Tag: Events

  • A letter to NEH on compliance with Trump orders (opinion)

    A letter to NEH on compliance with Trump orders (opinion)

    On Feb. 11, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on its website that it had modified its funding criteria for eligible humanities projects in compliance with three recent executive orders. According to the announcement, “NEH awards may not be used for the following purposes:

    • promotion of gender ideology;
    • promotion of discriminatory equity ideology;
    • support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives or activities; or
    • environmental justice initiatives or activities.”

    These prohibitions impose the terminology of Executive Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 onto future applicants for NEH funding, whether individual scholars, museums, nonprofit organizations or colleges (including historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges). Published well within the stipulated 60-day window for government agency compliance with the order to terminate all “equity-related” initiatives, grants or contracts, these prohibitions represent a swift implementation of the Trump administration’s point-by-point mandate for “Ending Radical Indoctrination.”

    I can only begin to conjecture here about what the consequences of the NEH’s new criteria might be for the humanities, the domain of cultural and intellectual inquiry the NEH was created to foster. To cite the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, “While no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”

    To uphold conditions defined by prohibition rather than freedom—and with prohibitions explicitly targeting the right to existence of queer and transgender people (“gender ideology”), the ability in any way to offset egregious structural inequalities in educational and cultural access (“DEI”), and even the very right to advocate on behalf of anyone’s rights (“discriminatory equity ideology”)—is to betray the very terms under which the NEH was created. In revising its Notice of Funding Opportunities, the NEH is in violation of its public mission.

    Presumably, as a government agency perpetually under threat of budget cuts, the NEH hastened to implement Trump’s executive orders in order to fend off wholesale elimination. The NEH is a federal agency and is thus directly implicated in the executive orders, provided those orders are constitutional. By complying with Trump’s ideology, the National Endowment may perhaps live to see another day, thereby preserving the careers of at least some of its approximately 185 employees and its ability—to do what?

    The NEH has not yet fully overhauled its website to reflect its compliance. Of its current listings of Great Projects Past and Present, perhaps “The Papers of George Washington,” “Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” and “The Real Buffalo Bill” might manage to squeeze through under the new stipulations, but would the Created Equal documentary film project be so lucky? Would a biography of union organizer César Chavez manage to qualify as a fundable project, or a documentary about “A Black Surgeon in the Age of Jim Crow”? How about the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database? The NEH has leveraged its own institutional survival on the forfeit of future such projects.

    The problem is a far deeper one, however. In what universe should it be too much to ask that a state-sponsored institution created to uphold the “material conditions” for freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry put up even the slightest resistance to the inhumane, reactionary and repressive edicts issued by the Trump regime? Even today, the NEH website champions its past support for projects that uphold justice in the face of oppression, that resist totalitarian erasure. Yet the NEH itself has mustered no such resistance. Instead, it has announced that any such projects are now ineligible for consideration.

    Of one thing I am certain: The National Endowment for the Humanities has forfeited its claim to the word “humanities.” The humanities do not designate a prohibitive sphere of capitulation to ruling forces. The humanities are not furthered by a governmental agency that serves, willingly or unwillingly, as an ideological extension of a political party. The humanities are a domain of inquiry, of questioning and investigation, not of unquestioning acquiescence.

    As a literature professor and an educator in the humanities for more than a quarter century, I have assured my students that the study of cultural, artistic and intellectual production is continuous with its practice. This not only means that humanistic inquiry involves creativity, creation and a commitment to thinking freely, but it also means that humanistic inquiry necessarily upholds the same responsibility to questions of ethics, value and meaning with which any other historical action must reckon. Humanists cannot, and do not, stand meekly aside while the “real” agents of historical change make big decisions.

    In posting a recent message to the frequently asked questions web form on the NEH website, I wrote that in light of the NEH’s silent capitulation to Trump’s executive orders, I was ashamed to call myself a humanist. I hereby recant that statement. I am not ashamed to call myself a humanist. It is the National Endowment for the Humanities that should be ashamed. Or, better yet, I call on the NEH and all its 185 employees, including and especially NEH chair Shelly C. Lowe, to recant their compliance with Executive Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 and join other national and international agencies, organizations and individuals in resisting the inhumane and unconstitutional decrees of the Trump administration.

