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Tag: Higher
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Higher Education Inquirer : Labor Notes
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‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Means Big Changes for Higher Ed
Following a flyover by a B-2 bomber, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping policy bill into law Friday, celebrating the Fourth of July and commending congressional Republicans for meeting his self-imposed deadline.
The legislation, which narrowly passed the House on Thursday, promises to significantly change how colleges operate. Higher education groups and advocates warned that the bill will hurt low-income families while proponents praised the changes as necessary reforms.
Much of the debate over the bill dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act centered on the nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, as well as changes to the tax code that will benefit the very rich. But the 870-page piece of legislation also overhauls higher education policy to cap some student loans, eliminate the Grad PLUS program and use students’ earnings to hold colleges accountable. Taken together, higher education experts say, the legislation would transform the sector, hurt universities’ finances and hinder college access.
But the legislation doesn’t include some of the proposals that most worried college leaders, such as cuts to the Pell Grant program and a 21 percent endowment tax rate. Wealthy private colleges will still face a higher tax rate on their endowments, up to 8 percent. (The current rate is 1.4 percent.)
Some higher ed lobbyists commended Republicans for backing off some of the deeper cuts, but they are worried about a number of changes in the bill.
Eliminating Grad PLUS loans could mean fewer students attend graduate school, which would be a hit to universities’ bottom lines, especially at institutions that rely heavily on graduate programs for tuition revenue. Similarly, capping Parent PLUS loans at $65,000 per student could hurt Black and Latino families, who disproportionately use the loans. The legislation also consolidates repayment plans, giving future borrowers two options. Consumer protection advocates worry the bill will exacerbate the student debt crisis and drive students to private loans.
The student loan changes take effect July 2026.
Catch Up on Our Coverage of the Bill
Lawmakers also agreed to expand the Pell Grant to short-term job-training programs, achieving a long-sought goal for community colleges and other groups. In a last-minute change, the expansion excludes unaccredited providers.
“While somewhat improved over its original version, [the bill] contains a mix of new taxes and spending cuts that will force even more difficult decisions on chief business officers and further strain revenue that helps make college affordable for students and families,” said Kara Freeman, president of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. “The long-term implications of this legislation for higher education and American innovation are likely to be profound.”
Over all, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add about $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Republicans said they had hoped to curb spending and address the growing deficit with the legislation, and some conservatives balked at the price tag. Still, pressure from the president to deliver a legislative victory won out, even as some lawmakers waffled for hours over whether to support the bill. Politico reported that Trump called lawmakers and met with them in person to make his case.
Republicans lawmakers and Trump administration officials praised the legislation, saying it would lower the cost of college and boost accountability. One of the major changes ties colleges’ access to federal student loans to students’ earnings. Programs that fail to show their graduates earn more than an adult with only a high school diploma could be cut off from loans. One rough analysis found that fewer than half of two-year degree programs would pass the earnings test, but community colleges are less reliant on loans.
“Overall, the Senate’s ‘do no harm’ proposal would strengthen the higher education system,” wrote Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who conducted the analysis. “But the current political environment presents a once-in-a-generation chance to fix the broken federal role in higher education. Lawmakers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to go further.”
Another analysis from the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center at American University found that programs that would fail the earnings test enroll about 1 percent of students. But the test wouldn’t apply to certificate programs, where one in five students are pursuing a credential that doesn’t provide the necessary earnings boost, according to the PEER Center. Other experts have argued that the accountability plan should’ve taken into account the cost of programs and students’ debt loads.
Colleges generally preferred the earnings-based accountability plan, which is similar to the Biden administration’s gainful-employment rule, though lobbyists had wanted lawmakers to make some changes. House Republicans had planned to make institutions pay an annual penalty based on students’ unpaid loans, which could’ve cost colleges billions.
Jason Altmire, president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, the national trade association representing for-profit institutions, congratulated Congress in a statement Thursday for passing the “monumental legislation.”
He praised the short-term Pell expansion as well as the “no tax on tips” policy, among other provisions. But he’s concerned about parts of the new accountability framework, though “we strongly support the fact that the measure applies equally to all schools in all sectors of higher education, a longtime CECU priority.”
Altmire and CECU oppose the loan caps and eliminating Grad PLUS loans. “These cuts will negatively impact students and limit access for those who are most in need,” he said in the statement. “These provisions are ill-advised and we hope Congress will revisit them in the future. Overall, we are grateful that our voice was heard and so many of our longtime priorities were included in the final bill. We look forward to working with Congress to make improvements through future legislation.”
Charles Welch, president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said in a statement that the cuts to Medicaid and other programs will hurt regional public universities, which are typically “the first victim of tightened budgets.”
“Never has the federal government divested itself of financial responsibility to such an extent, imperiling previously stretched state and local budgets as they seek to cover newly obligated burdens,” Welch said.
Welch added that colleges in the association must put their “profound disappointment in the reconciliation bill aside” to focus on the appropriations process, which will kick into high gear this month. The appropriations bills in Congress set the spending limits and direct agencies how to dole out federal dollars. The Trump administration has proposed deep cuts to the Education Department’s budget, including zeroing out college-access programs like TRIO.
“The American Association of State Colleges and Universities urges Congress to reassert its constitutionally endowed authority over government expenditures, eliminating executive overreach and fully funding the programs, grants, and institutions that serve our nation’s postsecondary students,” Welch said.
