Tag: Higher

$Fewer Young People See Math Skills as Very Important in Work$

Fewer Young People See Math Skills as Very Important in Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Discipline in Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outreach at Risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scholarship Uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump ‘Always Wins’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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August 25, 2025
The Swedish higher ed system – Campus Review

Deputy vice-chancellor of cooperation and innovation at Sweden’s Halmstad University Kristian Widen explained how market forces like IKEA changed the country’s higher education system.

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August 25, 2025
How modern HR tools are helping higher education adapt – Campus Review

As budget cuts continue to ripple across the education sector, many institutions are being forced to reassess how they manage their workforce. From widespread restructures to heavier workloads, staff are feeling the strain.

Some academics are now working the equivalent of nine-hour days, 365 days a year. At the same time, some institutions are making difficult staffing decisions in response to multi-million dollar funding gaps.

These pressures are compounding existing workforce challenges. Human resource (HR) and payroll teams are navigating complex employment arrangements, evolving compliance requirements, and increasing scrutiny around underpayment.

Without the right systems in place, even minor errors can have significant consequences.

The limitations of outdated systems

For many universities and TAFEs, HR and payroll systems haven’t kept pace with the realities of modern education. What may have once worked for a more stable, less fragmented workforce is now creating unnecessary complexity.

When systems aren’t integrated, data is difficult to reconcile and even harder to act on. Payroll teams are left cross-checking spreadsheets, while HR teams struggle to track performance, training, and entitlements across multiple roles and contracts.

Manual processes create more room for error, and a lack of visibility makes it harder to ensure compliance. According to McKinsey, automating finance processes can free up 30 to 40 per cent of a team’s capacity.

Disparate platforms also limit the experience for staff. Employees struggle to access their information, update details, or understand how their workload impacts their pay and entitlements. In a climate where staff are already stretched, that lack of clarity can further impact morale and retention.

A smarter approach to HR and payroll

Education providers are turning to integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to automate tasks like timesheet management, onboarding, and performance tracking, thereby freeing up teams to focus on more strategic work.

We have identified eight benefits of an integrated HR and payroll solution. Payroll becomes more accurate, compliance becomes easier to manage, and leaders gain clearer insights into workforce trends.

How institutions are making it work

While workforce challenges persist across the sector, some institutions are proving that the right technology can deliver meaningful change.

Instead of relying on fragmented systems, organisations like GOTAFE and Victoria University have shown how ERP software, like TechnologyOne’s, can play a critical role in improving payroll accuracy, streamlining HR tasks, and boosting overall efficiency and decision-making.

These are just two recent TechnologyOne success stories among many, but their experiences reflect a broader shift happening across the sector. More institutions are recognising the value of embracing ERP software that can grow with them.

How GOTAFE transformed payroll and people management

We recently saw this shift in action at GOTAFE, which replaced its ageing payroll system with TechnologyOne’s modern enterprise software.

By moving to our Human Resources & Payroll product, GOTAFE was able to unify its systems and reduce its reliance on manual processes. Staff could manage leave and payslips through self-service tools, while HR teams gained real-time insights into workforce activity and performance.

The improvements were significant. Contract generation dropped from four days to five minutes. Workforce reports that once took weeks could now be produced in two days. These changes helped the organisation make faster, more informed decisions and improve the employee experience.

Importantly, the shift was also cultural. GOTAFE moved away from customising the platform to match legacy processes, instead adopting standard functionality to unlock ongoing improvements.

The result is a more agile, data-driven workforce environment that supports both staff needs and strategic planning.

Read more about the GOTAFE story here.

Victoria University improves student experience

Victoria University recently completed a major digital transformation, replacing legacy platforms with a single enterprise solution with TechnologyOne’s OneEducation. While the project was initially focused on improving the student experience, the impact on staff productivity, reporting, and decision-making has been just as significant.

Before the shift, the university was operating across a patchwork of disconnected systems. Frequent outages and manual workarounds meant that staff were spending more time managing technology than using it effectively. Reporting was cumbersome, making it difficult to generate insights or respond to changes with confidence.

By unifying core systems across student management, finance, and scheduling, Victoria University has created a more connected environment for both staff and students. Manual tasks have been replaced with automated workflows. Reporting is no longer a reactive process but an embedded part of everyday decision-making.

Overall, the university fixed nearly 180 pain points. The result is a more agile workforce environment where time is spent on higher-value work and institutional knowledge is easier to share and act on.

