Tag: Events

What Ruth Simmons Taught Me About Standing for Something

Those who know me are well aware that I have a professional crush on Ruth Simmons. I have talked about how much I admire her career and the bold stances she has taken publicly and taken opportunities to ask others about how she has encouraged and mentored them. When presented with a chance to meet her, I quickly bought an airline ticket and counted down the days.

For those who are unfamiliar with her career, she was the first Black president of an Ivy League institution; holds the title of president emerita of Smith College, Brown University and Prairie View A&M University; and as of this past weekend, has been awarded 41 honorary degrees.

The last of these degrees was conferred by Southern Methodist University, which is where I earned my doctoral degree. Michael Harris, a professor at SMU, was the Faculty Senate president who nominated Simmons to receive the award. As a result, he was invited to the dinner given in her honor, and it was my great fortune his wife was unable to attend. He jokes that only one person references Simmons as often as I do, and he felt obligated to ask if I was interested in attending.

Prior to the dinner, Simmons was the speaker at a campuswide symposium, where signed copies of her book, Up Home, were distributed to attendees. She spoke about her childhood and career, offering advice to all in attendance.

Her final statement felt like a follow on to my last “Call to Action” piece, which encouraged everyone to fight on behalf of higher education:

“It’s in those moments, even when you’re wrong or when people think you’re wrong, that you’re elevated. It’s in those moments that you stand for something and know what is beyond the pale, in the things that you see before you. And so if, like my mother, you see somebody being unfairly treated, how dare you be silent? How dare you if you see someone doing something that trespasses. What should we be doing as human beings? How dare we not say something?

“So the question I get when I do my book events, from students and everyone else, is ‘What should I be doing in this moment?’ Everybody’s question is ‘What should I be doing now?’ I don’t have an answer for everybody, but I do know that at 80 years old, I get up every day ready to do something, and that’s what I always answer. ‘You’ve got to do something.’ It is not a moment to sit on the sidelines and be comfortable and say, ‘Oh, let everybody else worry about that.’ Shame on you if you draw that conclusion right now.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Like Ruth Simmons, I’ve received many questions from people who are unsure how or if they can fight, having read my recent piece. Some colleagues feel they can’t fight because they are in red states, or they worry they could put themselves or their institutions at risk through their actions. Others feel they lack the credibility or the authority to lead a fight. Still others worry they need to take on the fight on behalf of the whole industry and are already exhausted.

Fighting on behalf of higher education isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. I would encourage, as Simmons notes, that this can include addressing mistruths, defending those who are being treated unfairly and speaking out when the moment demands it. I believe that fighting for higher education means that we each defend the academy within our spheres of influence in big and small ways.

For example, arm yourself with facts and be prepared to address misinformation you may hear about the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was just approved by the House GOP and has been sent to the Senate. As passed by the House, it includes limiting Pell eligibility and eliminating subsidized student loans.

Know what the impact of the House’s proposed endowment tax will be on the institutions that will be impacted. Be versed in how institutions are reeling from the elimination of research grants and how the bill will now further impact them. It is clear to me that these are the first cuts for institutions, but they won’t be the last. The goal is to have fiscal death by a thousand cuts. I would argue it is our responsibility to speak out—to fight— when we hear people discussing the federal budget and grant cuts and explain the impacts these cuts are having on student persistence, on campuses, on research, and on everyday people.

Despite my choice of language and the traditional connotation associated with it, I don’t think of fighting as only a negative concept. Or, at the very least, I was raised in a Hispanic household where the duality of challenge and support was viewed as a given, rather than a negative. A colleague of mine said that he felt my language was solely confrontational. I suggested in response that fighting to me means asserting an alternative, which includes sharing expertise, data and information, and serving as a sense maker. I believe it covers addressing falsehoods and defending the truth. It is up to each of us if we view and live this only as a negative.

It’s possible that Simmons’s advice feels aligned with my thinking because I want so dearly to be aligned with her, but the reality is that there’s something about a fighter that is always aligned with another fighter, and for that reason I hope you’ll see yourself in her words and in mine. Once again, I invite you to fight.

Source link

May 23, 2025
King Misrepresented in Anti-DEI Congressional Hearing

In January 2024, I wrote a Forbes article titled, “How Martin Luther King Would Respond to Today’s Attacks on DEI.” I declared therein that King would be outraged and disgusted by the catastrophic assault on values for which he fought, was arrested 29 times and ultimately died. Were he still alive today, I know for sure that King would call on leaders to demonstrate more courage and integrity as DEI is being recklessly torn down in our nation’s K-12 schools, higher education institutions, government agencies and businesses. He would insist on brave truth telling, nonviolent resistance, larger and more audacious multiracial coalitions, and strategically pulling every possible lever in defense of racial justice. King would not have been okay with colleges and universities closing culture centers and multicultural affairs offices, scrubbing their websites of language pertaining to antiracism and equity, and firing innocent DEI practitioners who broke no laws and did nothing wrong.

Regarding his dream, I insisted the following in the aforementioned Forbes article about King: “Paradoxically, many people who know little about the greatest American civil rights leader of all time at least know he famously spoke these words: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ The part about not judging people by skin color gets weaponized to justify colorblindness.”