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How Labour’s 10-year health plan for England joins up with higher education and research
The government wants to reinvent the NHS (in England) through three radical shifts – hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.
Whether like the chief executive of the NHS you believe Labour’s 10-year health plan for England is about creating “energy and enthusiasm”, whether like the secretary of state you believe this is about building a NHS which is about “the future and a fairer Britain,” or whether across its 168 pages you find the government’s default to techno-optimism, AI will solve everything, one more dataset will fix public services, approach to governance to be somewhere between naive and unduly optimistic, it is clear that the NHS is expected to change and do so quickly.
This is a plan that is as much about the reorganisation of the economy as it is about health. It is about how health services can get people into work, it is a guide to economic growth through innovation in life sciences, it is a lament for the skills needed and the skills not yet thought about for the future of the NHS.
Elsewhere on the site, Jim Dickinson looks at the (lack of) implications for students as group with health needs – here we look at the implications for education, universities, and the wider knowledge economy.
Workforce modelling
One of the premises of the plan is that the 2023 Conservative long-term workforce plan was a mistake. The NHS clearly cannot go on as it currently is, and to facilitate this transformation a “very different kind of workforce strategy” is needed:
Until 2023, [the NHS] had never published a long-term workforce plan. The one it did publish did little more than extrapolate from past trends into the future: concluding there was no alternative than continuation of our current care model, supported by an inexorable growth in headcount, mostly working in acute settings.
A new workforce place is being put together, to appear “later this year” and taking a “decidedly different approach”:
Instead of asking ‘how many staff do we need to maintain our current care model over the next 10 years?’, it will ask ‘given our reform plan, what workforce do we need, what should they do, where should they be deployed and what skills should they have?’
The bottom line is that, therefore, “there will be fewer staff in the NHS in 2035 than projected by the 2023 workforce plan” – but these staff will have better conditions, better training, and “more exciting roles”.
So one immediate question for universities in England is what this reduced staffing target means for recruitment onto medical, nursing and allied health degrees. Places have been expanding, and under previous plans were set to expand at growing rates in the coming years, including a doubling of medical school places by 2035. There were questions about how optimistic some of the objectives were – the National Audit Office last year criticised NHS England for not having assessed the feasibility of expanding places, in light of issues like attrition rates and the need to invest in clinical placement infrastructure.
We won’t get a clear answer of what Labour is proposing until the new workforce plan emerges – especially as there is an accompanying aspiration in today’s plan to reduce the NHS’ dependence on international recruitment. But there are some clear directions of travel. Creating more apprenticeships gets a mention – though of course not at level 7 – but the key theme is a tight link between growing medical student numbers and widening participation:
Expansion of medical school places will be targeted at medical schools with a proven track record of widening participation… The admissions process to medical school will be improved with better information, signposting and support for applicants, and more systematic use of contextual admissions.
This is accompanied by endorsement of the Sutton Trust’s recent research into access disparities. And in one of those “holding universities to account” measures that everyone is so keen on, part of reinforcing this link will be done via work with the Department for Education to “publish data on the relevant background of university entrants, starting with medicine.” If you are thinking that we already did that – yes we did. The UK-wide HESA widening participation performance indicator was last published in 2022 – each regulator now has their own version (for example this from the Office for Students) which doesn’t quite do the same thing.
Education and students
Of course, creating more pathways into working in the NHS is one mechanism to grow its workforce. The other is to unblock current pathways that prevent people from getting into and getting on with their chosen careers in health.
For example, there is a (somewhat tepid) commitment on student support: the plan commits to “explore options” on improving the financial support on offer to medical students from the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds.
For nursing students, the offer is slimmer still – a focus on the “financial obstacles to learning”, including faster reimbursement of placement expenses, and tackling the time lag between completing a course and being able to start work. This latter measure will involve working with higher education institutions to revise the current approach to course completion confirmation, and is billed for September 2026. The Royal College of Nursing has suggested that these “modest” changes go nowhere near far enough.
Nursing and midwifery attrition also comes under scrutiny – the government spots that reducing the rate of non-continuation by a percentage point would result in the equivalent of 300 more nurses and midwives joining the NHS each year. But rather than looking deeper at why this is a growing issue, the buck is handed over to education providers to “urgently address attrition rates.”
Elsewhere the interventions into education provision are more substantial. There’s an already ongoing review of medical training for NHS staff, due to report imminently. On top of this, the plan sets out how the next three years will see an “overhaul” of education and training curricula, to “future-proof” the workforce. There’s lots of talk about faster changes to course content as and when needed, to reflect changes in how the NHS will operate. This comes with a warning:
Where existing providers are unable to move at the right pace, we may look to different institutions to ensure that the education market is responsive to employer needs.
Clinical placement tariffs for undergraduate and postgraduate medicine will be reformed – the plan suggests the tariff system currently “provides limited ability to target funding at training where it is most needed to modernise delivery,” and wants to do more in community settings and make better use of simulation. There will also be expansion of clinical educator capacity, though this will be “targeted” (which is often code for limited).
And course lengths could fall – the plan promises to “work with higher education institutions and the professional regulators as they review course length in light of technological developments and a transition to lifelong rather than static training.” While this does not explicitly suggest shorter medical and nursing programmes – and a consequent growth in provision aimed at professionals – the preference is pretty obvious.
