Tag: Force

  • EEOC asks court to force Penn response in antisemitism probe

    EEOC asks court to force Penn response in antisemitism probe

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    Dive Brief:

    • A Pennsylvania federal district court should force the University of Pennsylvania to comply with a subpoena requesting information in an ongoing investigation of alleged discrimination against Jewish employees at the institution, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said in a Tuesday filing.
    • EEOC said it first issued the subpoena in July, to which Penn submitted a petition to revoke the subpoena in its entirety. EEOC denied the petition but served Penn with a partially modified subpoena that it said addressed objections raised by the university. EEOC claimed Penn did not comply with a response deadline of Sept. 23.
    • The agency asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to direct Penn to produce all requested information, including data pertaining to discrimination complaints made by employees as well as participants in listening sessions held by a Penn antisemitism task force. In an email, a Penn spokesperson denied EEOC’s claims, stating that the university “responded in good faith to all the subpoena requests” but objected to providing personal and confidential information of Jewish employees without their consent.

    Dive Insight:

    The filing is part of an ongoing EEOC investigation as well as a broader series of inquiries regarding alleged Jewish discrimination and antisemitism at prominent U.S. universities. In a press release, EEOC said Tuesday’s filing stemmed from a 2023 commissioner’s charge filed by Andrea Lucas, its current chair.

    Per court documents, EEOC said the charge alleged a pattern of antisemitic behavior and that Penn subjected Jewish employees to a hostile work environment based on national origin, religion and race.

    “An employer’s obstruction of efforts to identify witnesses and victims undermines the EEOC’s ability to investigate harassment,” Lucas said in EEOC’s press release. “In such cases, we will seek court intervention to secure full cooperation.”

    The Penn spokesperson told HR Dive that Penn “cooperated extensively with the EEOC, providing over 100 documents, totaling nearly 900 pages” but refused to provide lists of, or personal contact information for, Jewish employees, Jewish student employees and persons associated with Jewish organizations.

    The spokesperson also denied EEOC’s claims that the university obstructed access to employees who may have submitted discrimination claims and said that it provided the information of employees who consented to doing so. EEOC rejected Penn’s offer to help the agency reach employees who were willing to speak with EEOC, the spokesperson said.

    “Penn has worked diligently to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish life on campus,” the spokesperson said.

    The agency’s investigation mirrors similar probes of alleged antisemitic discrimination at California State University and Columbia University. Faculty members at Columbia and Columbia-affiliated Barnard College reportedly received text messages from EEOC asking them to complete a survey last April.

    Penn and other institutions drew criticism and scrutiny for their handling of on-campus demonstrations and other related incidents amid the Israel-Hamas war. Former Penn President Elizabeth Magill was among the administrators asked to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023 — just months after the conflict began — on responding to antisemitism. House Republicans later launched their own probe of Penn’s and other universities’ antisemitism responses, Higher Ed Dive reported.

    Penn convened an antisemitism task force in response to these developments, which published a report in May 2024 containing findings and recommendations for the university and condemning antisemitism.

    Lucas and EEOC have since publicly encouraged workers who have experienced antisemitism on college campuses to submit employment discrimination charges to the agency.

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  • Loan Caps Could Force Students Into Private Market

    Loan Caps Could Force Students Into Private Market

    At least a quarter of students across a broad range of graduate and professional programs could need private loans, which tend to come with higher interest rates, in order to pay for their education once new caps on federal loans take effect next summer, multiple studies show. For some, the loans could become so costly as to make earning a master’s or doctoral degree unattainable.

    Currently, this group can borrow federal loans up to the total cost of attendance thanks to a program known as Grad PLUS. But starting July 1, students will max out at either $20,500 or $50,000 per year depending on whether they enroll in a graduate or professional program, respectively. And those in graduate programs will only be able to take out $100,000 over all, while students in professional programs will be limited to $200,000. Congress made the changes as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed earlier this summer.

    The caps mean that the median borrower in four of the nine largest professional programs likely will need to find other financing to pay tuition bills, according to a recent analysis from the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center at American University. Borrowers in the 75th percentile exceed the cap in six of the nine fields.

    And it’s not just the most costly doctoral programs such as medicine and dentistry in which students will face such a challenge, PEER notes. Out of the 30 master’s degree programs with the highest loan volume, 50 percent of students exceed the cap in nearly half of them.

    Many of these students could struggle to find a private lender to make up the difference, potentially forcing them to drop out or not enroll in the first place, policy experts at PEER and other research groups say. And even if a student finds a lender, taking out a private loan could lead to steep, sometimes predatory, interest rates that take decades to pay off. (Research shows that low-income individuals particularly struggle to secure private financing because of a range of factors such as low credit scores, a lack of assets or an inconsistent flow of income.)

    Before this new law, “students could have just filled out their FAFSA, applied for loans through the Department of Education and been able to borrow up to the full cost of attendance of their program,” said Jordan Matsudaira, director of the PEER Center and a former deputy under secretary at the Department of Education.