Unsurprisingly, this very thing happened this week in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing titled “Restoring Excellence: The Case Against DEI.” I was the lone expert witness for the Democrats, a role I had played twice before on Capitol Hill.

Robert Onder, a Republican congressman representing Missouri, prefaced a question to me by reciting the go-to line from King’s speech. “Let me read to you a quote you may have heard of, maybe you haven’t, it goes something like this …”

Two things ran through my mind at the time. First was “Oh, here we go with the tired, predictable misrepresentation of Martin Luther King’s stance on colorblindness.” Secondly, I thought, “Of course I have heard these words—I have been a Black man in America for nearly 50 years; I am a proud graduate of a historically Black university; I spent a decade as a member of the Africana studies faculty at the University of Pennsylvania; I have delivered numerous Martin Luther King Day keynote addresses for universities and companies across the country (including this one in 2016 at Duke University in which I critiqued the twisting of King’s Dream speech); and I have read dozens of MLK sermons, speeches and letters, including but not limited to those published in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches—how absurd to even suggest that I may be hearing these words for the first time.” It was the most disgusting moment of the hearing for me, yet I somehow maintained my composure.

I have said it many times before, but it is worth repeating during these dangerous times in higher education and our democracy: King was not a proponent of colorblindness. He hated racism against African Americans and other people of color. He called white supremacy by its name. He called Black people by their names as he fearlessly demanded equity, opportunity and justice for them. The remedies he advocated were extraordinarily race-forward and color-conscious. Any policy or practice in higher education or elsewhere that insists on colorblindness is a misrepresentation of King’s stance.

There is at least one other noteworthy thing about the annoying evocation of King in the congressional hearing: The civil rights icon said judged “by the content of their character,” but Onder and other Republicans kept insisting on narrowly judging applicants by standardized college entrance exams that tell admission professionals more about those prospective students’ ZIP codes, socioeconomic statuses, the ability of their families to pay for expensive test prep courses and tutors, and the abundance of resources in the K-12 schools they attended.

Ironically, DEI opponents often fail to recognize and appreciate the incredibly valuable proxies for character, leadership, creativity and other strong indicators of undeniable potential for greatness in holistic admissions practices.

Those of us who love King and truly value the race-consciousness of the unrealized American dream for which he fought, was repeatedly jailed and died must continue to help our family members, neighbors, colleagues, presidents and governing board members, students, and elected officials understand why wholesale, decontextualized advocacy for colorblindness is wrong, unfair and bad for our democracy.

If we really want to honor King, especially during this time, more of us would demonstrate brave resistance to the enormously consequential dismantling of DEI in educational institutions and our broader society. The civil rights hero is widely known for peace, love and nonviolence—what Cornel West calls the “Santa Clausification” of King.

But to be sure, King would have hated the weaponization of government to dismantle DEI broadly and racial equity efforts specifically right now. He would have put up the biggest fight and demanded that leaders, including those in higher education, stop cowardly surrendering to white supremacy and hate. More of us should do that, too.

Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of education, business and public policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership.

Source link

May 23, 2025
3 Considerations for “Nudging” Intervention in Higher Ed
Nudging systems are low-cost, simple mechanisms colleges can deploy to ensure students stay on track with enrollment. They can have a long-term impact on student success, creating socioeconomic mobility and closing equity gaps for students from historically marginalized backgrounds. But how does a college create effective nudging measures to enhance student success?

The nonprofit group ideas42 conducted a field review of available research on educational nudging and its impact on student outcomes and identified promising practices in an April report.

Over all, researchers found nudges that reduced students and parents’ mental load and simplified processes, such as prefilled forms, were tied to higher educational outcomes, compared to messages that required additional processes or complex decision-making.

A Slice of Research

Ideas42’s report addresses the entire education pipeline, from kindergarten to higher education. This article focuses only on processes implemented in university settings or related to enrollment in higher education.

The background: Behavioral science principles have been applied to higher education for decades with the goal of supporting students and families as they navigate complex institutions. Called nudges, these interventions happen in admissions, financial aid and the registrar’s offices, and can take place via email, learning management systems and texts, to help students meet deadlines.

Large-scale nudging interventions at the state and national level have been shown to be less effective than smaller-scale outreach from groups students are familiar with. A more recent study from Georgia State University found that time-sensitive nudges, or those related to high-stakes tasks, were more likely to encourage student behavior.

Methodology: In the report, researchers define nudges as “interventions that change student behavior by modifying their decision-making context, without meaningfully restricting available choices or exerting coercive influence through large incentives or penalties.”

The report authors focused on three types of nudges that address students’ bounded awareness, rationality and self-control—subconscious factors that may limit an individual’s decision-making, willpower or information-seeking abilities.

Nudges were categorized by whether they add or subtract elements from student-facing processes. For example, an additive nudge requires students to interact with a new product or service or complete additional tasks, whereas a subtractive nudge reduces the tasks students have to complete or eliminates products (for example, texts to a student rather than notifications through a portal). Researchers also evaluated whether the nudges increased students’ cognitive load, requiring additional processing and decision-making, or reduced mental pressure to help them focus attention and process information.