On that last point every member of NHS staff will get their own “personalised career coaching and development plan” which will come alongside the development of “advanced practice models” for nurses (and all the other professional roles in the NHS: radiographers, pharmacists, and the like).
Data and (wider) employment
The plan stretches much wider than simply making commitments on training though and, as the plan makes clear, if the answer isn’t always going to be more money there has to be more efficiency.
There’s a fascinating set of commitments linking health and work – one of those things that feel clunky and obvious until you note that “getting the long-term sick back into work” has just been a soundbite with punitive vibes until now.
Of course, everything has a slightly cringeworthy name – so NHS Accelerators will support local NHS services to have an “impact on people’s work status”, something that may grow into specific and measurable outcomes linking to economic inactivity and unemployment and link in other local government partners. And health support in the traditional sense will link with wider holistic support (as set out in the Pathways to Work green paper) for people with disabilities.
There’s also a set of commitments on understanding and supporting the mental health needs of young people – although the focus is on schools and colleges, there is an expectation that universities will play a part in a forthcoming National Youth Strategy (due from the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport “this summer”) which will cover support for “mental health, wellbeing, and the ability to develop positive social connections.”
All these joined up services will need joined up data, so happy news, too, for those looking for wrap-around support in transitions between educational phases – there will be a single unique identifier for young people: the NHS number. And for fans of learner analytics, a similar approach (with a sprinkling of genomics) will “tell [the NHS] the likelihood of a person developing a condition before it occurs, support early detection of disease, and enable personalised prevention and treatment”.
For some time, universities and other trusted partners have benefited from access to deidentified NHS healthcare administrative data via ADRUK – which has been used for everything from developing new medicine to understanding health policy. This will be joined by a new commercially-focused Health Data Research Service (HDRS) backed by the Wellcome Trust. This is not a new announcement, but the slant here is that it will support the private sector – and as such there will be efforts to “make sure the NHS receives a fair deal for providing access”, which could include a mix of access charges and equity stakes in new developments.
Research, research, research
In effect, the government’s proposals set out how improving the conditions, configurations, and coordination of the NHS workforce, and the information provided to them and their partners, can improve healthcare. The next challenge then is targeting the right kinds of information in the right places, and this depends on the quality of research the NHS can access, make use of, and produce.
The health of the nation does not begin and end at the hospital door. As The King’s Fund points out, “we can’t duck the reality that we are an international outlier with stagnating life expectancy and with millions living many years of life in poor health.” The point of this plan is not only about making health services better but about narrowing health inequalities and using life sciences research to grow the economy.
The plan talks about making up for a “lost decade” of life sciences research. In doing so, it cites an IPPR report (the author is now DHSC’s lead strategy advisor) which demonstrates that the global research spend on life sciences in the UK has reduced and that this has had an impact on life sciences GVA. Following this line of thought suggests that if the UK had maintained levels of investment the economy would have got bigger, people’s lives would have been better and because of the link between poverty and ill health, the NHS would be under less pressure.
The issue with this citation is that the figures used are from 2011–16 and some of the remedies, like association to Horizon Europe, are things the UK has done. Though the plan makes clear that “the era of the NHS’ answer always being ‘more money, never reform’ is over,” it is in fact the case that the government has ploughed record levels of public money into R&D without fundamental reform to the research ecosystem. The premise that economic growth can be spurred by research and leads to better health outcomes is correct – but it isn’t necessary to reference research carried out in 2019 to make the case.
This isn’t merely an annoyance – it speaks to a wider challenge within the plan which oscillates widely between the optimism that “all hospitals will be fully AI-enabled” within the next ten years (80 per cent of hospitals were still using pagers in 2023 despite their ban in 2019), and the obviously sensible commitment to establish Health Innovation Zones which will bring health partners within a devolved framework to experiment in service innovation.
The fundamental challenge facing innovation within health is the diffusion of priorities. There are both a lot of things the NHS and life science researchers might focus their time on, and a lot of layers of bureaucracies that inhibit research. The plan attempts to organise research priorities around five “big bets” (read missions but not quite missions). These include the use of health data, the use of AI (again), personalised health, wearables, and the use of robots. One of the mechanisms for aligning resources will be:
a new bidding process for new Global Institutes. Supported by NIHR funding, these institutes will be expected to marshal the assets of a place – industry, universities, the NHS – to drive genuine global leadership on research and translation.
It’s very industrial strategy – the government is setting out big ideas with some incentives, and hoping the public and private sector follows.
There are some more structural changes to research aside from the political rhetoric. Significantly, there is a proposal to change the funding approaches of the Medical Research Council and National Institute for Health and Care Research to pivot funding toward “prevention, detection and treatment of longterm conditions”. The hope is this approach will drive private investment. Again, like the industrial strategy, the rationale is that the state can be an enabling force for growing the economy.
Ten years’ time
The ten year plan, if it is to mean anything, has to be focused on delivering a different kind of health service. The fundamental shift is about moving toward personalised community orientated care. The concern is that the plan is light on delivery, which would tally with reports that a ninth chapter on delivery is missing all together.
The NHS is stuck in a forever cycle of reform, failing to reform, entering crises, and then being bailed out from crises. The mechanisms to break the cycle includes changes to the workforce, new skills provision, using data differently, and reorientating life sciences research toward prevention and economic growth.