You can find out more about Victoria University’s transformation here.

Embrace the future of education software

From shifting compliance requirements to the increasing complexity of workforce management, legacy systems are no longer equipped to support long-term success.

Modern enterprise platforms are changing that. In an environment where every hour counts, the ability to streamline tasks and remove administrative roadblocks makes a real difference.

The next generation of education software is already here. Institutions that embrace it will be better positioned to support their people, respond to challenges, and plan with confidence.

Invest in TechnologyOne’s Human Resources & Payroll today

TechnologyOne Human Resources & Payroll (HRP), part of our OneEducation solution, provides universities with real-time workforce insights, automated payroll processing, and self-service HR tools.

Designed for the unique needs of higher education, it streamlines recruitment, onboarding, and workforce planning, helping institutions manage staff efficiently while ensuring compliance.

Adapt, evolve, and stay ahead with a solution built for the future of education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Virginia university has been under investigation since early July.

John M. Chase/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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August 22, 2025
Michael Stedelin | Diverse: Issues In Higher Education

Michael StedelinMichael Stedelin has been named assistant vice president for research strategic planning and solution development at Penn State University. In this role, Stedelin will provide senior leadership in integrating mission planning, systems and solutions within the research domain so that organizational capabilities are prioritized, adopted and scaled effectively to meet the University’s research goals.

Stedelin holds a bachelor’s degree in computer management information systems and an MBA from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

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August 22, 2025
Black Women’s Leadership in Higher Education: The Remaking of Academic Power

I
Dr. Tina M. King n the storied halls of higher education, Black women who ascend to the presidency do so while carrying the weight of history, community, and the unspoken expectation that we will be both miracle workers and scapegoats. Black women in higher education leadership navigate a complex matrix of anti-Blackness and misogynoir —a reality where their expertise is simultaneously appropriated and undermined. Research reveals that more than most Black women executives in predominantly white institutions (PWIs) experience racelighting (racialized gaslighting), characterized by dehumanizing scrutiny. We endure identity taxation, where we are expected to carry the unsustainable burden of single-handedly solving institutional race problems, often where we are the target of the attack while comforting white fragility. Simultaneously, we experience racelighting where people of color receive racialized messages and question their thoughts and experiences. This racelighting is perpetuated by the institution’s willingness to tokenize Black women’s identities for diversity optics while suppressing our agenda for transformative anti-racist praxis. The narrative of Black women’s leadership in PWIs is not simply a tale of individual achievement but also reflects the deep, persistent anti-Blackness embedded in the academy’s very structure.

The attacks, swift and severe, are often cloaked in the familiar rhetoric of “governance, academic integrity, or collegial concern,” but the subtext is unmistakably racial. They are orchestrated not as a response to policy but as a rebuke of Black authority daring to reshape the institution’s priorities. In such attacks, we are called incompetent, corrupt, and unwilling to do the hard work (lazy), echoing tropes that have long been used to undermine Black people in general and Black women in leadership specifically. The most insidious move, however, is often the elevation of a single Black or Brown person to be the messenger or carrier of the attack, serving as a shield to deflect accusations of racism and to lend legitimacy to the movement or campaign t o disparage and discredit Black women’s leadership.Dr. Regina Stanback Stroud

This dynamic is not new. Dr. Patricia Hill Collins (2000), in her foundational work on Black Feminist Thought, describes how Black women in leadership are subjected to controlling images— stereotypes that are deployed to police the boundaries of acceptable Blackness. In the academy, these images manifest as relentless questioning of competence, insinuations of aggression, and the expectation that Black women will perform emotional labor to maintain white comfort. The token messenger, perhaps unwittingly, becomes complicit in this system, their proximity to whiteness granting her temporary power even as it reinforces the very structures that marginalize leaders of color—in other words, they become complicit in using the academic tools of white supremacy to join in the assault on Black women’s leadership.

What begins to emerge is a spectator sport where people at all levels of influence remain silent in the face of orchestrated attacks. Please make no mistake: silence does not represent neutrality; it represents complicity. By refusing to address the racialized nature of the attacks, the institution is signaling that Black women leaders are ultimately expendable, their contributions contingent upon their willingness to placate white interests and prioritize white comfort. This is the reality of what Breonna Collins (2022) calls “epistemic violence” –the systematic invalidation of Black knowledge and leadership under the guise of procedural fairness.