The findings: Researchers found that the most effective nudges in improving student outcomes are those that reduce unnecessary steps, simplify processes and make it easier for individuals to complete their goals—such as prefilled financial aid applications or streamlined enrollment forms.

However, nudge designers often lean toward creating more steps or introducing new tools and activities, such as a texting campaign to connect students to resources about late course withdrawal, that don’t reduce the effort required by students. This can overload them and fail to benefit them in the intended ways, adding confusion.

Instead, campus leaders should prioritize subtraction in the number of messages and steps a student may receive in the hopes of reducing their mental burden.

Some additive measures can be helpful, such as creating a tool for students and families to evaluate various options in a choice set, because it makes decision-making easier or enables action in a simpler manner.

But in general, the best practice is to reduce the complexity of processes and the cognitive demands of the task.

Making changes: To enhance nudging systems, the ideas42 review suggested education leaders consider the following:
- Focus on the messenger. Often, nudge development focuses on the content of the message, but identifying a trusted and recognized source to deliver the message can increase its credibility. Messengers who are trusted, local and human are more likely to engage recipients than generic, institutional or automated senders.
- Forget the low-hanging fruit. Nudges can be developed as a cost-effective and scalable intervention, but they may neglect the deeper, more systemic solutions that could generate long-term student success. “This focus on cheap and incremental solutions also risks exacerbating inequities in educational outcomes, because the barriers faced by historically marginalized communities often require deeper solutions,” the report says.
- Evaluate the problem thoroughly. The nudge design process can begin with a predetermined solution, rather than a diagnosis-driven approach, which doesn’t necessarily fit the need at hand. Campus leaders should seek to understand the barriers students face and create nudges that touch the root of the problem.
Get more content like this directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.
Source link
May 23, 2025
Higher Ed Unions Call for Free College in Fed Policy Agenda
A coalition of labor unions representing faculty and other higher education workers called for free college and more Thursday—the same day House Republicans passed their reconciliation bill, which would cut Pell Grants and target postsecondary education in other ways.

The federal policy agenda is from Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), which seeks to unify all types of higher ed workers—academic and nonacademic, unionized or not—in a single national coalition that can organize together.

The other broad prongs of HELU’s agenda are to:
- Establish strong labor standards on every campus
- End the crises of student and institutional debt
- Rebuild and expand the nation’s research infrastructure
- Enshrine and protect the right to learn, speak freely and teach without fear or retaliation
- Ensure democracy and shared governance for those who work, learn and live alongside colleges and universities
“Now is the time to rally our forces and offer a different vision of higher education and a positive path forward,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors and a founder of HELU, at a news conference in Washington, D.C.

“Higher ed is under a withering assault right now,” Wolfson said. “But it’s important for us to be clear: The assault on higher ed did not begin with Trump.”

“As a sector, we have suffered through 50 years of federal and state divestment,” Wolfson continued. He said this has led to, among other things, “skyrocketing tuition” and a lack of job security for campus workers.

“The corporatization and neoliberal attacks on our universities are entwined with the right-wing authoritarian attacks,” Wolfson said. “They want to stop political dissent,” and, “as higher education goes, so goes democracy.”

Two Democratic politicians—Rep. Mark Takano of California and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts—spoke at Thursday’s event alongside leaders from multiple unions. Markey said House Republicans “have proposed a budget that will decimate the Pell Grants, leaving colleges out of reach for hundreds of thousands of low-income and first-generation students.”

“Donald Trump and Republicans don’t want freedom, they don’t want democracy, they want control,” including over curricula, research and student speech, Markey added.
Source link
May 23, 2025
U.K. Invests $40M to Attract International Researchers

The Royal Society has announced a $40 million fund designed to attract global research talent to the U.K.

The Faraday Fellowship “accelerated international route” will provide up to $5.4 million per academic or group willing to relocate to British universities and research institutes, over a period of five to 10 years. The society said that it would be willing to consider larger awards “in exceptional circumstances.”

The announcement comes as countries around the world vie to attract leading scholars who are considering fleeing the U.S. in protest of President Donald Trump’s attacks on research funding and diversity initiatives.

Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, said that international science was “in a state of flux with some of the certainties of the postwar era now under question.

“With funding streams and academic freedom coming under threat, the best scientific talent will be looking for stability. The U.K. can be at the front of the queue in attracting that talent,” Smith said.

“Our new opportunity, combined with schemes from [UK Research and Innovation] and the Royal Academy of Engineering, is a step in the right direction.”

The society said that two-thirds of the initiative’s budget would come from the Faraday Discovery Fellowship Fund, part of a $335 million government endowment set aside in 2023 to support attempts to attract midcareer academics to the U.K. The society will top this up with $13.4 million of its own, enabling the plan to be widened to cover researchers at other career stages.

Full eligibility criteria will be published by the end of June.

The announcement follows the European Union’s unveiling of a $565 million fund to attract researchers, including doubling to $2.25 million the maximum grant available to those arriving from outside the bloc to set up a laboratory or research team.