    Jonathan P. Eburne is a professor of comparative literature, English and French and Francophone studies at Pennsylvania State University and director of undergraduate studies in comparative literature.

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  • Final “Intellectual Affairs” column by Scott McLemee (opinion)

    Final “Intellectual Affairs” column by Scott McLemee (opinion)

    The historian and political analyst Garry Wills once described writing for magazines and newspapers as a way to continue his education while getting paid to do it. The thought made a lasting impression on me and has been a driving force since well before I started writing “Intellectual Affairs” in 2005.

    Twenty years is a sizable portion of anyone’s life; a kind of record of it exists in the form of something short of a thousand columns. I am a slow writer (my wonderful and long-suffering editors at IHE can confirm this), and quantifying the amount of time invested in each piece would probably make me feel older, even, than I look.

    The launch of the column came after a decade of covering scholarly books and debates, first as a contributing editor at Lingua Franca and then as a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The founders of Inside Higher Ed approached me with an offer of far less money but complete freedom in what and how I wrote. The decision was easy to make. The offer seemed as close to tenure as a perpetual student could hope to get.

    The shift from writing for dead-tree publications to an online-only venue was not an obvious choice to make, but IHE’s audience and reputation grew rapidly. Getting review copies of new books was not always straightforward or quick. Confusion with other publications having similar names was also a problem. But “Intellectual Affairs” began to draw a certain amount of attention—whether enthusiastic, contemptuous or trollish—in the academic blogosphere of the day.

    The work itself, while grueling at times, was for the most part gratifying. Scholars would write to express astonishment that I’d actually read their books, and even understood them. It seemed best to regard that as a compliment.

    I tend to forget about a column as soon as it’s finished and rarely look at it again. To explain this it is impossible to improve upon Samuel Johnson, who was a columnist of sorts even though the term had not yet been coined. In 1752 he wrote,

    “He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.”

    It’s not always that bad, but the experience he describes is familiar and typically yields the resolution to start earlier next time. But there is no next time with this column.

    I’ve revisited the digital archive in recent days to assemble the selection below. If “Intellectual Affairs” has served as the notebook of an intellectual vagabond, here are a few pages from a long, strange trip.

    Among the earlier columns was one considering the practice of annotating texts while you are reading—specifically, ones printed on paper with ink. A few people found my account of an improvised method useful. These days I mark up PDFs along much the same lines.

    Much Sturm und Drang over e-publishing was underway during the column’s first decade—not least in scholarly circles. A column from 2014 surveys some of the trends predicted, emergent and/or collapsing at the time. Another piece described efforts to rethink literary history with an eye to the prevailing energy sources at the time a text was written.

    More offbeat (and a personal favorite) was this exposé of the unspeakable secret behind Miskatonic University’s financial stability. Another piece brought together the purported psychic powers of Edgar Cayce, a.k.a. “the sleeping prophet,” with news of a technological advance permitting someone to “read” a closed book, or its first few pages, at any rate.

    Early in the last decade, the New York Public Library prepared to offload a sizable portion of its holdings to locations outside the city—freeing up space for more computer terminals. Scholars and citizens spoke up in protest. A second column was necessary to correct the record after an official spun his way through a response to the first one.

    Compulsive and compulsory technological change was at issue in this column suggesting that the Pixar film WALL-E owed a lot to the dystopian satire presented in the cultural theorist Kenneth Burke’s “Helhaven” essays. It was a bit of a stretch, sure, but the point was to honor their “margin of overlap,” as KB would say.

    Many interviews ran in “Intellectual Affairs” over the years. Two in particular stand out. The earliest was with Barbara Ehrenreich on the occasion of her 2005 book about white-collar labor. I also reviewed two of her later books, here and here.

    The other interview was with George Scialabba—a public intellectual working at a certain distance from the tenure track—on the occasion of his first book. His collected essays appeared not too long ago.

    I stand by this assessment of Cornel West’s self-portrait. It caused a ruckus for a few days, but nothing changed in its wake, which is disappointing.