The higher education sector, research institutes, and companies working in research are not only central to the new vision of a NHS but with the amount of investment placed on their capacity to bring change they are no less than the midwives of it. The government’s biggest bet is that it can grow the economy, improve people’s lives, and in doing so reduce pressure on public services. Its biggest risk is that it believes it can do this without fundamental reform to higher education or research as well.
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Higher education postcard: Norwich University of the Arts
From the Bolton Chronicle, 7 June 1845:
[t]he following is the Report of the progress and state of this Institution made to Government, and just submitted to Parliament – The School of Design at Somerset-house was established at the commencement of the year 1837, by and under the superintendence of the Board of Trade, for the improvement of ornamental art, with regard especially to the staple manufactures of this country. The number of applicants for admission every month exceeds, by about fifty, that which the limited space in Somerset-house will accommodate.
In connection with the head school at Somerset-house, schools have been formed in many of the principal manufacturing districts, namely, in Spitalfields, Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, York, Newcastle and Glasgow; and applications are at present under consideration for the establishment of others in the boroughs of Southward and Lambeth, in Norwich, in the Staffordshire Potteries, and in Dublin…
And it is to Norwich that we go.
The idea of a school of design had been floated in Norwich for some time. The chief magistrate, Henry Bellenden Ker, had written to the mayor in November 1841 – the letter was published with an editorial in the Norwich Mercury on 6 November – setting out the expectations on the town, were it to be granted a government school of design. Essentially, they would have to find about £150 per year, supplemented by the government funding for the salary of the head of the school.
The Norwich Mercury was very much in favour:
In 1842 the town council agreed to a grant of £75 towards the costs, the remainder to be made via subscriptions. And it seems that the subscriptions must have been forthcoming, for on 21 January 1846 the Norwich School of Design was formally opened with much hoo-ha and admiring of the artistic collections that it had. In addition to the pieces granted by the government, the council provided some works from its own collection. And the school was up and running!
By 1880 it was known as the Schools of Art and Science. It seems that this was by central government action: the schools of design were originally creations of the Board of Trade, and the Victorians recognised that science was just as important as creativity in that regard. (Even if this truth is one that our governments have forgotten today.)
In 1899 the Technical Instruction Act empowered local authorities to control and fund technical education, and by the following year suggestions were being made that the School of Art and Sciences might fall within the scope of this act. Certainly the council was active in this area, a technical education committee having been established and an organiser and inspector of technical education appointed. By 1891 a new technical institute was being built in Norwich – the one shown on the card. The School of Art and Design was incorporated into this new Institute from 1901, as was, in 1913, the Norfolk and Norwich School of Cookery.
The technical institute became the Norwich Technical College in 1930, and then in 1938 the Technical College and School of Art, Norwich. It feels almost like the artists and designers were not entirely integrated into the college!
And in 1964 there was a separation. The college by then had a new building, and it seems that the technical subjects went to this new building on the Ipswich Road (still used by City College Norwich to this day), while the renamed Norwich School of Art stayed put. This also led to the School of Art moving into degree level education: from 1965 it offered the Diploma in Art and Design, validated by the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design. And when in 1975 the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design was incorporated into the Council for National Academic Awards, the school started offering bachelor’s degree courses.
In 1974 responsibility for the School of Art had shifted from Norwich City Council to Norfolk County Council. And this fact became significant in 1989 when the School was merged with the Great Yarmouth College of Art, and the Norfolk Institute of Art and Design (NIAD) was created. This became an associate college of Anglia Polytechnic University (APU, as it then was), with APU validating NIAD’s degrees. These included postgraduate taught degrees from 1993, and research students from 1995.
In 1994 the institute was incorporated as a higher education corporation – this is the legal form for most universities created from 1992 onwards – and renamed as the Norwich School of Art and Design. In 2007 it gained taught degree awarding powers and again assumed a new name, this time as the Norwich University College of the Arts. And finally in 2013, after the size threshold for university status had been reduced from 4,000 students to 1,000, it gained university status, becoming the Norwich University of the Arts.
Alumni of the university include Keith Chapman, who created both Bob the Builder and Paw Patrol; and Neil Innes, of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Monty Python.
The card itself is unsent, but looks to me to date from the first decade of the twentieth century. There’s a jigsaw here, for your delight and delectation.
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A Call for Revolutionary Hope in American Higher Education
In a fiery and prophetic address, the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries invoked the memory of America’s original struggle for freedom, branding the tyranny of King George III in the years before the American Revolution as “Project 1775.” With bold clarity, he drew a straight line from that era of oppression to today’s rising authoritarianism—what he identified as “Donald Trump’s Project 2025” and the accompanying Trump Spending Bill. But rather than ending in despair, his speech was a call to courage and hope: just as Project 1775 gave birth to the Revolution of 1776, we are called to give birth to a new movement—Project 2026, a revolutionary vision of democracy, justice, and renewal.
His message resonates beyond politics—it speaks deeply to the state of American higher education, which now stands at a crossroads. Under siege from authoritarian impulses, stripped of funding, and commodified by corporate greed, our colleges and universities reflect a nation in spiritual crisis. But as the Minority Leader reminded us, this moment is also one of great opportunity.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7)
Project 2026 is not merely a reaction to tyranny—it is a faith-driven declaration of agency. It is a call to restore education as a public good, not a private racket. It is a rejection of robocolleges, shadowy online program managers, and predatory lenders that have turned learning into a means of lifelong debt. And it is a stand against those who weaponize ignorance and rewrite history for their own gain.