Individual European countries and universities have also launched initiatives to attract international researchers following Trump’s election, including a $9.8 million scheme in Norway. France’s University of Aix-Marseille is providing nearly $17 million in grants for those seeking “scientific asylum” from the U.S.

Leading scientists have been calling on the U.K. to launch a similar initiative. However, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has warned that such attempts could be stymied by U.K. immigration policies, including high visa and health-care costs.

Source link

May 23, 2025
Calif. Community Colleges Ramp Up Battle Against the Bots

Faced with an ongoing swell of fraudulent applications and enrollments, the California Community College system is hotly debating what to do next to win their battle against bot “students” for good.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the 116-college system has been haunted by ghost students—impostors who enroll online, apply for financial aid and disappear with the funds. System administrators say the issue arose in the last five years, with fraudsters eager to access federal aid made available to students. The growth of online education and spread of AI has exacerbated the problem, making it easier for bots to apply in droves. The issue has put strain on professors and staff who have had to flag and purge thousands of bots from online courses and led to the loss of millions of dollars of student aid.

System leaders brought a proposal before the Board of Governors in a meeting Tuesday, asking them to consider a “nominal” student fee to help pay for artificial intelligence tools and other defenses against the bots. After more than two hours of discussion, board members opted against taking steps to charge a fee. But the board didn’t reject the idea outright; instead they asked system staff to further “explore” it and unanimously voted in favor of other recommendations. Notably, the system now has approval to require an identity-verification process for all applicants and to ramp up use of high-tech and AI tools to combat the issue.

Over the past year alone, the system found 31.4 percent of applications were fraudulent, system officials said. Ghost students have stolen about $10 million in federal financial aid and $3 million in state and local aid in the past year, according to system officials. That’s an escalation from prior years; campus reports obtained by Cal Matters revealed that between September 2021 and January 2024, fraudsters took off with $5 million in federal aid and $1.5 million in state and local aid.

Those figures have alarmed state lawmakers. Last month, nine Republican members of Congress from California sent a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi calling for a federal investigation into the fraud issue. State lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, have since demanded a state audit of the system’s fraud challenges.

Chris Ferguson, executive vice chancellor of the California Community College system, told Inside Higher Ed that stolen funds account for “about two-tenths of a percent” of the several billion dollars of aid flowing into the colleges, “well below the threshold that would normally trigger federal investigations of financial aid fraud,” he said. He also emphasized that the system’s current tools for fraud detection capture about 85 percent of false applications.

At the beginning of last year, the system rolled out a new identity verification process as a part of applications, called ID.me. But the process was optional for community college districts until the Board of Governors voted to require it at this week’s meeting.

Ferguson would like to see the share of fraudulent cases caught—and prevented—approach 100 percent, partly by scaling AI tools already in use on some campuses. But advancing those efforts could cost up to $10 million, Ferguson estimated, which is why administrators requested the authority to charge a student fee in “the low tens of dollars.”

The goal of the fee would be to “both support application review costs and deter fraudulent application submissions,” according to the proposal.

James Todd, assistant vice chancellor of the California Community College system, told Inside Higher Ed that the system is trying to prevent fake students from continuing to take away resources from real students. He said campus employees have had to pivot from their day-to-day, student-facing work to focus their attention on identifying bots. Meanwhile, ghost students’ registrations are crowding out actual students from classes they need for their programs.

“Our entire system is based on increasing equitable access for students,” Todd said. “Students who are already on a degree or certificate path are sometimes finding barriers to being able to enroll in a class or a class being canceled because colleges have found that it’s all enrolled with fraudulent students. That is what we’re dealing with on an everyday basis across our campuses.”

But students came out in force at the Board of Governors meeting to express their opposition to the fee. Many students, from campuses across the system, acknowledged the importance of rooting out ghost students but also shared concerns that an additional charge, even if small, could pose a financial barrier for low-income students.

The fee “is someone’s food, is someone’s gas,” Daniela Romo, president of the Associated Students of Delta College at San Joaquin Delta College, told the board. “But it’s also a message to other people that there is some barrier to entry … I think that the beauty of the California Community College system is that it accepts everybody with open arms.”

A National Issue

While California community colleges have a particularly stubborn bot problem, student aid fraud isn’t new or isolated to the system.

The Office of Inspector General at the federal Department of Education has been working for years to raise national awareness about financial aid fraud rings. For example, OIG investigations revealed $10 million worth of student aid fraud in Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and other states, according to a 2021 report.

Community colleges tend to be the most vulnerable to these types of scams because of their open-access mission, said Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. They intentionally make it easy for students to apply, unlike more selective universities, and they’re low-cost, or even no cost in states with free college programs. That means a fraudulent student who feigned eligibility for the Pell Grant could pay minimal tuition and pocket the rest of the aid money intended for other educational expenses like textbooks and transportation.

“Because of their very nature of being welcoming to all, [community colleges] invite this kind of opportunity for fraud,” Desjean said.

She emphasized that there are guardrails in place to prevent people from exploiting the financial aid system, like the FAFSA verification process, which requires some students to verify information on their financial aid applications. The Department of Education also flags potentially fraudulent behavior, like enrolling and withdrawing multiple times at different nearby institutions.