    While by no means prescient, a column on the scholarly study of ignorance from 2008 still feels topical. The subject remained far too relevant 15 years later. Someone will eventually start an Institute for Applied Agnotology; it won’t have trouble finding financial backing.

    Also distressingly perennial is a column considering social-scientific analysis of American demagogues of the 1930s and ’40s. A sequel of sorts, at least in hindsight, was this look into the stagnant depths of a spree killer’s worldview. And I was at work on a column about Ku Klux Klan historiography when Charlottesville broke into the news.

    Less connected to the news cycle but likewise bloody was an item filed after attending a seldom-performed Shakespeare play in 2009. A year earlier, I looked into the far-fetched legend that The Tempest was inspired by a small island near New Bedford, Mass. (Copies of this column were available for a while in pamphlet form at the local historical society.)

    Finally—and a matter of bragging rights— there’s this piece on the first volume of a biography of the long-forgotten Hubert Harrison, a Caribbean-born African American polymath and pan-African activist from the early 20th century. On more than one occasion the author told me that nothing generated more interest in the book than the column.

    George Orwell characterized the professional book reviewer as someone “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” I once considered this amusing; now it makes me wince. (It’s not even a whole pint, mind you.) The rewards of non-celebrity-oriented cultural journalism tend to be meager and infrequent, but writing this column for Inside Higher Ed has provided more than my share. Thanks in particular to Scott Jaschik, Sarah Bray and Elizabeth Redden for their patience and keen eyes.

    Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

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  • Dear Colleague letter is lawless attack on DEI (opinion)

    Dear Colleague letter is lawless attack on DEI (opinion)

    On Valentine’s Day, the Trump administration surprised schools and colleges with its newest attack on DEI and student body diversity. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released a Dear Colleague letter that warned schools and colleges that they may lose federal funding if they discriminate on the basis of race.

    This letter revealed novel, unsupported legal theories regarding the application of federal civil rights laws to schools and colleges. In fact, OCR’s letter sweeps so broadly that it claims to prohibit certain considerations of race that remain perfectly legal under well-established legal doctrine.

    While the threat of losing federal funding has been a facet of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act since its passage in 1964, the letter specifically takes aim at DEI programming as well as the use of “race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming.”

    Although the letter includes some correct statements of nondiscrimination law, OCR makes assertions that are troubling and unsupported by sound legal reasoning. As part of the team that wrote OCR’s guidance on this very issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, I am disturbed by how politics is driving policy guidance that will hurt educational institutions and students from kindergarten through college.

    In describing the scope of SFFA, OCR’s latest guidance attempts to smuggle in a legal standard that appears nowhere in the court’s opinion. The letter states, “Relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information, violates the law … It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”

    Here, OCR baselessly claims that not only can colleges not consider race as a factor in admissions, they also cannot make race-neutral changes to admissions policies that help increase student body diversity—such as eliminating standardized testing. That claim falls firmly outside not only the bounds of SFFA but also the decades of Supreme Court case law that precede it.

    In Grutter (2003), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor considers whether the University of Michigan Law School could use a lottery system for admissions. In Fisher (2016), Justice Anthony Kennedy implicitly approves of the Texas top 10 percent plan, perhaps the most well-known race-neutral strategy to increase racial diversity. And in SFFA (2023), the plaintiff’s briefs themselves include endorsements of possible race-neutral alternatives Harvard could have legally pursued such as adopting socioeconomic preferences in admissions.

    Yet in its most recent letter, OCR attempts quite the head fake in its declaration that SFFA dictates that schools and colleges must abandon race-neutral strategies meant to increase student body diversity. While in reality SFFA says nothing about the permissibility of these race-neutral strategies, a separate line of cases tackles these legal questions head-on—and contradicts the Trump administration’s unfounded guidance.

    In Coalition for TJ, Boston Parent Coalition and other recent cases, groups similar to Students for Fair Admissions have challenged changes to admissions policies of prestigious, selective high schools that were adopted in part to increase student body diversity. In some cases, the schools reconfigured weighting for standardized tests; in others, schools guaranteed that each feeding middle school gets a certain number of seats. In all of the cases, the school districts won. The position now advanced by OCR in its recent letter has failed to find footing in two courts of appeal. And just last year, the Supreme Court declined to further review the decisions in TJ and Boston.