We are reminded in the New Testament that resistance is righteous, and that reform must be rooted in love, justice, and truth.
“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)
This truth must guide the next phase of the American experiment—a truth that recognizes students not as consumers but as citizens; that sees teachers not as disposable labor but as bearers of light; and that understands education as liberation, not subjugation.
Project 2026 can become our modern Sermon on the Mount, a blueprint for building a nation where colleges nurture both critical thinking and spiritual compassion, where public funding is a covenant—not a weapon—and where we “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8).
For decades, institutions of higher learning have drifted toward elitism, exclusion, and exploitation. Many have served as tools of empire, not vessels of enlightenment. Project 2026 offers a rebirth—a Great Awakening that opens the doors of education wide to the poor, the marginalized, and the weary. It speaks to the tired adjunct, the indebted graduate, the first-generation student, and the worker seeking dignity.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Matthew 5:6)
This is the moment to stand together. Project 2026 must not be left to chance or left in the hands of the powerful alone. It is a grassroots revolution of the mind and spirit—a multiracial, multigenerational, moral movement that calls upon students, faculty, parents, and communities to say: No more.
No more austerity cloaked as fiscal responsibility.
No more censorship masquerading as patriotism.
No more debt for a degree that leads to precarious work and empty promises.Instead, let us build an education system worthy of democracy—a system animated by the values that once inspired a ragtag group of rebels in 1776. Let us be the generation that reclaims education as the soul of the Republic.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)
The struggle ahead will not be easy. But neither was 1776. And yet from that fire emerged a new nation. With faith and fierce love, Project 2026 can become a new declaration—not just of independence, but of interdependence. A declaration of solidarity with the forgotten, the silenced, and the struggling.
Let the tyrants tremble. Let the profiteers beware.
A revolution is stirring in our hearts.And as Scripture reminds us:
“If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31)
Sources:
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The Holy Bible, New Testament
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House Minority Leader remarks, July 3, 2025
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Trump-aligned Project 2025 blueprint (Heritage Foundation)
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Trump Budget and Spending Bill (2025)
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The Higher Education Inquirer archives on privatization, debt peonage, and adjunct labor in U.S. higher education
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Lawmakers Confront Columbia President About Old Messages
Shipman has been Columbia University’s acting president since March.
Claire Shipman, acting president of Columbia University, apologized Wednesday for writing messages in 2023 and 2024 that House Republicans say “appear to downplay and even mock the pervasive culture of antisemitism on Columbia’s campus,” Jewish Insider reported.
“The things I said in a moment of frustration and stress were wrong. They do not reflect how I feel,” Shipman wrote in a private email the outlet obtained Wednesday. Shipman said she was addressing “some trusted groups of friends and colleagues, with whom I’ve talked regularly over the last few months.”
The apology comes one day after the House Committee on Education and Workforce sent Shipman a letter asking her to explain the intent of internal messages she wrote about antisemitism on the Manhattan campus following the start of Israel’s war in Gaza and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. During the time frame in question, Shipman, who became acting president in March, was co-chair of the university’s Board of Trustees.
In its letter, the committee, which has subpoenaed numerous documents related to antisemitism at Columbia, cited a message Shipman wrote to now-resigned president Minouche Shafik on Oct. 20, 2023, that said, “People are really frustrated and scared about antisemitism on our campus and they feel somehow betrayed by it. Which is not necessarily a rational feeling but it’s deep and it is quite threatening.” The committee told Shipman her statement was “perplexing, considering the violence and harassment against Jewish and Israeli students already occurring on Columbia’s campus at the time.”
The committee, which has already compelled Columbia and numerous other universities to testify about their responses to campus antisemitism, also cited in its letter several messages from Shipman that convey alleged “distrust and dislike” for Shoshana Shendelman, a Jewish member of the university’s board who has been outspoken about perceived inadequacies of Columbia’s antisemitism response. “I just don’t think she should be on the board,” Shipman said in a January 2024 message. In April 2024, Shipman wrote that she was “so, so tired” of Shendelman.
In addition to ongoing scrutiny from Republican members of Congress, the Trump administration has attacked Columbia for months, accusing the university of not protecting Jewish students sufficiently and cutting off more than $400 million in federal funds. Although Columbia agreed to the administration’s demands, including overhauling disciplinary processes, Trump hasn’t yet restored the university’s funding. Instead, the Education Department reported Columbia to its accreditor, which has since issued a warning to the university.
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Penn Gets Funding Back After Agreeing to Trump’s Demands
Penn had $175 million in federal funding frozen in March.
Kyle Mazza/Anadolu/Getty Images
After the University of Pennsylvania agreed to strip a trans athlete’s awards and comply with the Trump administration’s other demands, the Education Department said Wednesday that the university will get its federal funding back, Bloomberg News and CNN reported.
The administration had paused $175 million in funding to the university because Penn “infamously permitted a male to compete on its women’s swimming team,” an official said in March. After the funding freeze, the Education Department said in April that Penn violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by allowing Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, to compete on Penn’s women’s swimming team in 2022. (That decision followed NCAA policies at the time as well as Title IX.)