But there’s a difficult balance to strike between stopping fraudsters and making the financial aid process so burdensome that real students are deterred from applying, she said.

Adu Love, a student member of the Board of Governors, raised similar concerns about the community college system’s verification process, now required for all applicants. She told the board she worries extra steps could make applying more difficult for homeless, incarcerated or undocumented students, who might lack some of the necessary documentation. She herself drove five hours to Moorpark College to verify her identity because she was unable to use ID.me, she said.

“Our responsibility is not just to stop fraud, but it’s also to maintain the access we have as a system while we do it,” she told board members.

Using AI to Fight AI?

Earlier in the Board of Governors meeting, some community college leaders detailed the stress fraudulent applications have put on their campuses and the steps they’ve taken to resolve the issue.

Jeannie G. Kim, president of Santiago Canyon College, told the board that her institution identified about 10,000 fraudulent students by employing various verification methods, including making phone calls to individual students.

“We had to actually take them out of our system, and when we did that, of course, our enrollment numbers … dropped tremendously,” Kim said. “But we needed to do it, because we needed to bring our real students in. That saved the day for our students … Our students were clamoring for these classes that they could not gain access to.”

Clearing out the false students made room for about 8,000 actual students to enroll.

Jory Hadsell, vice chancellor of technology for the Foothill–De Anza Community College District, told the Board of Governors that “waves” of fraudulent applications last year left admissions and financial aid personnel “overwhelmed and exhausted” as they sifted through thousands of suspect applications.

“Internal fraud tools were no longer keeping up with the speed and the sophistication of the threat that we were facing,” he said.

Now the Foothill–De Anza district and Santiago Canyon are part of a group of 48 colleges that have turned to artificial intelligence to flag potentially fraudulent applications—and they say it’s working.

Kim told board members that AI has been a game changer, helping her college catch bots at the application stage and keep them out of enrollments and wait lists.

The AI model reviews each application and gives it a “fraud score” indicating how likely it is to be fraudulent, along with an explanation of what factors triggered its suspicions. For example, the AI can detect whether lots of applications are coming from the same IP address.

The fraud problem “is controllable,” Kim said. “We have a 99 percent efficacy rate with the implementation that we have done” for a cost of less than $100,000.

Kiran Kodithala, CEO of N2N Services, which offers LightleapAI, the tool colleges are using, said at the meeting that the company processed roughly three million applications in the last eight months and prevented about 360,000 fraudsters “from defrauding taxpayers, stealing classes from students” and worrying campus leaders, helping them avoid “waking up in the middle of the night” fretting over whether they can trust their enrollment numbers.

These are the kinds of tools Ferguson wants to see expanded to more institutions.

“The more we can stop [fraud] at the application phase, the less you have to do on the enrollment front and … the less you have to do on the financial aid front,” he said.

Kim told the board that not every institution can use the same AI tools, because the bots used for fraud are too “smart”—they’ll quickly adapt if colleges aren’t using a diverse set of defenses. But she believes the entire system should be required to use some form of AI as part of their antifraud strategy, especially lower-resourced institutions that may not have the money or staffing to flag a swell of suspect applications on their own.

“We have a lot of small rural colleges, and those colleges cannot handle the kind of attack that we endured last fall,” she said. “If that happens to them, they are going to be in jeopardy.”

Source link

May 23, 2025
Trump Administration Strips Harvard’s SEVIS Certification

Amid an ongoing legal showdown with Harvard University, the Trump administration has carried through on a recent threat to halt the private institution’s ability to host international students.

The move was first reported Thursday afternoon by The New York Times, then subsequently announced on social media by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus. It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments,” Noem wrote in the announcement. “Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused.”

(Though much of the federal government’s recent focus on Harvard has concerned the university’s alleged failure to address antisemitism on campus, the Trump administration has also raised questions about collaboration with foreign researchers, particularly those with ties to the Chinese and Iranian governments.)

In her statement, Noem wrote that Harvard’s Student Exchange and Visitor Information System certification was being stripped “as a result of their failure to adhere to the law,” which she said should “serve as a warning to all universities” across the U.S.

Current international students would be required to transfer to maintain their visa status.

Noem added that Harvard would need to turn over demanded records within 72 hours if it would “like the opportunity of regaining” SEVIS certification “before the upcoming school year.”

A Harvard spokesperson called the action “unlawful” in an emailed statement.

“We are fully committed to maintaining Harvard’s ability to host international students and scholars, who hail from more than 140 countries and enrich the University—and this nation—immeasurably,” the spokesperson wrote. “This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission.”

Impact on Harvard

Harvard enrolled 6,793 international students last fall, according to university data. International students have made up about a quarter of Harvard’s head count over the last decade—a population that could disappear, along with their substantial tuition dollars, if the Trump administration’s directive holds.

Noem threatened to revoke Harvard’s SEVIS certification last month after the university pushed back on federal government demands to turn over “detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities by April 30.” That threat followed Harvard’s refusal to acquiesce to sweeping demands to overhaul its governance, admissions and hiring processes and more in response to allegations of antisemitic conduct. The university then sued the Trump administration over a federal funding freeze and other recent actions.