    But now, for upward of a quarter of graduate students, it likely won’t be that simple.

    “I think that will come as a surprise to a lot of people,” he said.

    Can Private Lenders Fill the Gap?

    Other researchers at Urban Institute and Jobs for the Future have also crunched the numbers on the loan caps and reached similar findings.

    Jobs for the Future estimated in a report released last month that if this loan cap had been in place for the 2019–20 graduating class, roughly 38 percent of graduate borrowers would have needed to take out more loans beyond the cap. And thanks to the limit, the federal government would have issued $9.7 billion less in loans—a decrease of about 28 percent, according to the report.

    Urban also used data from 2019–20 but broke it down by program, finding that dentistry would have the largest share of students exceeding the cap. About 56 percent would have exceeded the annual limit, and 58 percent blew through the aggregate cap. Other programs with a high share of students that could be pushed into the private market include medicine, at 41 percent, a master’s in public health, at 29 percent, and a master’s in fine arts, at 26 percent.

    Policy experts on both sides of the political aisle tend to agree that the student debt crisis needs to be addressed. But unlike conservative lawmakers and analysts who believe these caps are necessary in order to lessen student debt and encourage colleges to lower costs, some researchers worry the limits are too aggressive and don’t account for nuances like a program’s return on investment.

    “The kind of pain involved here is a little bit bigger than it needed to be to rein in the most egregious abuses in the system,” Matsudaira said. “The better approach over all would have been to adopt an approach where different fields of study had different limits that were scaled with borrowers’ ability to repay.”

    Some questions about how the loan limits will work and which programs they’ll apply to will be answered later this month when the Education Department starts to work through the rule-making process to carry out the law’s provisions. Representatives from nursing, aviation and social work have already started to speak out about why their programs should be considered professional degrees and therefore be eligible for the higher cap.

    “In today’s economy, the majority of graduate education is practical and workforce-aligned, preparing students for jobs in health care, education, counseling, technology and much more,” Stephanie Giesecke, a representative of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said at a public hearing in August. “The definition that is too narrow risks excluding programs that are vitally important to communities and employers nationwide.”

    Like Matsudaira, Ethan Pollack, a senior director of policy at JFF, said that while he sympathizes with the Republican diagnosis that debt is too high, he probably would have gone about addressing it a different way. But rather than suggesting changes to the cap itself, JFF’s report looked at the financial impact on borrowers and suggested ways that institutions, the government and private lenders can adjust in response.

    One key recommendation was the use of outcomes-based financing for private loans, which would base payments in part on borrowers’ earnings after graduating. Pollack said that this approach could help students who lack strong credit histories or cosigners still pursue well-paying degrees like a juris doctorate.

    But current regulations, like requiring a bank to disclose a flat annual percentage rate, or APR, when offering a loan, make it difficult for some private vendors to explore new models like outcomes-based financing, he explained. If the government were to build on the recent legislation by amending current regulations and introducing new guardrails for private lenders, Pollack added, the OBF model could make nonfederal loans more affordable for borrowers of all backgrounds.

    “The federal government, in some sense, is stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time,” he said. “They’re saying that they want the private market to be stepping up, but at the same time, the federal government is one of the obstacles to the private market being able to step up in the way that we would all like them to, which is to be offering financing with much more student-friendly terms.”

    Matsudaira, on the other hand, was more skeptical.

    “The big question is whether the private sector is really going to be able to come in and fill a hole that big,” he said. “And even if they do, how long does it take for them to spin up to be able to do those kinds of things?”

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  • Chinese officials force censorship of Thai gallery’s art exhibit about authoritarianism (proving the exhibit’s point)

    Chinese officials force censorship of Thai gallery’s art exhibit about authoritarianism (proving the exhibit’s point)

    Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter. 

    Exhibit on authoritarianism censored by authoritarians

    These days, repressive regimes are not content with just censoring their critics within their own borders. They also think they have the authority to determine what the rest of the world can see, hear, and say, which is how we wind up with news like the latest out of Thailand. 

    In late July, staff from China’s embassy visited the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre, along with local city officials to demand the censorship of the exhibition “Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity.” The gallery granted their demands and “removed pieces included Tibetan and Uyghur flags and postcards featuring Chinese President Xi Jinping, as well as a postcard depicting links between China and Israel.” Words including “Hong Kong,” “Tibet,” and “Uyghur” were redacted. But even this was not enough for the Chinese embassy, whose staff returned to seek further redactions and “reminded the gallery to comply with the One China policy.” 

    In a statement, China’s foreign ministry said Thailand’s quick action to pressure the gallery to censor “shows that the promotion of the fallacies of ‘Tibetan independence,’ ‘East Turkestan Islamic Movement,’ and ‘Hong Kong independence’ has no market internationally and is unpopular.” What it actually shows, though, is that the Chinese government often throws its weight around on the global scale — and gets its way. Authoritarians in the Academy, my new book out this month, documents precisely how China has attempted to enforce this kind of censorship in global higher education.