    What OCR attempts to do with its letter is extraordinary. It tries to advance a legal theory with support from a Supreme Court case that says nothing about the matter. At the same time, OCR ignores recent judicial opinions in cases that directly address this question.

    Regardless of how legally infirm OCR’s proclamations are, schools and colleges will likely feel forced to comply. This could mean that the threat alone will lead schools and colleges to cut efforts to legally pursue racially diverse student bodies and racially inclusive campus environments. As a result, our nation’s classrooms and campuses will unfortunately look less like the communities that they sit in and serve, all because of shoddy policymaking and legal sleight of hand.

    Ray Li is a civil rights attorney focusing on education policy. He recently left the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after serving as a career attorney from 2021 to 2025. In that role, he worked on more than a dozen policy documents for OCR, including guidance issued after the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA. He also served as OCR’s lead staff attorney on appellate and Supreme Court litigation matters, including for the SFFA, Coalition for TJ and Boston Parent Coalition cases. Prior to joining OCR, he advised schools, colleges and universities on legal regulatory issues, including civil rights issues, at Hogan Lovells’ education practice.

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  • New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

    New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

    New research suggests that the Department of Government Efficiency has been making inaccurate claims about the extent of its savings from cuts to the Department of Education.

    DOGE previously posted on X that it ended 89 contracts from the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, worth $881 million. But an analysis released Wednesday by the left-wing think tank New America found that these contracts were worth about $676 million—roughly $200 million less than DOGE claimed. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” website, where it tracks its cuts, later suggested the savings from 104 Education Department contracts came out to a more modest $500 million.

    New America also asserted that DOGE is losing money, given that the government had already spent almost $400 million on the now-terminated Institute of Education Sciences contracts, meaning those funds have gone to waste.

    “Research cannot be undone, and statistics cannot be uncollected. Instead, they will likely sit on a computer somewhere untouched,” New America researchers wrote in a blog post about their findings.

    In a separate analysis shared last week, the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, also called into question DOGE’s claims about its Education Department cuts.

    Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, compared DOGE’s contract values with the department’s listed values and found they “seldom matched” and DOGE’s values were “always higher,” among other problems with DOGE’s data.

    “DOGE has an unprecedented opportunity to cut waste and bloat,” Malkus said in a post about his research. “However, the sloppy work shown so far should give pause to even its most sympathetic defenders.”

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  • To make profit, AI companies will have to take your job

    To make profit, AI companies will have to take your job

    Lately, I have been experiencing anger, occasionally edging toward rage (depending on my mood) when I open a new document in MSWord and I see the ghostly prompt urging me to use its Copilot generative AI tool.

    I do not want to use this tool. I especially do not want to use this tool to start a draft of a document, because writing the first draft under the power of my own thoughts is the key to ultimately producing something someone else might want to read, and outcome on which my living depends, but it’s also, the point of all writing ever, in any context, as far as I’m concerned.

    I am persuaded by Marc Watkins’s framing of “AI is unavoidable, not inevitable” for no other reason than the tech companies will not allow us to avoid their generative AI offerings. We can’t get away from this stuff if we want to, and boy, do I really want to.

    But just because it is unavoidable and must be acknowledged and, in its way, dealt with, does not mean we are required to use or experiment with it. Over the period of writing More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, and now spending a month or so promoting and talking about the book in various venues, I grow more and more convinced that if this technology is to have utility in helping students learn—and I mean learn, not merely do school—this utility is likely to be specialized and narrow and the product of deep thought and careful exploration and step-by-step iteration.

    Instead, we’re on the receiving end of a fire hose spraying, This is the future!

    Is it, really?

    One of the reasons we’re being told it’s the future is because at this time, generative AI has no strong business rationale. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who admitted in a podcast interview that generative AI applications have had no meaningful effect on GDP, suggesting they are not amazing engines of increased productivity.

    Tech watcher Ed Zitron has been saying for months that there is no “AI revolution” and that we’re heading toward the bursting of a bubble that will at least rival the 2008 downturn caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.