Revoking Harvard’s SEVIS certification is the second punch the government threw at the university this week, coming after the Department of Health and Human Services announced the termination of $60 million in multiyear federal grants, which officials attributed to concerns about campus antisemitism.

Other sources of federal funding are on hold. Altogether, the Trump administration has frozen at least $2.7 billion flowing to the private university, or about a third of Harvard’s federal funds.

A New Political Cudgel

The Student Exchange and Visitor Program’s process for revoking universities’ SEVIS status is usually a prolonged and complicated bureaucratic affair, typically preceded by a thorough investigation of the institution and the possibility of appeal.

Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, told Inside Higher Ed that the manner in which the federal government stripped Harvard’s SEVIS certification was unprecedented.

“In a normal world, Harvard is supposed to actually get a notice that their SEVIS certification is being revoked, and then there is an appeals process,” Spreitzer said. “It doesn’t seem that DHS is following any of the regular requirements that are included in statute for taking this action.”

In late March, Trump officials first proposed revoking SEVIS status from institutions that they believed fostered antisemitism on campus, aiming their threats specifically at Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles, which were home to major pro-Palestinian protests in 2024. In mid-April they threatened Harvard with decertification.

Clay Harmon, director of AIRC: The Association of International Enrollment Management, told Inside Higher Ed in March that historically, SEVP investigations are conducted when universities are suspected of delivering less-than-bona-fide degree programs, using shady coursework as a way to essentially sell student visas to would-be immigrants who want a fast way to enter the country.

“It is the government’s primary way of ensuring that international student visas are not granted for diploma mills, fake institutions or institutions that are not adequately financially supported,” Harmon said. “I’ve never heard of a fully accredited, reputable institution—whether it’s Columbia or Bunker Hill Community College—being subjected to some kind of extraordinary SEVP investigation outside of the standard recertification process.”

The initial process of certification, Harmon added, is intensive and can take institutions months or even longer to complete, which is one reason why decertification is so rare. Wielding the organization’s oversight powers as a tool for leverage in a larger political battle, he said, would be “a significant departure from past practices and established precedents.”

“It is clear that the administration is putting forward new interpretations of laws and powers that have not been established through case law or regular practice,” Harmon said.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed on Thursday, Harmon said the administration’s decision to use decertification against Harvard “imposes real, immediate, and significant harm on thousands of students for reasons outside their control and unrelated to their own actions.”

“This action may have broad and long-term negative impacts—well beyond Harvard and well beyond 2025—to the educational experience and financial health of U.S. institutions,” he wrote.

Revocation of Harvard’s SEVIS certification prompted sharp reactions online.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on social media that Noem’s actions are “likely illegal” and her letter showed no evidence of Harvard’s violations.

“Nothing in here alleges ANY specific violation of the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. Nothing. She cites no law violated, no regulation broken, no policy ignored,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote. “I don’t care what you think of Harvard; this is clear weaponization of government.”

Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called the government’s revocation of Harvard’s ability to host international students “retaliatory and unlawful.”

In a statement posted on X, he assailed the Education Department’s demands that Harvard hand over footage of international students protesting on campus.

“This sweeping fishing expedition reaches protected expression and must be flatly rejected,” Creeley wrote. “The administration’s demand for a surveillance state at Harvard is anathema to American freedom … This has to stop.”

But some officials in the MAGA camp celebrated the move.

“This is a remarkable first step,” Republican senator Ashley Moody of Florida wrote on X. “I applaud the administration for taking a stand to rid our universities of malign foreign influence.”

Source link

May 22, 2025
Judge Orders Education Department Employees Reinstated

On Thursday a judge ordered more than 2,000 fired employees of the Education Department reinstated.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images | Matveev_Aleksandr and raweenuttapong/iStock/Getty Images

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from firing thousands of employees at the Department of Education in a decisive rebuke of this spring’s sweeping reduction in force and the executive branch’s efforts to weaken the Education Department.

Judge Myong Joun rejected the administration’s argument that the layoffs, which affected half of the department’s workforce, were part of a “reorganization” aimed at improving efficiency and said evidence showed the administration’s “true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.” His order also prevents the department from implementing President Donald Trump’s March directive to dismantle the agency.

Joun of the District of Massachusetts also said the injunction to rehire the fired staffers was necessary in order to restore the department’s ability to accomplish its core functions and statutorily mandated responsibilities.

“Not only is there no evidence that Defendants are pursuing a ‘legislative goal’ or otherwise working with Congress to reach a resolution, but there is also no evidence that the RIF has actually made the Department more efficient,” Joun wrote in his 88-page ruling. “Plaintiffs have demonstrated that the Department will not be able to carry out its statutory functions—and in some cases, is already unable to do so.”

Reports of systemic failings and overloaded staff have streamed out of the beleaguered department ever since the March layoffs, from an untouched backlog of complaints at the Office for Civil Rights to the piling up of applications for student loan repayment and forgiveness plans.