    The co-curators of the show, a married couple, have since fled Thailand, citing fears of retaliation by Thai authorities. They plan to seek asylum in the UK. 

    Palestine Action, internet speech, and the disastrous Online Safety Act rollout 

    As I explained in the last Dispatch, UK police are enacting a widespread crackdown on protests surrounding Palestine Action, a group banned under anti-terrorism legislation for damaging military planes in a protest. They’re not just arresting the group’s activists, but also any and all members of the public who express “support” for the group. That even includes a man who held up a sign of a political cartoon — one legally printed and available for sale in a Private Eye edition — that criticized the ban on Palestine Action, as well as an 80-year-old woman who was held for 27 hours for attending a protest.

    Pro-Palestinian activists protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice as a judge hears a challenge to the proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act. (Pete Speller / Shutterstock.com)

    These arrests were just drops in the bucket. Police arrested 532 protesters over one weekend this month, with all but 10 being arrested for words or signs “supporting” the banned group. “We have significant resources deployed to this operation,” Metropolitan Police posted on X. “It will take time but we will arrest anyone expressing support for Palestine Action.” Northern Ireland police also warned protesters that they could face prosecution.

    That’s not even the only troubling free speech scandal from UK police these past weeks. 

    Carmen Lau, a Hong Kong activist now living in the UK and still a target of censorship from the Chinese government, says Thames Valley police asked her to sign an agreement that she would “cease any activity that is likely to put you at risk” and “avoid attending” protests to limit the likelihood of overseas repression. Then a magistrate court overturned a gag order placed on a firefighter, suggesting that police officers were attempting to enforce a “police state.” Police raided the home of Robert Moss, a firefighter who won a wrongful termination challenge in 2023, over Facebook comments he’d posted about Staffordshire’s fire department, and then told him he must not only stay silent about leadership of the fire department, but was also not permitted to even discuss the investigation itself. 

    Meanwhile, overzealous police are far from the only problems facing internet speech in the UK. Looming even larger is the Online Safety Act, now in effect and wreaking havoc on the UK’s internet users and the companies and platforms they engage with online. A useful collection from Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown shows how requirements that sites verify age for material “harmful to children” created some absurd fallout. Age-gated content has included an X post with the famous painting Saturn Devouring His Son, news about Ukraine and Gaza, and a thread about material being restricted under the act. 

    The Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to certain regulations of the law failed this month, meaning many of its concerns about the act’s threats to the privacy of Wikipedia’s anonymous editors remain. But now, the message board site 4chan is pushing back, refusing to pay a fine already doled out for its noncompliance with the law. “American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an email,” the site’s lawyers wrote in a statement.

    And to the UK citizens who understandably are uncomfortable with the burdensome and privacy-threatening process of age-verification just to use the internet, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle warns: Don’t look for a workaround. Bizarrely, Kyle claimed adults verifying their age “keeps a child safe,” as if an adult’s VPN use somehow poses a risk to some child, somewhere. 

    Two women sentenced to a decade for printing anti-Hugo Chávez shirts 

    In what certainly looks like a case of entrapment, two Venezuelan women who run a T-shirt printing business were recently sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of incitement to hatred, treason, and terrorism. They had accepted an order to print shirts featuring a photo of a protester destroying a statue of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The women were initially wary of taking the order — apparently, for good reason — but eventually accepted it from the insistent customer. While delivering the order, they were arrested by police, who also confiscated their equipment and inventory. 

    It’s not just in Venezuela. More censorship of political speech, protest, and journalism globally:

    • Ugandan authorities disappeared a student for weeks, and when public outcry finally forced them to explain his whereabouts, he “resurfaced” at a police station and was charged with “offensive communication” for intent “to ridicule, demean and incite hostility against the president” on TikTok.
    • Moroccan feminist activist Ibtissam Lachgar was arrested this month for posting a photo of herself wearing a shirt with the message, “Allah is Lesbian.” A public prosecutor cited her “offensive expressions towards God” and post “containing an offense to the Islamic religion.”
    • An Argentine legislator is being prosecuted for social media posts comparing Israel to the Nazi regime and calling it a “genocide state.” In 2020, Argentina adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. (FIRE has repeatedly expressed concerns about codification of the IHRA definition and the likelihood it will censor or chill protected political speech.)
    • Belarusian authorities arrested dozens of activists and critics who took part in anti-government protests outside Belarus, in countries including the U.S. and UK.
    • Russian journalist Olga Komleva was sentenced to 12 years on “extremism” charges for her ties to the late Alexei Navalny and for spreading alleged fake news about the Ukraine invasion.
    • Cities across Canada have withdrawn permits for performances by Sean Feucht, a right-wing Christian singer and vocal supporter of President Trump, with one Montreal church facing a $2,500 fine for going forward with his concert. Montreal mayor Valérie Plante said, “This show runs counter to the values of inclusion, solidarity, and respect that are championed in Montreal. Freedom of expression is one of our fundamental values, but hateful and discriminatory speech is not acceptable in Montreal.”
    • Indonesian authorities are warning about the country’s regulations on flag desecration and respect for state symbols in response to a trend of citizens posting the Jolly Roger flag from the manga One Piece as a form of protest.
    • Six journalists, including four with Al Jazeera, were killed by an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military accused one of the journalists, Anas al-Sharif, of being a Hamas cell leader, but the Committee to Protect Journalists says it “has made no claims that any of the other journalists were terrorists.”
    • A 34-year-old Thai security guard, originally sentenced to 15 years, will spend seven years in prison for Computer Crimes Act and lese-majeste violations for insulting the monarchy on social media.
    • A statement from the U.S. and a number of European nations accused Iranian intelligence authorities of widespread plots “to kill, kidnap, and harass people in Europe and North America in clear violation of our sovereignty.”
    • Chinese officials in eastern Zhejiang province issued warnings to performers about material on gender relations in response to a comedian’s viral set about her abusive husband. “Criticism is obviously fine, but it should be … constructive rather than revolve around gender opposition for the sake of being funny,” the warning read.

    Book banning abroad

    Arundhati Roy waliking on village the road at Dwaraka, Kerala, Indi

    Arundhati Roy walking on village the road at Dwaraka, Kerala, India (Paulose NK / Shutterstock.com)

    Under the criminal code of 2023, Indian authorities in Kashmir banned over two dozen books, including those by novelist Arundhati Roy and historian Sumantra Bose. The books allegedly promote “false narratives” and “secessionism.” Selling or even just owning these books can result in prison time.

    This ban follows raids by Russian authorities of bookshops carrying titles from a list of 48 banned books, often those with LGBT themes. 

    Tech and the law

    • In enforcing its under-16 ban for social media, Australia reversed course and now will include YouTube in the group of platforms subject to the country’s age-gate ban.
    • French prosecutors are investigating Elon Musk’s X to see if the platform’s algorithm or data extraction policies violated the country’s laws.
    • Indian media outlets are disappearing past reporting amid “growing pressure from the Indian government to limit reporting critical of its policies.” One journalist told Index on Censorship that “404 journalism” is “becoming a new genre of journalism in India — stories that once were, but are now memory.”
    • A new law in Kyrgyzstan bans online porn to “protect moral and ethical values” in the country and “requires internet providers to block websites based on decisions by the ministry of culture”
    • Starting this autumn, Meta will no longer allow political or social issue ads on its apps within the EU, citing “significant operational challenges and legal uncertainties” from the forthcoming Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising rules.
    • Qatar approved an amendment to a cybercrime law that criminalizes publishing or circulating images or videos of people in public places without their consent, raising an outcry from press freedom advocates. Offenders can face up to one year in prison and/or a fine of up to 100,000 Qatari riyals (about $27,500).

    More suppression in and outside Hong Kong, as Jimmy Lai’s trial nears its end

    Readers of the Free Speech Dispatch are likely aware of how grim the situation for free expression in Hong Kong has become in the past few years, and there are no improvements in sight. It even reaches globally. Late last month, officials issued arrest warrants for overseas activists, including those based in the U.S., for alleged national security law violations.

    In recent weeks within the city, eight of Hong Kong’s public universities signed an agreement announcing their intent to comply with Xi Jinping’s and mainland China’s governance, another conspicuous sign of academic freedom’s decline in the city. The Hong Kong International Film Festival cut a Taiwanese film from its schedule for failing to receive a “certificate of approval” from the city’s film censors. Then a teenager was arrested by national security police for writing “seditious” words in a public toilet. Police said the messages “provoked hatred, contempt or disaffection against” Hong Kong’s government.

    And the trial of Jimmy Lai, the 77-year-old media tycoon and founder of dissenting newspaper Apple Daily, is now reaching its conclusion. Lai, who is in poor health, has pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious material in Apple Daily.

    In a troubling incident in an already disturbing case, a judge overseeing the case cited speech suppression in the U.S. to justify the prosecution of Lai. “People who were freely expressing their views on Palestine, they were arrested in England… [and] in the US,” Judge Esther Toh said in court last week. “It’s easy to say ‘la-di-da, it’s not illegal,’ but it’s not an absolute. Each country’s government has a different limit on freedom of expression.”

    It should be a warning sign to Americans when our government’s actions are cited abroad in favor of, not against, censorship.