In order to resolve the civil rights investigation, Penn had to agree to three demands including “restoring” swimming awards and honors that were “misappropriated” to trans women athletes and apologizing to cisgender women who competed with Thomas. Penn officials said this week that the agreement ends “an investigation that, if unresolved, could have had significant and lasting implications for the University of Pennsylvania.”
After announcing the agreement, Penn quickly began complying. CNN reported that Thomas is no longer included on a list of women’s swimming records. The document now notes, according to CNN, that “competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021–22 season.”
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Drops in International Student Tuition Could Pose Credit Risk
Just over one in 10 higher education institutions enroll at least 20 percent international students.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | skynesher/E+/Getty Images
Colleges and universities with a high percentage of international students face a credit risk as the federal government continues to target international students, according to a new report from Moody’s Ratings.
Those most at risk include the 11 percent of American institutions where international students make up more than 20 percent of the student body, the ratings agency said, as well as institutions that are already struggling financially. (In total, 6 percent of students at U.S. institutions come from other countries.)
“The reduction in international students presents a credit risk for universities heavily reliant on this demographic because of potential declines in tuition income, as international students typically pay full tuition fees,” the report states. “Additionally, with declining numbers of high school students over the next several years in the U.S. leading to fewer domestic students, universities intending to fill the gap with more international students may fall short.”
The report follows the Trump administration’s months-long attack on immigrants and international students specifically, which began with the sudden removal of thousands of students from the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, putting their legal status at risk. Since then, the administration has implemented a travel ban that includes 12 countries, prohibiting students from those countries from studying in the United States, and has targeted international students at Harvard University specifically, attempting to end the university’s ability to host international students. The State Department has also increased scrutiny into student visa applicants’ social media presences.
It’s unclear as of yet how those factors will impact international enrollment in the fall. According to a recent report by the Institute of International Education, an approximately equal number of colleges and universities said they expected their international enrollment in the 2025–26 academic year to increase (32 percent), decrease (35 percent) and stay the same (32 percent) from this year’s numbers. But the percentage who expect a decrease was much higher than last year, when only 17 percent of institutions thought they might lose international students.
The hit to the sector may not be as significant as it would be in countries like the United Kingdom and Australia, where about 25 percent of all students are international, Moody’s reported. Still, if the U.S. lost 15 percent of its international student population, a substantial number of colleges could experience at least moderate financial repercussions, according to one projection.
About one in five colleges’ and universities’ EBIDA (earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization) margins would shrink by 0.5 to two percentage points, according to the ratings agency’s calculations.
“For entities that already are under fiscal stress and have low EBIDA margins (the median EBIDA for private nonprofit colleges and universities was 11.7 percent in fiscal 2024 and 10.7 percent for publics), a change of one or two percentage points could push them into negative territory, especially if they are heavily discounting domestic tuition or losing enrollment because of demographic shifts,” according to the report. “Also, many small private schools may need to contend with federal changes to student loan and aid programs, further depressing domestic enrollment prospects and stressing budgets, especially for those with low liquidity.”
The report stresses that this model does not account for any steps the institutions might take to mitigate those losses—especially at wealthier institutions. (Fifty-four percent of institutions with at least 15 percent international students are highly selective, while 25 percent are nonselective.)
“Institutions that are highly selective, or those with considerable reserves, may better absorb the impacts by adjusting operations or increasing domestic enrollment,” it states. “Some elite institutions are less reliant on tuition, deriving income from endowments, fundraising or research, thereby mitigating the financial impact.”
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The Meaning of July 4 to Political Science Teacher (opinion)
Every year for the past 25 years, I have taught an intermediate-level undergraduate course at Indiana University Bloomington called The Declaration of Independence and the Meaning of American Citizenship. I love teaching this course, because it allows students to engage history by interpreting a rather simple text that is well recognized even if not necessarily well understood—and this tension between vague familiarity and real understanding makes the teaching fun.
My basic approach to the topic and the course, outlined on the syllabus, has remained pretty fixed over the years:
This class will pay special attention to the meaning of “America.” It will address serious questions about what it means to think “historically.” It will trace and analyze the many ways that the meanings of American citizenship have been contested since 1776, and it will do so through a focus on alternative interpretations of the Declaration of Independence, which has sometimes been called the “birth certificate of American democracy.”
The Declaration is not the only important text in American political history. In particular, we will pay attention to its complex relationship to the U.S. Constitution, the other seminal “founding” document of the U.S. political system. But it is a very important touchstone for many important historical debates, and it is an even more important symbol of American political identity (which is why the late historian Pauline Maier referred to it as “American Scripture”).
The Declaration is also a very instructive example of the fact that core political symbols, texts and principles can be interpreted in different ways and are often heavily contested. Such rhetorical contests play an important role in the evolution of democracy over time, as disenfranchised groups appeal to “foundational” texts, like the Declaration, to justify their demands for recognition and inclusion—and as those who oppose recognition and inclusion also sometimes draw upon the same texts, though in very different ways.
In this course we will discuss how the Declaration has been a source of inspiration for activists and social movements seeking to democratize American society, and how it has also been used, differently, by opponents of democratization.
As we will see, there is not one true “meaning” of the Declaration.
But there are more and less nuanced, and more and less inclusive, interpretations of the Declaration. The primary goal of this course is to develop a historically and philosophically informed understanding of the Declaration—what it says, what it has meant, how it has justified many of the things most of us hold dear and some things many of us find revolting—and, by doing so, to nurture a more informed and reflexive understanding of contemporary American democracy. And because it is a course taught in a U.S. public university, to students most if not all of whom are citizens of the U.S., such an understanding has potentially significant implications for the way each of us thinks and acts as a citizen.