    So, while there is reason to believe that we are experiencing a bubble that is inevitably going to burst, as we imagine what our institutional and individual relationships should be with this technology, I think it’s useful to see what the people who are—literally—invested in AI envision for our futures. If they are right, and AI is inevitable, what awaits us?

    Let’s check in with the people directly funding and developing AI technology what they foresee for the educators of the United States.

    @elonmusk/X

    That is the man who is apparently running—and running roughshod over—the United States government suggesting that AI-assisted education is superior to what teachers deliver. Now, we know this is not true. We know it will never be true—that is, unless what counts as outcomes is defined down to what AI-assisted education can deliver.

    At her “Second Breakfast” newsletter, Audrey Watters puts it plainly, and we should be prepared to accept these truths:

    “But to be clear, the ‘better outcomes’ that Silicon Valley shit-posters Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk fantasize about in the image above do not involve the quality of education—of learning or teaching or schooling. (You’re not fooled that they do, right?) They aren’t talking about improved test scores or stronger college admissions or nicer job prospects for graduates or well-compensated teachers or happier, healthier kids or any such metric. Rather, this is a call for AI to facilitate the destruction of the teaching profession, one that is, at the K-12 level comprised predominantly of women (and, in the U.S., is the largest union) and at the university level—in their imaginations, at least—is comprised predominantly of ‘woke.’”

    It is hard to know what to do about a technology that some intend to leverage to destroy your profession and harm the constituents your profession is meant to serve. More Than Words is not a book that argues we must resist this technology at all costs, but again, these people want to destroy me, you, us.

    ChatGPT and its ilk haven’t even been around for all that long, and we already see the consequences of voluntary deskilling. Futurism reports, “Young coders are using AI for everything, giving ‘blank stares’ when asked how programs actually work.”

    Namanyay Goel, a veteran coder who has been observing the AI-wielding coders who can’t actually code, says, “The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just … missing.” This is output divorced from process, a pattern that is already endemic to our transactional model of schooling, but which AI now supercharges.

    There is no role for educational institutions in the world where we allow this sort of thing to substitute for knowledge and learning. That may be the least of our problems should the full deskilling result. (See the film Idiocracy for that particular flavor of dystopia.)

    When Microsoft shoves its AI tools in the face of a student with less time, less freedom, less confidence and more incentive to use it, what are we giving them to make them want to resist, to commit to their learning, to become something other than a meat puppet plugging syntax into a machine with the machine spewing more syntax out?

    At this point, where is the evidence the companies do not wish us harm?

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  • Your alumni magazine is a source of marketing gold

    Your alumni magazine is a source of marketing gold

    In a time of skyrocketing paper and postage costs, alumni magazines are paradoxically enjoying a renaissance. After cutting back—or cutting down—print issues during the pandemic, many institutions are now pushing for expanded page counts, more copies, better photography, multimedia extras and more institutional support.

    Why?

    Because audiences appreciate the thought-provoking content and the tangible, premium reminder of the enduring connection with their alma mater. In a 2024 CASE readership survey, 68 percent of TCU Magazine’s readers reported spending 30 minutes or more with every issue. Almost half reported that the magazine was a go-to source for continuing education.

    Journalists are pouring their passion and experience into institutional magazines because higher education shines glimmers of hope into an increasingly dark world. They highlight purpose-driven students who will tackle the problems of the future and brilliant faculty whose research is providing innovative solutions to the planet’s most pressing challenges.

    Our readership analytics at TCU Magazine have long shown a strong audience appetite for well-researched and carefully written and edited feature stories about forward momentum and its relationship to education. Since 2015, our overall page views have experienced an astounding 1,300 percent growth. That number sounds outlandish, but I can assure you it is accurate.

    Our alumni, parents, donors and internal stakeholders are and always have been the primary audiences. But they aren’t the only people who want to know about the students, faculty, staff and initiatives that thrive on our campus. TCU Magazine’s stories are crafted to be relevant far beyond our campus community and long after the initial date of publication.

