessarily to end the program altogether. Students for Fair Admissions is the group whose suits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill yielded the 2023 Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in admissions. In the suit over the HSI program, that group and Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, now argue that the admissions ruling means Tennessee colleges and universities can’t use affirmative action to increase Hispanic student enrollments in order to qualify for HSI funding.

Deborah Santiago, co-founder and chief executive officer of Excelencia in Education, which promotes Latino student success, said Friday that the Education Department in June “opened a competition to award grants for this fiscal year for HSIs.”

“There are proposals to the Department of Education right now that they said they were going to allocate,” Santiago said, noting that the program was set to dole out more than $350 million this fiscal year—money that institutions use for faculty development, facilities and other purposes.

“The program doesn’t require that any of the money go to Hispanics at all,” she said. For a college or university to qualify for the program, at least half of the student body must be low-income, in addition to the requirement that a quarter be Hispanic.

“The value of a program like this has really been investing in institutions that have a high concentration of low-income, first generation students,” Santiago said.

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August 22, 2025
Ed Dept. Says George Mason Violated Civil Rights Law

The Virginia university has been under investigation since early July.

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Gregory Washington, president of Virginia’s George Mason University, must apologize to the university community for “promoting unlawful discriminatory practices” in order to resolve allegations that the institution violated civil rights law, the Department of Education announced Friday.

The department claims that the university has illegally factored race and “other immutable characteristics” into hiring, promotion and tenure practices since at least 2020.

Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said the unlawful practices began shortly after the murder of George Floyd, when Washington called on faculty and administrators to expunge campus of “racist vestiges” by “intentionally discriminat[ing] on the basis of race.”

“You can’t make this up,” Trainor said in the statement. “Despite this unfortunate chapter in Mason’s history, the university now has the opportunity to come into compliance with federal civil rights laws by entering into a Resolution Agreement with the Office for Civil Rights.”

The Education Department first announced in early July that it would investigate GMU for potentially violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on race and national origin. Later that month, the Department of Justice announced it would investigate the institution’s Faculty Senate after the panel passed a resolution in support of Washington, who had been quick to push back on the Trump administration and defend the university’s commitment to addressing social injustice. Many conservatives called for Washington—the institution’s first Black president—to be fired. But the university’s Board of Visitors spared him at a meeting Aug. 1, at least for now, and gave him a raise.

Trainor said in the statement that “the Trump-McMahon Department of Education will not allow racially exclusionary practices—which violate the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Protection Clause, and Supreme Court precedent—to continue corrupting our nation’s educational institutions.”

In addition to an apology, the Education Department is demanding that GMU post that statement “prominently” to the university’s website, remove any contrary statements from the past and revise campus policies to prevent future race-based programming. It also wants the institution to begin an annual training session for all individuals involved in recruitment, hiring, promotion or tenure decisions to emphasize the ban on racial consideration and provide records documenting compliance whenever they are requested moving forward.

George Mason officials have 10 days to respond to the department’s proposed resolution agreement.

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August 22, 2025