The course was originally inspired by a chance encounter, many decades ago, with a fascinating anthology, published in 1976—the year of the Bicentennial—and edited by famed labor historian Philip S. Foner, entitled We, The Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman’s Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829–1975. This volume, as its title suggests, furnishes a wide range of texts to explore with students. Over the years, I have incorporated dozens of other texts, some modeled directly on the 1776 Declaration, others simply drawing heavily on it, including the speeches of a great many presidents, especially Lincoln.
Central to the course are three famous speeches delivered by dissenters who were widely reviled in their time: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”; Eugene V. Debs’s “Liberty,” given in 1895 upon his release from six months in prison for leading the 1894 Pullman strike; and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, given at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
But the syllabus also includes speeches by Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens; populist Tom Watson; and segregationist governor George C. Wallace. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” adopted in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights, plays an important role; so too the 1898 “White Declaration of Independence” published by white racists in Wilmington, N.C., who overthrew a multiracial city government and terrorized the Black community.
The course is very historical, but also very contemporary, because July 4 comes every year, and because past historical struggles over the meaning of the Declaration continue to resonate in the present—and indeed are sometimes revived in the present.
But in the coming year the course will be more relevant than ever, because President Donald Trump has made clear that he plans to turn the entire year leading up to next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing into a celebration of “American greatness”—and thus of himself.
Back in May 2023, Trump released a campaign video promising what Politico described as “a blowout, 12-month-long ‘Salute to America 250’ celebration,” including “a ‘Great American State Fair,’ featuring pavilions from all 50 states, nationwide high school sporting contests, and the building of Trump’s ‘National Garden of American Heroes’ with statues of important figures in American history.”
In his second week in office, Trump issued two executive orders centered on the Declaration. The first, “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday,” announced that “it is the policy of the United States, and a purpose of this order, to provide a grand celebration worthy of the momentous occasion of the 250th anniversary of American Independence on July 4, 2026.” The other, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling,” mandated the termination of “radical, anti-American ideologies” and the re-establishment of a “President’s Advisory 1776 Commission” charged with promoting patriotic education.
Trump has long laid claim to “the spirit of July 4, 1776.” In the final days of his first term, as the nation was overtaken by a wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations protesting the police killing of George Floyd, he established his “1776 Commission,” which was intended to legitimate his increasingly repressive approach to the demonstrations and to energize his 2020 re-election campaign (the resulting report was also an explicit repudiation of The New York Times’ 2019 “The 1619 Project”).
The commission and its hurriedly drafted “The 1776 Report” failed to help fuel Trump’s failing 2020 campaign. But its broader ideological mission—to inaugurate a MAGA-inflected cultural revolution in a second Trump term—was hardly defeated.
The MAGA movement’s attempt to overthrow Joe Biden’s 2020 election— “Today is 1776,” tweeted MAGA congresswoman Lauren Boebert on Jan. 6, 2021, speaking for the thousands of “3 Percenters,” “Proud Boys” and assorted “patriot” groups that invaded the Capitol building—may have failed. But only temporarily. For Trump has returned to the White House with a vengeance and has commenced an ideological and economic assault on higher education, committed to “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” by purging society of “divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”
Historical understanding and social criticism are out and national reverence is in.
I cannot imagine a more exciting time to be teaching a course on the Declaration of Independence and the meaning of American citizenship.
But I also cannot imagine a more challenging and indeed precarious time to do so.
For the course—which does not seek to promote reverence or national pride or “American greatness”—is at odds with the prevailing spirit of the time, or at least its ascendant ideology.
It seeks to promote historical understanding, based on serious historical scholarship, and a general appreciation for the complex ways that the Declaration has figured in debates and conflicts over the shifting meaning of American citizenship. The course refuses to ignore or whitewash the ways that patriotism and even the preamble of the Declaration itself have been mobilized to oppose the forms of inclusion, and democratization, that we now take for granted (like the abolition of chattel slavery, considered by Southern states to be such a despotic violation of slaveholder property rights that they seceded from the Union, and formed the Confederacy, by appealing to the Declaration’s “consent of the governed”).
It also refuses to treat American history as the happy working out over time of a beneficent commitment to universal freedom that was embraced from the beginning by all Americans. For while certain universalist words were there from the beginning—coexisting with much less universalistic words, to be sure—a commitment to their universal application was most definitely not there from the beginning. That promise took decades and even centuries to be even haltingly redeemed, partially and in steps, due to the blood, sweat and tears of generations of brave activists—a process that continues to this day. And the fact that the Declaration’s words played such an important role in this contentious politics is the very reason why it is such a seminal text, one that deserves appreciation and celebration even as it is a human invention not above moral reproach or historical critique.
In politics as in life, criticism, and not easy praise, is the sincerest form of flattery.
As a professor, my approach to the course material is not partisan in any sense. I have no interest in changing the minds of any of my students, whatever they happen to think, except in the sense that all good teaching is about getting students to think more deeply and more regularly. In this sense, I seek to change the mind of every student, by engaging every student with historical materials, and ideas, and intellectual challenges, and by fostering a climate of respectful questioning and disagreeing in the classroom so that students can hear and listen to those with viewpoints different from their own. The pedagogy of higher education is not normal out in the world beyond the academy, though it would not be a bad thing if it were much more normalized than it currently is. That is why colleges and universities exist.