    In 2021, when all the rules were being rewritten, we proposed a partnership with our colleagues in marketing. We suggested a trial run of using existing magazine stories as peer marketing material, promoting those features to internet users who live in the proximity of the country’s top 150 colleges and universities. The goal was for other professionals in higher education to learn about TCU beyond our exceptional student experience and athletic success.

    TCU’s marketing director agreed that long-form content could run alongside more traditional digital marketing materials. Why not? Serving stories about improving teacher retirement plans; developing free, open-source digital mapping tools; or better understanding mutations in the BRCA gene benefit us and all manner of readers.

    Audiences learn something new and interesting about how research is shaping the future, and we achieve our goal of enhancing TCU’s academic reputation.

    Win-win.

    Together, we built a partnership with a digital marketing agency based in Fort Worth. With their expert guidance, we got a crash course in the differences between Google Display Network and SEM keywords, Demand Gen ad placements, bidding strategies, and the wisdom of narrowing ad placements in social media feeds.

    We launched our first joint academic content campaign in April 2021 with a modest investment. The results were promising: In two months, we got the TCU initials in front of more than six million people around the country and enticed 87,000 of those people to click on the ad and come to the website to read the story.

    Best of all, these were what we refer to as quality clicks, because the average reader spent almost two minutes on one of our stories, far above the internet’s long-form content average of less than 40 seconds. That small trial convinced our divisional leaders that magazine material could be marketing gold.

    We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel or invest in outside development of marketing-specific content because we had a treasure trove already flowing from a steady creative stream inside our office.

    We expanded the efforts in 2022, sharing new stories with 10.5 million pairs of eyes and bringing 116,000 more people to our site to learn about TCU research. That year, we got an email from Puerto Rico about French professor Benjamin Ireland’s research reuniting families torn apart during forced internment during World War II. “I am not sure why Facebook ‘promoted’ your article to me this morning,” the effusive author shared, “but something made me click to read more.”

    We’ve continued to grow these campaigns. Though our mission at the magazine is and always will be to serve the TCU community first, we now factor in whether a proposed story might have a broader impact or might help us tell a more expansive tale about how the type of ethical leadership that flourishes here and makes the world a better place.

    My opinion is that these campaigns have worked because they’re a perfect merger of marketing and communication. We’re doing what magazine writers and editors have always done—telling authentic stories about real people doing purpose-driven work.

    What’s not to like?

    Caroline Collier is director of editorial services at Texas Christian University and editor of TCU Magazine.

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  • Local lawmakers press Penn to uphold DEI

    Local lawmakers press Penn to uphold DEI

    Local lawmakers walked out of a meeting with University of Pennsylvania officials on Tuesday due to what they said was insufficient support for diversity, equity and inclusion, WHYY reported.

    Pennsylvania state senator Art Haywood and state representative Napoleon Nelson, both Democrats, reportedly walked out of the meeting after a Penn official referred to diversity as a “lightning rod.” 

    The meeting, which included several elected state and city officials, became contentious, with lawmakers pressing Penn to hold its ground against the Trump administration’s executive actions on DEI, according to WHYY.

    Penn has since removed webpages about its DEI initiatives and updated its nondiscrimination policies, despite swirling legal questions and a nationwide injunction handed down last week that blocked the Trump administration’s plans to crack down on college DEI efforts.

    University officials denied backtracking on Penn’s commitment to DEI, according to lawmakers’ accounts of the meeting.

    A university spokesperson told the Philadelphia radio station that Penn remains “committed to nondiscrimination in all of our operations and policies” and said the institution appreciated the concerns raised.

    Lawmakers indicated that they would continue to press Penn on its commitment to DEI; several provided fiery statements to WHYY casting the university’s response as weak.

    “Penn has made a cowardly move, rushing to heed dog-whistle demands from a feckless federal leadership and dismantle their programs that welcome students and workers from an expansive range of backgrounds,” state senator Nikil Saval, a Democrat, told the radio station.

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  • Stanford drops plan to buy Bay Area campus

    Stanford drops plan to buy Bay Area campus

    Stanford University backed off a plan, almost four years in the making, to buy the Notre Dame de Namur University campus in nearby Belmont, Calif., the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

    “The university arrived at this decision after evaluating many factors, some of which could not be anticipated when Stanford first entered into an option purchase agreement with NDNU almost four years ago,” Stanford officials wrote in a Tuesday statement announcing the decision.