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  • Students for Fair Admissions drops lawsuits against West Point, Air Force Academy

    Students for Fair Admissions drops lawsuits against West Point, Air Force Academy

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    Dive Brief:

    • Students for Fair Admissions has dropped its lawsuits against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Air Force Academy over race-conscious admissions — practices that are no longer in effect at either institution under the Trump administration.
    • Both academies axed admissions goals based on race, ethnicity and gender shortly after President Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, took office. 
    • SFFA had filed the lawsuits after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 sided with the anti-affirmative action group in its landmark ruling banning race-conscious admissions at colleges but allowed the practice to continue at military academies.

    Dive Insight:

    In a footnote to Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — the case that ultimately ended decades of race-conscious admissions — the court said the decision did not address the practice at the nation’s military academies.

    While no military academy had been party to the case, the court effectively created a carve-out for race-conscious admissions at the institutions “in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

    In a friend-of-the-court brief to that case, the Biden administration wrote that “the Nation’s military strength and readiness depend on a pipeline of officers who are both highly qualified and racially diverse — and who have been educated in diverse environments that prepare them to lead increasingly diverse forces.”

    After the ruling came down, SFFA soon filed legal challenges against military academies and their race-conscious admissions policies. 

    In its 2023 complaint against West Point, SFFA alleged, “Instead of admitting future cadets based on objective metrics and leadership potential, West Point focuses on race.” 

    The lawsuit further argued: “West Point has no justification for using race-based admissions.” 

    SFFA’s cases against West Point and the Air Force Academy, along with another one against the U.S. Naval Academy, were in progress when Trump retook the presidency in January. 

    The group quickly found it had an ideological ally in the new administration, whose policies reflect SFFA’s goals.

    Hegseth banned race-based admissions at the nation’s military academies in January, days after being sworn in. In doing so, Trump’s defense secretary described diversity initiatives as “incompatible with the values of DoD,” adding that “the DoD will strive to provide merit-based, color-blind, equal opportunities to Service members but will not guarantee or strive for equal outcomes.”

    Hegseth has gone much further than just rejecting race-conscious admissions at the academies. Under his leadership, the Pentagon ordered the military academies to purge hundreds of books from their libraries that deal with racism and gender issues, a move that has sparked outcry as well as lawsuits and at least one reversal.

    In June, the Justice Department and SFFA asked that the group’s lawsuit against the Naval Academy be declared moot, after that institution dropped race-conscious admissions under Hegseth’s directive. The case was under appeal at the time, after a federal judge upheld the institution’s policies in December. In July, an appeals court dismissed the case in response to the request from SFFA and the Justice Department.

    SFFA President Edward Blum said in a June statement, “We applaud this extraordinary accomplishment by the President and the Department of Defense which restores the colorblind legal covenant that binds together our military institutions.”

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  • Creative higher education isn’t a skills pipeline, it’s a cultural force

    Creative higher education isn’t a skills pipeline, it’s a cultural force

    Creative education is not a conveyor belt. It’s a crucible.

    In the UK’s industrial strategy, the creative industries are rightly recognised as a pillar of national growth. But this recognition comes with a familiar risk: that education will be seen merely as a supplier of skills, a passive pipeline feeding talent into pre-existing systems.

    This is a pervasive attitude, which so strongly influences the possibilities for students, they can be anxious about being “industry ready” before they’ve had the chance to explore or define fully what kind of practitioners they want to become. This is a reductive view and one we must resist. Creative higher education is not a service department for industry. It is a cultural force, a site of disruption, a collaborator and a generator of futures not yet imagined.

    Partners not pipelines

    Creative education does not simply serve industry – it co-shapes it. Our job is not just to deliver talent into predefined roles, but to challenge the boundaries of those roles altogether. We cultivate new forms of knowledge, artistic practice, and cultural leadership. As Michael Salmon has noted, HE’s relationship with the industrial strategy needs rethinking – we think especially in fields where “skills” are not easily reduced to training targets or labour force projections. Education is not just about plugging gaps; it’s about opening space for new kinds of thinking.

    Christa van Raalte and Richard Wallis have called for “a better quality of conversation” about the skills agenda in screen and creative sectors. Their point that simplistic, linear approaches to “skills gaps” are not fit for purpose should land hard within our own walls too. We need a better quality of conversation around the creative skills agenda. Narrow, supply-side thinking is not only reductive, it risks cutting off the very dynamism on which the industry depends.

    Our graduates don’t only “enter” the creative industries. They redefine them. They found new companies, invent new formats, challenge power structures, and expand what stories get told and who gets to tell them. To conceive of specialist creative HE as mainly a workforce provider is to misunderstand its essence. Our institutions are where risk-taking is possible, where experimentation is protected, and where the creative freedoms that industry often cannot afford are made viable.

    Resistance from within

    The danger isn’t just external. It’s internal too. Even within our own institutions, we sometimes absorb the language and logic of the pipeline. We begin to measure our worth by the requirement to report on short-term employability statistics. We are encouraged by the landscape to shape curricula around perceived “gaps” rather more than emerging possibilities. The pressure of metrics, league table and reputation help us to believe that our highest purpose is to serve, rather than to shape.