The injunction, handed down Thursday morning, means the administration must reinstate more than 2,000 Education Department employees and reopen regional offices that were shuttered during the reduction in force.

The administration has already said it has issued a challenge to the ruling. Madi Biedermann, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for communication, said the administration has already appealed.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Biedermann decried the decision, calling Joun a “far-left judge” who “dramatically overstepped his authority” and maintaining that the layoffs were “lawful efforts to make the Department of Education more efficient and functional.”

“President Trump and the Senate-confirmed Secretary of Education clearly have the authority to make decisions about agency reorganization efforts, not an unelected Judge with a political axe to grind,” she wrote.

A spokesperson for the Association of American University Professors, one of the plaintiffs in the case, wrote in a statement that they were “thrilled” with the decision.

“Eliminating the [Education Department] would hurt everyday Americans, severely limit access to education, eviscerate funding for HBCUs and [tribal colleges and universities] while benefiting partisan politicians and private corporations,” they wrote.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended the layoffs at a budget hearing just a day prior to the ruling. She said the goal was to “wind down the bureaucracy” of the department, and that while she hoped to have congressional support to dismantle it eventually, the administration did not intend to so on its own.

Joun’s decision undercuts that defense. In the budget hearing, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat of Connecticut, told McMahon that the cuts were “unlawful” and a usurpation of congressional authority.

“As long as you continue to deliberately and flagrantly defy the law, you will continue to lose in court,” DeLauro said.

The injunction is the latest in a string of court orders challenging the Trump administration’s rapid cuts to federal agencies in its first 100 days, often under the supervision of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was responsible for the vast majority of the Education Department layoffs, according to McMahon’s House testimony Wednesday.

Joun’s ruling wasn’t the only one aimed at undoing the administration’s Education Department cuts. Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also ordered that the department restore grant funding to a Southern nonprofit that has helped further school desegregation efforts since the 1960s. The grant had been defunded as part of the administration’s push to eliminate spending on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Source link

May 22, 2025
Trump Adviser Blames “Scientific Slowdown” on DEI, Red Tape

President Donald Trump’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy believes the recent, seismic cuts to federal research funding offer “a moment of clarity” for the scientific community to rethink its priorities, including the government’s role in supporting research.

Michael Kratsios, who is pushing for increased private sector support of research, said that federal investment in scientific research—much of which happens at universities—has yielded “diminishing returns” over the past 45 years.

“As in scientific inquiry, when we uncover evidence that conflicts with our existing theories, we revise our theories and conduct further experiments to better understand the truth,” Kratsios, a former tech executive with ties to tech titan and conservative activist Peter Thiel, said at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. “This evidence of a scientific slowdown should spur us to experiment with new systems, new models, new ways of funding, conducting and using science.”

But some experts believe Kratsios’s comments mischaracterized trends in the nation’s academic research enterprise, which has been faced with decades of declining federal funding.

“Kratsios may have things exactly backward. Our growth has slowed down over decades—the same decades where we have been funding science less and less as a share of GDP,” Benjamin Jones, an economics professor at Northwestern University and former senior economist for macroeconomics for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Federally supported research is near its lowest level in the last 70 years. If the U.S. really wants to be ‘first’ in the world, the key will be how fast we advance. Cutting science is just a huge brake on our engine.”

A wide body of literature confirms that federally funded research and development continues to produce enormous social returns. A 2024 paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that rates of return on nondefense R&D spending range from 140 to 210 percent. Another report from United for Medical Research determined that for every dollar the National Institutes of Health spent on research funding in 2024, it generated $2.56 of economic activity. And yet another science policy expert has estimated that an additional dollar of government-sponsored R&D generates between $2 and $5 in public benefits via economic growth.

But those facts were absent from Kratsios’s remarks, which accused scientists of focusing on “trying to score political points” and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives instead of so-called gold-standard science. “Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things,” he said. “Political biases have displaced the vital search for truth.”

Kratsios also cited “stalled” scientific progress despite “soaring” biomedical research budgets and “stagnated” workforce training as proof that “more money has not meant more scientific discovery, and total dollars spent has not been a proxy for scientific impact.” Since 1980, he specified, “papers and patents across the sciences have become less disruptive,” and since the 1990s, “new drug approvals have flatlined or even declined.”

The White House OSTP did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for Kratsios’s sources of information, but some outside experts said those specific claims have merit, even if they lack additional context.

A 2023 paper in Nature shows that patents and papers are indeed becoming less “disruptive” over time. But the authors themselves said the slowdown is “unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors,” but rather “may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology,” which is presenting increasingly difficult and complex problems for researchers. The authors also called on federal agencies to “invest in the riskier and longer-term individual awards that support careers and not simply specific projects.”

(Many of the federal research grants the Trump administration has terminated in recent months supported those aims, including funding for graduate and postdoctoral students and multiyear projects that weren’t yet complete.)

And even though new inventions may be decreasingly likely to push science and technology in new directions, as the Nature paper indicated, federally funded research has nonetheless expanded its reach to consumers since 1980—the same time frame Kratsios claims has been marked by diminishing returns that warrant an overhaul of federal research policy.