    Officials added that as the university was “exploring possible academic uses for a Stanford Belmont campus,” it became clear “that identifying and establishing those uses for a potential Belmont campus will take significantly longer than we initially planned.”

    Administrators also seemed to hint at potential financial concerns, as President Donald Trump has sought—unsuccessfully, so far—to cap reimbursements for indirect research costs funded by the National Institutes of Health, which experts have warned will harm research universities. 

    “The landscape for research universities has changed considerably since Stanford entered into the option purchase agreement with NDNU,” Stanford officials wrote. “These changes are resulting in greater uncertainties and a different set of institutional and financial challenges for Stanford.”

    In their own statement, NDNU officials noted the university would continue to seek a buyer and expressed disappointment that the sale had fallen through.

    Notre Dame de Namur has sought to sell the Belmont campus near Palo Alto since it shrank its offerings and moved a number of its programs online in 2021 amid financial challenges that pushed it to the brink of closure. Now the private Roman Catholic institution is focused on graduate education and offers a mix of in-person, hybrid and online programs.

    Officials had expected the sale of the Belmont campus to provide a financial boon.

    “Our focus remains on finding a buyer who will preserve and honor the historical significance of this beautiful campus and continue to serve the community-oriented mission that has long been a cornerstone of Notre Dame de Namur University,” NDNU president Beth Martin wrote.

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  • Report finds racial disparities in STEMM degree persistence

    Report finds racial disparities in STEMM degree persistence

    A new report from the Common App found major racial disparities in persistence rates for students who enter college pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, mathematics or medicine.

    Just over half of all college applicants express interest in a STEMM field before entering college—except for Asian American students, 72 percent of whom are interested in STEMM. But while more than half of white and Asian students pursuing STEMM obtain a degree in their chosen field within six years, only one-third of first-generation and Latino students who pursue STEMM, and 28 percent of Black or African American students, persist to earn a degree.

    The disparities go beyond race. While 54 percent of continuing-generation STEMM students earn a degree in their chosen field, only 34 percent of first-gen students do so. And 51 percent of STEMM-interested students from above the median household income earn a degree in their field, compared to 38 percent of students from below median income levels.

    “Our research finds many more talented STEMM aspirants from underrepresented backgrounds applying for college than completing it,” the report concludes.

    The study also found that more female STEMM students switch their degree paths (18 percent) than male students (14 percent), though they complete STEMM degrees at similar rates.

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  • Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

    Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

    New York governor Kathy Hochul took an unusual interest in the hiring practices of the City University of New York on Tuesday when she ordered the public system to take down a job posting for a professorship in Palestinian studies at Hunter College.

    CUNY quickly complied, and faculty at Hunter are up in arms over what they call a brazen intrusion into academic affairs from a powerful state lawmaker.

    The job posting was for “a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.”

    “We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches,” the posting continued.

    In a statement Tuesday night, Hochul said the posting’s use of the words “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid” amounted to antisemitic attacks and ordered CUNY to “immediately remove” the posting.

    A few hours later, CUNY complied, and system chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez echoed Hochul’s criticisms of the posting.

    “We find this language divisive, polarizing and inappropriate and strongly agree with Governor Hochul’s direction to remove this posting, which we have ensured Hunter College has since done,” he wrote in a statement.

    Hochul also directed the university system to launch an investigation at Hunter “to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom.” Matos Rodríguez appeared to imply the system would follow that order as well, saying, “CUNY will continue working with the Governor and other stakeholders to tackle antisemitism on our campuses.”

    A CUNY spokesperson declined to say whether the system would launch a probe into the posting at Hunter but wrote in an email that “each college is responsible for its own faculty job posting.”

    Hochul’s order came after pro-Israel activists, including a former CUNY trustee and current professor, publicly voiced concerns about the posting.

    “To make a Palestinian Studies course completely about alleged Jewish crimes is akin to courses offered in the Nazi era which ascribed all the world’s crimes to the Jews,” Jeffrey Weisenfeld, who served as a CUNY trustee for 15 years, told The New York Post.