    This internalisation is subtle and corrosive. It narrows our vision. It makes us reactive instead of generative. And it risks turning spaces of radical creativity into echo chambers of industry demand. It is a recipe for sameness and status quo, a situation many call to change.

    We must be vigilant. We must ask ourselves: are we designing education for the world as it is, or for the world as it could be? Are we opening access, nurturing the disruptors, the visionaries, the cultural architects — or only the job-ready?

    When creative institutions start to measure their value predominantly through short-term employability metrics, or shape curriculum mainly around perceived industry gaps, we lose the distinctiveness that makes us valuable in the first place.

    We risk:

    • Designing education around current norms, not future needs
    • Prioritising technical proficiency over critical inquiry
    • Favouring students most likely to succeed within existing structures, rather than supporting those most likely to change them

    If we define our purpose only in terms of industry demand, we abandon much responsibility.

    From pipeline to ecosystem

    What we need is a new compact: not “education as service provider,” but “education as ecosystem partner.” A pipeline feeds. An ecosystem nurtures, nourishes and grows.

    This approach:

    • Recognises specialist creative HE as a site of research, innovation and values-driven practice
    • Treats industry as a collaborator, not a master – collaboration is especially present in research activity and creative projects led by industry professionals
    • Encourages co-creation of skills agendas, not top-down imposition
    • Embraces long-term thinking about sector health, sustainability, and inclusion – not just short-term workforce readiness

    The creative economy cannot thrive without imagination, critical thinking, inclusion, and cultural complexity; all things specialist institutions are powerfully placed to nurture. But this can only happen if we reject limiting narratives about our role. The industrial strategy may frame education as an economic lever to support the growth in the creative industries, but we must resist being reduced to a lever alone. Meeting the opportunities in the strategy is both an invitation to engage with sector needs, help shape the future and a challenge to the cultures of training, pedagogy and research whose long roots exercise power in specialist HE.

    If we want to protect and evolve the value of creative higher education, we must speak with greater clarity and confidence to government, to industry, and to ourselves. This is not about resisting relevance or rejecting partnership. It’s about ensuring that our contribution is understood in full: not only as a supply chain, but as a strategic and cultural force.

    Importantly, we must acknowledge that our graduates are not just contributors to the UK’s creative economy – they are cultural ambassadors on a global stage. From Emmy, Oscar and BAFTA winning actors to internationally celebrated designers, technical artists, writers and directors (and so much more) UK-trained creatives shape discourse, aesthetics, and industries across the world. To frame their education in purely national economic terms is to limit its scope and power.

    Because the purpose of creative education isn’t just to help students find their place in the industry. It’s to empower them – and us – to shape what that industry becomes.

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  • AmeriCorps Cuts Force College Access Groups to Reduce Staff

    AmeriCorps Cuts Force College Access Groups to Reduce Staff

    Brianne Dolney-Jacobs has spent the last year advising high school seniors in Bay City, Mich., on their options after graduation.

    She met with 96 percent of the seniors at least once to talk about college applications, financial aid options, standardized tests and more. In doing so, she helped nearly 30 students access a countywide scholarship, up from under 10 in the previous year.

    But now, she’s one of 32,000 people affected by sweeping cuts to AmeriCorps, a federal agency focused on service and volunteerism across the United States. At least 100 college-access groups, including the Michigan College Access Network, where Dolney-Jacobs works, rely on AmeriCorps funding or members to make the college application process more accessible to high school students, especially those in low-income areas and at schools with low rates of college attendance.

    MCAN lost its grant funding this week and was ordered to cease all AmeriCorps work immediately, though the organization was able to use its own funds to buy staff members an extra month. Dolney-Jacobs will now wrap up her time at the high school at the end of May; she was supposed to stay on through late June.

    Without someone in her position, Dolney-Jacobs told Inside Higher Ed, there is no one at her school who would have the bandwidth to meet with individual students as they navigate the college application process. Many students would never have heard about different scholarships that are available to them or know that community college—including both an associate’s degree and some trade certifications—is free for recent high school graduates in Michigan.

    When her students heard that her position had been impacted, a group brought flowers to her office.

    “They told me, ‘you are the Class of 2025’s hero,’” she recounted. “And I was just bawling.”

    The National College Attainment Network, the association for MCAN and other similar organizations, is still taking stock of how many of its members have been impacted, said Elizabeth Morgan, NCAN’s chief external relations officer. But damage has been widespread.

    “I think it’s safe to say probably our members that use AmeriCorps are serving hundreds of thousands of students across the country,” Morgan said. “They are devastated by this news for a couple of reasons: The students they are supporting right now, many are high school seniors who are just weeding through their [college] decision-making process … [and] the AmeriCorps members are being thrown out of work months early.”

    A total of $400 million in AmeriCorps grants were axed, according to America’s Service Commission, a nonprofit that represents state and national service commissions, including funding for food pantries and disaster relief programs in areas impacted by recent natural disasters. The majority of AmeriCorps’ staff was also put on administrative leave in mid-April.