Prior to the 1980s, the government owned the intellectual property of any discoveries made using federal research dollars. The policy gave universities little incentive to find practical uses for inventions, and fewer than 5 percent of the 28,000 patents held by federal agencies had been licensed for use, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

That changed when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, allowing universities, not-for-profit corporations and small businesses to patent and commercialize federally funded inventions. Universities began transferring inventions to industry partners for commercialization. Between 1996 and 2020, academic technology transfers in the U.S. contributed $1.9 trillion in gross industrial output, supported 6.5 million jobs and resulted in more than 126,000 patents awarded to research institutions, according to data from the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM).

As for Kratsios’s claim that drug approvals have “flatlined,” Matt Clancy, a senior research fellow at Open Philanthropy, said that’s a matter of interpretation. “If you think it means discovery is dead and not happening, that’s clearly false,” he said, noting that while drugs had been getting steadily more expensive to develop in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, costs have started falling over the past decade. “If you think it means the rate of discovery has not increased in proportion to the increase in spending, I think that is correct.”

‘The Enemy of Good Science’

Kratsios also tied those alleged declines in innovation to the assertion that researchers have fallen victim to a misguided “professional culture” and to “social pressures.” As an example, he pointed to the scientific community’s insistence on keeping schools closed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus as an example of scientists’ unwillingness to question dominant viewpoints. “Convention, dogma and intellectual fads are the enemy of good science,” he said.

Administrative burdens have also hamstrung the scientific enterprise, he added.

“The money that goes to basic and blue-sky science must be used for that purpose, not to feed the red tape that so often goes along with funded research,” Kratsios said. “We cannot resign our research community and the laboratory and university staff who support them to die the death of a thousand 10-minute tasks. To assist the nation’s scientists in their vocation, we will reduce administrative burdens on federally funded researchers, not bog them down in bureaucratic box checking.”

Expanding the role of private funders is part of Kratsios’s solution.

“In particular, in a period of fiscal constraints and geopolitical challenges, an increase in private funding can make it easier for federal grant-making agencies to refocus public funds on basic research and the national interest,” he said at the NAS meeting, which was attended by university lobbyists and senior administrators.

“Prizes, challenges, public-private partnerships and other novel funding mechanisms can multiply the impact of targeted federal dollars. We must tie grants to clear strategic targets while still allowing for the openness of scientific exploration and so shape a general funding environment that makes clear what our national priorities are.”

According to Kratsios, private industry is well positioned to step in. He claims the sector spends “more than three times on R&D than does the federal government,” though it’s not clear from where he drew that statistic. Data from AUTM shows that in 2023, industry expenditures made up just 6.8 percent of all research spending in the United States, compared to 56.6 percent from the federal government. (Inside Higher Ed has previously reported on the challenges of looking to private funders to meaningfully make up for the Trump administration’s current and proposed cuts to academic research.)

Shalin Jyotishi, senior adviser for education, labor and the future of work at the left-leaning think tank New America, said that while some of the issues that Kratsios raised regarding federal science policy have merit, the administration hasn’t put forth a clear vision for reform.

“Instead, what we are seeing is ‘creative destruction’ playing out across the federal research enterprise—without the ‘creative’ part,” he said. “It’s not too late. The administration can and should still salvage the federal research enterprise and enact reform to make it even better.”

Source link

May 22, 2025
Pasco-Hernando Taps DeSantis Ally as Interim President

Weeks after Pasco-Hernando State College president Jesse Pisors resigned abruptly, the board named Florida Department of Juvenile Justice secretary Eric Hall interim president Tuesday.

Republican governor Ron DeSantis appointed Hall to the department in late 2021. Prior to that role, Hall served as senior chancellor of the Florida Department of Education from early 2019 to late 2021. Before that appointment, his educational experience was largely in the K-12 space.

Hall was a finalist in the 2023 PHSC presidential search that ended with Pisors in the top job.

Pisors resigned after less than 18 months as president. His departure followed the release of a critical report by Florida’s version of the Department of Government Efficiency, which indicated the college was among the worst in the state in terms of student growth and retention. Board members alleged that they had not been made aware of those numbers, despite requests.

However, The Tampa Bay Times reported that there has been skepticism around the validity of the report, which some critics argued was a flawed analysis of PHSC’s student outcomes.

The newspaper also noted that DeSantis appointed Hall to a government efficiency task force in late 2023, an effort that was ultimately a forebear of the state’s DOGE apparatus.

Hall is one of multiple DeSantis allies hired to lead a public institution in Florida this year. Others include Marva Johnson, a lobbyist, hired to lead Florida A&M University last week, and former Florida lieutenant governor Jeanette Nuñez at Florida International University, as well as former state lawmaker Adam Hasner at Florida Atlantic University, both of whom were hired in February. (Nuñez was hired as an interim but has since been named sole finalist for the job.)

Prior political hires include Ben Sasse, a former Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, who briefly led the University of Florida before stepping down amid a spending scandal, and former state lawmaker Richard Corcoran at New College of Florida. Another former GOP lawmaker, Ray Rodrigues, was hired as chancellor of the State University System of Florida in 2022.

Source link

May 22, 2025