    Faculty at Hunter are livid about the decision, according to multiple professors who spoke with Inside Higher Ed both on the record and on background. They say it’s a concerning capitulation to political pressure from an institution they long believed to be staunchly independent.

    One longtime Hunter and CUNY Graduate Center professor, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their job, said faculty across the system were “outraged at this craven act by our governor and our chancellor.”

    “It shows that [Matos Rodríguez] has no commitment to academic freedom or moral compass that would allow him to stand up at this moment of political repression,” they said.

    CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, the union representing more than 30,000 faculty and staff members across the system’s 25 campuses, wrote a letter to Matos Rodriguez on Wednesday evening condemning the posting removal and calling on leadership to reverse their decision.

    “An elected official dictating what topics may be taught at a public college is a line that should not be crossed,” the letter reads. “The ‘divisive concepts’ standard for universities is something devised in Florida that shouldn’t be exported to New York. What’s needed are inclusive ways of teaching, not canceling concepts and areas of study.”

    It was unclear Wednesday whether the job posting would be edited and reposted or if the opening would be eliminated. A CUNY spokesperson declined to respond to questions about the job’s future, but the anonymous faculty member said they believed Hunter officials were revising the post, intending to relist it.

    The anonymous professor said they were worried that Hunter president Nancy Cantor, who took on the role last August after leading Rutgers University–Newark for a decade, could face severe scrutiny after the posting.

    “We fully support this initiative by our president to make this Palestinian studies cluster hire,” the anonymous professor said. “I’m very worried about Nancy Cantor’s tenure at Hunter. I think this is part of a campaign by the far right to get rid of Félix [Matos Rodríguez], and it would not surprise me in the least if he threw Nancy Cantor under the bus to save his own skin.”

    Heba Gowayed, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter, said she was shocked that Hochul had made the job posting a priority, especially as threats to academic freedom and attacks on higher education from Republicans are intensifying.

    “This is an unprecedented overstep in authority, but instead of coming from Republicans, it’s coming from a Democrat in one of the bluest states in the country,” she said. “They’re the ones that are supposed to be fighting to protect academic freedom. This is a tremendous abdication of that responsibility.”

    ‘A Climate of Fear’

    The anonymous professor said their colleagues are grappling with contending emotions: rage and fear. There’s a great appetite to speak up, they said, but they also feel it’s more dangerous than ever, even for tenured faculty.

    “People are worried across the board,” they said. “That is the kind of climate of fear that this sort of action creates.”

    It’s not the first time CUNY has responded to pressure from pro-Israel activist groups in faculty workforce decisions. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, CUNY institutions have declined to renew contracts for two vocally pro-Palestinian professors: Danny Shaw at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who says he was the target of a pro-Israel pressure campaign to get him fired after 18 years of teaching, and lecturer Lisa Hofman-Kuroda at Hunter, who was reported for pro-Palestinian social media posts.

    Shaw, who is currently suing CUNY for breach of contract, told Inside Higher Ed that the decision to remove the job posting did not surprise him.

    “This is McCarthyism 2.0,” he said. “Administrators won’t protect us. It’s been made pretty clear that at the end of the day, it’s either their necks on the chopping block or ours.”

    Last spring, when the student-led pro-Palestinian encampment protests spread from Columbia University across town to the City College of New York, CUNY leadership drew criticism for calling the New York Police Department to disperse students. Gowayed said that decision shocked faculty across the system, who took pride in their institution’s progressive reputation and history of academic integrity.

    Even then, she said she was “disturbed that they have let it get to this higher level of censoring faculty for a completely legitimate job posting.”

    The Palestinian studies position was one of two Hunter planned to hire, and Gowayed said faculty and leadership at Hunter had been supportive of the plans to expand their research and teaching capacity in an area of growing interest.

    “Whatever your feelings on Palestine, this is a research area in a widely recognized field of scholarship on genocide and apartheid,” Gowayed said. “These are well-established fields, whether you’re studying the Belgian Congo or Rwanda or Palestine, and the posting wasn’t even saying what approach the faculty should take … The reaction to this posting is so discrepant from the actual academic integrity of the job search.”

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