    It’s just one of the many agencies that have faced funding cuts and grant cancellations as part of the Trump administration’s war on government spending. Its defenders say that the agency, which pays modest stipends to its members, is anything but wasteful: It provides both vital supports for American communities and professional development training to its members, all for a low price tag.

    “I don’t believe Washington is really in tune to what is going on in the local communities,” said Grady Holmes, who works with a different MCAN AmeriCorps program that provides college success coaching to community college and tribal college students. “This is a program that is not government waste. It basically assists the government in making sure their productive citizens are being moved toward self-sufficiency and obtaining a college degree … When the powers that be decided this is wasteful spending—they don’t understand AmeriCorps.”

    Twenty-four states sued the Trump administration over the cuts, calling the dismantling of the agency, which was created by Congress in 1993, “unauthorized.”

    Advisers’ Impacts

    MCAN is facing cuts to two student-facing programs: AdviseMI, which is focused on college readiness for high schoolers, and the College Completion Corps, which is geared toward students at tribal and community colleges. Both rely on AmeriCorps grants and are staffed by AmeriCorps members, who work in yearlong service positions in exchange for stipends and educational awards that can cover current educational expenses or pay off student loans. The organization employs over 100 AmeriCorps members across both programs.

    Both programs have been successful, MCAN leaders say. In the 2023–24 academic year, students supported by AdviseMI advisers submitted 21,420 college applications and were awarded more than $32 million in financial aid.

    The advisers “often interact with parents, as well, to help parents understand the role of FAFSA and help parents understand what’s happening with their student,” said Ryan Fewins-Bliss, the organization’s executive director. “And [they] engage the school in what we hope to be a schoolwide college-going culture … so when the juniors become seniors, they’re ready for this.”

    After MCAN learned Friday night that it lost one of its AmeriCorps grants, the organization spent the weekend trying figure out how it could keep its AmeriCorps staff on board if the rest of the grants were also canceled. (In total, MCAN lost $2.1 million in AmeriCorps funds.)

    Come Monday, MCAN found out its remaining grants, including funding for AdviseMI and College Completion Corps, were indeed cancelled, and that it had to stop operating those programs immediately. MCAN was able to find funding in the budget to continue those programs for an extra month, but the future beyond then is uncertain.

    Other organizations had to lay off their AmeriCorps members entirely. Partnership 4 Kids, a Nebraska-based organization that works with students from prekindergarten through college, had two full-time AmeriCorps fellows working with high school seniors and three fellows working directly with college students. All five had to stop working Friday, immediately after P4K received word that its grants had been terminated.

    “These two in the high schools had great relationships with their students. They were doing one-on-one case management; they were the driving force [behind] college applications, scholarship applications, helping students overcome barriers they might have, and really to get them to that finish line to graduate,” P4K president Deb Denbeck said.

    This year, 97 percent of P4K’s senior cohort graduated and 80 percent of them are going to college—an impressive feat in a state where the college-going rate for high school graduates has been on the decline.

    ‘Brings Out the Best in People’

    AmeriCorps members have worked in high schools as college advisers for at least two decades, starting with the College Advising Corps, an organization that began in Virginia and has since expanded to 15 states. It’s a model that college-access leaders say has been incredibly effective, helping thousands of students go to college and boosting the careers of the advisers.

    It’s also been embraced by politicians on both sides of the aisle, according to Nicole Hurd, who founded the CAC and is now president of Lafayette College.

    AmeriCorps members are a natural fit for college-readiness work, these leaders say. Because many are recent college graduates, they can remember what it was like to be in the high schoolers’ shoes, making it easy for them to empathize with and respond to the challenges their students are facing. The college adviser positions are relatively easy to train, meaning individuals from any background can take on these roles.

    But perhaps most importantly, leaders of college-access nonprofits feel AmeriCorps’ long-standing ethos of volunteerism aligns perfectly with their missions to bring educational opportunity to all.

    “AmeriCorps brings out the best in people, and it gives them an opportunity to learn as well—to learn how to be professionals in their field,” said Denbeck. “When you look at everything that AmeriCorps does, whether it’s working in education or mentoring or agriculture or disaster relief, they’re doing it because of their heart.”

    The impacted organizations doubt they’ll be able to rely on AmeriCorps going forward. For now, they’re working to figure out how to continue their work and where they might get the funding necessary to deploy college advisers into the communities that need them most.

    “In the future, it’s safe to say that there are countless students that won’t attend college because they’re not getting this kind of support,” Morgan said.

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  • Antisemitism Task Force Weighing Consent Decree for Columbia

    Antisemitism Task Force Weighing Consent Decree for Columbia

    The federal task force investigating Columbia University for its alleged failures to address antisemitism is considering putting the Ivy League institution under a consent decree, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

    A consent decree would add legal heft to the task force’s recent demands and hold Columbia accountable to following through on its recent commitments to overhaul disciplinary processes, ban masks at protests and review academic programs focused on the Middle East, among other changes. Under a consent decree, a federal judge would have oversight over the university.