All the same, we have arrived at a historical moment in the U.S., perhaps unlike any before, in which such education is considered partisan, and denounced as “indoctrination,” by a MAGA movement and a Trump administration obsessed with a closing of borders, and ranks, and minds, in the name of patriotic “unity” and “American greatness.”
At a time when historical education is reduced to the celebration of national greatness, a historically serious course on the Declaration of Independence that treats it as a text to be critically engaged, not worshipped, might be considered subversive. Indeed, GOP-controlled state legislatures across the country, following the Trump administration’s lead, have instituted a wide range of measures designed to subject university teaching to heightened political scrutiny (in my own state of Indiana, vague “intellectual diversity” standards have been enacted into law, and Attorney General Todd Rokita has created a web portal, ominously named “Eyes on Education,” that encourages parents and teachers to report “objectionable” forms of teaching).
The problem with such censoriousness is that, if taken seriously, it is hard to see how the Declaration is worth anything at all. None other than Frederick Douglass himself noted precisely this back in 1852: “There was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”
Since July 4, 1776, the Declaration’s words have resonated at every moment when citizens have together sought to make the society, in the words of that other foundational text, the Constitution, “a more perfect union.” To dismiss the critical appropriation of the Declaration is to devalue both the text itself and the entire course of American history.
This July 4, I will be reflecting on the historical and the contemporary meaning of the text whose publication Americans will celebrate, and gearing up to once again teach The Declaration of Independence and the Meaning of American Citizenship at a time when it could not be more relevant.
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A Re-Engagement Strategy for Administrators (opinion)
In American higher education, teaching is our business, research our currency and service our obligation. It has always perplexed me that the pursuit of higher education administration has traditionally compelled individuals to move away from a continued practice of two of these core faculty functions. The path of a faculty administrator is typically marked by a shift away from teaching and research, an evolution that makes returning to the faculty for some almost an impossibility, after years of being disconnected from the disciplinary practices that propelled their trajectory through the faculty ranks to secure an administrative role in the first place.
At Kennesaw State University, we are exploring a new approach to academic leadership that reverses this traditional model of administrative disconnect. Starting this past academic year, every senior academic administrator serving on the provost’s leadership team (including all deans) joined me (serving as provost) in a commitment to teaching or researching annually, with the goal of helping us better understand and serve our university community. For some, the move to formally carve out approximately 10 percent of their time for either teaching or research validates ongoing teaching and research practices, while for others, it provides administrative latitude to reignite their passion for teaching and/or research.
KSU’s president, Kathy Stewart Schwaig, co-taught an honors course with me this past spring, leading this strategy by example. President Schwaig, who holds a Ph.D. in information systems and whose leadership trajectory has evolved through faculty ranks across two Georgia institutions, takes this philosophical commitment to staying connected to the business of higher education even a step further, as she is currently enrolled as a graduate student at Dallas Theological Seminary pursuing a master’s in biblical and theological studies.
As Kennesaw State, a Carnegie-designated R-2 institution that serves a population of more than 47,800 students, some could see this strategy as a pragmatic way of extending the capacities of the senior academic administrators to serve the institution’s growing needs in research and teaching. At a time when the capacities of faculty colleagues are being optimized to serve one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing public institutions, the members of the senior academic administrative team are committing to optimize their own collective capacities to serve the mission of the university.
The consequences will be more than just pragmatic, however. The annual commitment to serve as a higher education practitioner in addition to a higher education administrator could help us pursue administrative approaches that are rooted in a pragmatic understanding of both the shifting needs of industry and the changing needs of students entering higher education today. And it can also help build goodwill among faculty colleagues, who sometimes feel university administrators fail to fully comprehend the growing challenges of the classroom and pressures of research productivity.
Serving as provost, I have found my annual commitment to teaching an opportunity to inform administrative priorities. In fall 2020, when we struggled to comprehend how best to reopen and calibrate to the safety needs of the COVID pandemic, I was scheduled to teach a senior seminar course in the Department of Dance, while I served as dean of the College of the Arts at KSU. For a moment, I thought I should excuse myself from the added responsibilities of teaching a course at a time when my administrative capacities were being tested in rather unconventional ways. Better judgment prevailed, however, as I realized that out of every year that I continued to teach in my higher education career, this would be the semester when being in the classroom and experiencing the challenge alongside my faculty colleagues was most critical.
I would be lying if I said the experience was transformative. The challenges of lecturing with a face mask to socially distant students, split into two groups and separated by technology and physical space, was an experience that most faculty would likely agree was frustrating. But serving as dean and being in the classroom all semester allowed me to skip past several steps to serve the needs of my faculty colleagues with an understanding and empathy that was experientially relevant.
I am hoping that the impact of KSU’s administrative re-engagement strategy will be similarly impactful, ensuring that all senior academic administrators reignite their capacities to contribute to the teaching and research mission of the university. The idea seems to have been embraced at the outset by most; its sustainability, however, will require a continued institutional commitment and individual prioritization. While the true outcomes are yet to be empirically assessed, my hope is that this move will convert administrative faculty into faculty administrators, building their capacities to more effectively serve the growth of our institution with relevant, ongoing experiences in teaching and research.