Yet Black women leaders have always found ways to resist and reimagine the academy. Drawing on the tradition of Black feminist resistance, we create counterspaces within hostile institutions, mentoring the next generation and insisting on the legitimacy of their vision. We redefine “institutional fit” not as assimilation into white norms but as the capacity to transform the institution in service of justice.

Despite these acts of resistance and reimagination, the very presence and leadership of Black women in academic spaces often disrupts entrenched power structures and exposes the discomfort many have with authentic Black excellence. A threat to many, Black excellence in leadership prioritizes the needs of marginalized students and communities over the preservation of the status quo.

While some may wish to uphold privilege and power for themselves, others may be well-intentioned but unable to recognize Black excellence. They may interpret Black leadership as arrogance or see Black Leaders simply as flaunting their positions or being opinionated. Still others may believe they are doing good but fail to recognize their own deep biases. Those who consider themselves allies may suffer fatigue along with Black leaders, but that mutual suffering does not, an ally make. It must be accompanied by one’s willingness to use their white privilege and capital to actively combat anti-Blackness and misogynoir at play.

Studies of HBCU leadership reveal how Black women executives subvert PWI pathologies through radical self-definition, where we reject white-normed leadership frameworks to implement culturally grounded approaches and ethical care (prioritizing community needs over respectability politics). We create counter-spaces that center Black epistemologies, such as mentorship programs that affirm Black women’s intellectual sovereignty. Black women leaders engage in institutional truth-telling where we document systemic racelighting through critical race methodology.

True transformation requires more than performative allyship. It demands redistribution of resources, independent accountability structures, and a commitment to centering Black epistemologies in institutional decision-making. There is a growing recognition that Black leadership is not incidental— it is essential to the future of higher education. The time has come for institutions to choose: will they cling to the master’s tools, or will they finally make room for the radical imagination and power of Black women’s leadership?

Until higher education is willing to confront its foundational anti-Blackness, it will continue to sacrifice its most visionary leaders on the altar of white comfort. The question is not whether another attack will come but who will have the courage to stand in solidarity and say, “Enough.” The future of academia depends on this shift. Ultimately, we must move beyond the white gaze and demand for our pain, and instead, embrace the Black radical imagination and the remaking of power in the academy.

Dr. Tina M. King is president of San Diego College of Continuing Education

Dr. Regina Stanback Stroud is the chief executive officer of RSSC Consulting

Dr. Jennifer Taylor Mendoza serves as the 13th president of West Valley College.

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August 22, 2025
Egypt and Czech Republic to deepen higher education ties

Conversations between Egypt and Czech Republic are focused on expanding opportunities for student and faculty mobility, launching joint research initiatives, and creating frameworks for institutional partnerships between universities in both countries.

Senior officials including Ayman Ashour, Egypt’s minister of higher education and Czech Ambassador to Cairo, Ivan Jukl, gathered at the New Cairo Education Building to discuss deepening educational ties.

Ashour emphasised the importance of deepening academic and research collaboration between Egyptian and Czech institutions, noting that closer ties would help build human capacity and advance the priorities of both countries.

“We agreed on the importance of strengthening academic and research collaboration between Egyptian and Czech institutions, fostering knowledge exchange, and creating new opportunities for joint projects in priority fields that serve both nations’ development goals,” commented Ayman Ashour.

“Together, we will work towards building impactful partnerships that advance innovation, research, scholarships, and sustainable development.”

Together, we will work towards building impactful partnerships that advance innovation, research, scholarships, and sustainable development.

Ayman Ashour, minister of higher education,

In recent years, Egypt has launched new universities, welcomed international branch campuses, and developed dual-degree programs with globally ranked institutions, aiming to attract more students.

Egyptian universities are increasingly offering programs taught in multiple languages, designed to draw a more diverse pool of international students. This part of the expansion strategy and national development agenda, the minister explained, is Egypt’s ambition to establish itself as a regional hub for higher education, attracting students from across the Arab world, Africa, and the Middle East.

Jukl, meanwhile, welcomed the developments, stressing the Czech Republic’s commitment to extending its cooperation with Egypt.

He praised Egypt’s young, dynamic population and its position as a gateway to the African continent, calling these factors a strong foundation for building long-term academic and scientific partnerships.

For students, the enhanced cooperation could mean greater access to scholarships, exchange placements, and dual-degree opportunities in the coming years. Egyptian students may also see more Czech institutions participating in academic fairs and mobility schemes across the region, opening new pathways to Europe for postgraduate study and research.

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August 22, 2025