    Columbia would have to agree to enter a consent decree, according to the Journal. The government has used consent decrees in the past to force police departments to make reforms, particularly after high-profile incidents of brutality, and also to hold companies, such as Live Nation, accountable.

    The university recently agreed to make a number of changes in order to restore its federal funds after the task force canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia. More recently, the Trump administration reportedly froze all of Columbia’s NIH funding, an additional $250 million. 

    The task force “doesn’t think Columbia is a good-faith actor willing to make the significant changes on campuses necessary to curb what it thinks are civil-rights infractions against Jewish students,” the Journal reported.

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  • Will the UK’s AI Action Plan Force Universities into a U-turn?

    Will the UK’s AI Action Plan Force Universities into a U-turn?

    The AI Opportunities Action Plan, led by Matt Clifford CBE and announced in January, documents recommendations for the government to grow the UK’s AI sector to ‘position the UK to be an AI maker, not an AI taker’ in the field and help achieve economic growth.

    The UK’s AI Action Plan highlights the critical need to harness international talent and expand the workforce with AI expertise. However, this ambition is at odds with recent moves by the British government to limit international student numbers through stricter visa regulations, leading universities to make difficult decisions—cutting courses, slashing budgets, and exploring alternative strategies to maintain financial stability and global relevance.

    The AI Action Plan: A policy contradiction

    Despite a well-documented skills gap in the UK’s AI sector, the Government’s actions have forced universities to pivot toward establishing global campuses in a bid to preserve financial stability and maintain and promote international collaboration in general. This trend is exemplified by universities like Coventry University, which opened a campus in Delhi last year, and the University of Lancaster’s partnership with Deakin University in Indonesia. Today, UK universities operate 38 campuses across 18 countries, educating more than 67,750 students abroad.

    While these international campuses help extend the UK’s academic reach, the UK’s immigration policies are creating significant barriers to attracting top-tier AI talent to work domestically. Many international graduates, trained to UK standards, are struggling to secure postgraduate visas for themselves and their families, preventing them from contributing their skills to the UK economy.

    Visa barriers for graduates

    One of the main visa routes intended to help international talent integrate into the UK workforce is the High Potential Individual (HPI) visa. The HPI visa is a UK immigration pathway designed for recent graduates from 40 top global universities, allowing them to live and work in the UK for several years. However, this scheme remains restrictive. To qualify, applicants must have a qualification from one of the eligible global universities in the last five years. Of the universities included, 47.62% are from the US, and there is just one institution from the entire southern hemisphere on the list.

    The AI action plan recommended the government consider reforming the HPI pathway with ‘graduates from some leading AI institutions, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and (since 2020) Carnegie Mellon University in the US, are not currently included in the High Potential Individual visa eligibility list’.

    The AI Action Plan itself highlights the need for a rethink of the UK’s immigration system to attract graduates from top AI institutions worldwide. However, the government has only ‘partially agreed‘ with this recommendation, pointing to existing visa schemes that they believe meet the needs of skilled workers, including AI graduates. However, it can be argued that the UK visa process is often expensive, and Global Talent Visas require employer sponsorship while failing to account for the challenges that international graduates face when trying to secure long-term employment, especially in industries with rapidly evolving skills like AI. Even if the HPI eligibility list was expanded, our existing visa pathways are too restrictive to support a rapid influx of skilled graduates.

    Government and university collaboration

    The AI Action Plan calls on the government to ‘support Higher Education institutions in increasing the number of AI graduates and teaching industry-relevant skills.’ The reality is that many UK universities have already adjusted their strategies to cope with both domestic financial pressures and the measures introduced to quell international students through restricted immigration pathways.

    The question remains whether universities will be expected to reverse course, intensify efforts to recruit domestically and retain AI talent to meet the government’s urgent targets. Without a targeted and affordable visa system to support these efforts, the AI Action Plan’s goals risk falling short of their potential.

    This is not about asking Universities to ensure that their international students have clear career pathways post-graduation or providing AI-specific courses. The government must create an AI-specific visa that allows graduates from top global institutions to work in the UK.

    The real need lies in fostering closer collaboration between higher education institutions and government policymakers, particularly when it comes to visas. The government must take responsibility for creating a new visa pathway if it wants to meet the aims of the AI action plan.  Universities cannot be expected to U-turn- develop new courses in the face of financial constraints and restrictive visa policies.

    Mauve Group is a global HR, Employer of Record and business consultancy provider. Mauve specialises in supporting organisations of all sizes to expand overseas, helping companies navigate the complexities of employing workers across borders. 

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  • Motivational Force: Building a Foundation for Student Success – Faculty Focus

    Motivational Force: Building a Foundation for Student Success – Faculty Focus

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