Student protesters at Barnard College were arrested Wednesday afternoon for refusing to leave the campus’s library when asked by police, who were clearing the building due to a bomb threat, The New York Times reported. The students were protesting the recent expulsions of three student demonstrators.
Protesters gathered for a sit-in in the Milstein Center at around 1 p.m. Wednesday. Several hours later, administrators shared that they had received a bomb threat, and police began evacuating the building. The New York Police Department posted on social media that “anyone who refuses to leave the location is subject to arrest.” (The bomb threat was later found to be false.)
Many students initially refused to leave, continuing to chant above the sound of a fire alarm, until police began pushing students out of the building. Eventually, nine students were taken into custody for resisting police.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian activist group, as well as the college’s student government, condemned Barnard’s leaders for calling on NYPD officers to remove students from the building.
“Barnard College has broken a long-standing promise. SGA has been explicitly told by President [Laura] Rosenbury, in the presence of other senior staff, that the College would never invite the NYPD onto campus,” student government members wrote in an email to the Barnard community. “To go against this commitment blatantly violates a precedent that was meant to protect our students.”
Rosenbury defended the decision to bring NYPD officers to campus, saying it was necessary to protect protesters from injury after they refused to follow staff members’ instructions to leave the Milstein Center. (Copies of both the SGA’s and Rosenbury’s emails were shared in an article by Bwog, an independent student newspaper at Columbia.)
“For the safety of our entire community—including the safety of the masked disrupters—Barnard made the necessary decision to request NYPD assistance so they could evacuate the building to reduce the risk of harm … The decision to request NYPD assistance was guided and informed entirely by the absolute obligation we have to keep every member of our community safe,” Rosenbury said via email.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to use artificial intelligence to review and revoke visas of foreign students who appear to be Hamas sympathizers, Axiosreported Thursday, citing State Department officials.
The “Catch and Revoke” initiative will use AI to review tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts, looking for signs that they supported Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
If officials find a social media post from an international student that appears to endorse the attack and looks “pro-Hamas,” that could be grounds for visa revocation, an official told Axios.
Officials also plan to check news reports of anti-Israel demonstrations and lawsuits brought by Jewish students that might indicate a foreign national engaged in antisemitic activity.
Axios reported that to launch Catch and Revoke, the department examined a database of 100,000 people in the Student Exchange Visitor System since October 2023 to see if any visas had been revoked but the student was allowed to stay in the country during the Biden administration.
“We found literally zero visa revocations during the Biden administration,” a State Department official said, “which suggests a blind eye attitude toward law enforcement.”
The official said, “It would be negligent for the department that takes national security seriously to ignore publicly available information about [visa] applicants in terms of AI tools … AI is one of the resources available to the government that’s very different from where we were technologically decades ago.”
“Under President Trump, the Immigration Nationality Act [sic] is great again,” the official added.
Smith College has received a $51 million gift from an anonymous alumna, the Massachusetts women’s college announced Thursday.
It is the largest planned gift in the institution’s history and will be used to support financial aid and two faculty positions: one in engineering and one in statistical and data sciences.
Boosting financial aid “will allow young women from all economic backgrounds to realize their biggest dreams for educational opportunity, permitting them to make a difference in their local communities, in their nations, and in the advancement of humankind worldwide,” said the donor, who graduated in 1979.
She also articulated her belief in the value of STEM education.
“In an age in which it is more important than ever for women to excel in technology, especially in the fields of engineering and computing, it is crucial to endow a leading educational institution like Smith College and to benefit women’s contributions in the STEM fields.”
A long time ago, in a land far, far away from where I sit in Swansea, King Kumaragupta I established a monastery as a centre for higher learning. The monastery was in Nalanda, in modern-day India, and the year was something like 427 CE.
Nalanda was already a holy site: it had been visited by Siddhartha Gautama – who you might know better as Buddha – and was the birthplace of one of his disciples. By 427 CE there had for some 700 years been a stupa at the site, containing the remains of Sariputta, the disciple. Mahavira, a significant character in Jainism, had lived there. It was a place of pilgrimage.
Roy Lowe and Yoshihito Yasuhara’s 2016 work, The origins of higher learning, contains a good discussion on Nalanda, on which this blog draws. The monastery was active between 427 and the twelfth century CE, so it had about 700 years of existence, and overlapped the creation of the first European universities and the Islamic centre of learning based upon mosques and libraries.
Nalanda attracted scholars from many countries and regions – Lowe and Yasuhara report Persia, Tibet, Chia, Korea, Indonesia and Mongolia. (Their book highlights just how mobile scholars – and their ideas – were in the ancient world. It’s well worth a read.) From two of the Chinese scholars, Hiuen Tsang (who spent three years at Nalanda) and I Tsing (who, emulating Hiuen Tsang, spent ten years there), we can find out about life and learning at Nalanda.
It seems that Nalanda was organised on a collegiate basis – that is, residential, with tutors supervising students’ learning. At its height there were about 1,500 tutors and 8,000 students, which is a very Oxbridge ratio.
To gain admission, a student had to answers questions posed by the gatekeeper; apparently only one third of those who sought entry were successful. A high degree of literacy was expected of applicants: they must be familiar with core Buddhist texts and philosophical writings, although there was no religious belief bar to study.
Kumara Gupta I and subsequent rules had granted Nalanda a substantial income, from the produce of over 200 villages. This income supported the tutors and scholars: there were no tuition fees, and no requirement for students to undertake any task other than learning, discussion and contemplation.
The site was about the size of the City of London; there were ten temples, eight monastic buildings – which served as colleges – and over 600 individual study-bedrooms. But don’t think modern rooms with ensuite – this means space for a bed, and niches in the walls for a light and a bookshelf. The library was in three buildings, one of which was nine stories high; it is estimated that it held several hundred thousand texts; and copies were given to scholars who left for elsewhere.
Nalanda was governed by an assembly which took all major decisions, including those relating to admission, allocation of study-bedrooms, and students discipline. (Nalanda’s authority over its members seems to have been like that of a medieval European university.) There was a clepsydra, which regulated the times for eating and bathing.
The curriculum is known to have included study of Buddhist texts, and other subjects such as medicine and magic. Amartya Sen identified the subjects as including “medicine, public health, architecture, sculpture and astronomy… religion, literature, law and linguistics.” It is clear that Nalanda was a site for secular learning, not simply religious instruction. There was a tall tower for astronomy.
And, wonderfully, it seems that Nalanda spawned other institutions of higher learning. Gopala, who came to power in the region in the 700s, after a century in which there had been a power vacuum and much strife, founded several institutions which formed, with Nalanda, a network. These were at Odantapura, Vikramshila, Somapura and Jaggadala. Lowe and Yasuhara speculate that this could be thought of as a federal organisation: tutors and scholars were able, and indeed were encouraged, to move freely between them; it was a single project to enhance learning.
Nalanda is now simply ruins, although a modern university was established near the site in 2010, and in the 1960s there was what was regarded as a new university on the site. It says so on a postcard, which, as we know, never lie.
Here’s a jigsaw of the postcard, which is from a 1960s tourist pack of several of the site and the temple. It is unsent, and the pack had been held together by a rusty staple whose disintegration enabled me to scan this one without damaging the others.
It’s been a whirlwind week at the Department of Education, and some career staffers are anguished over its bleak, uncertain future.
On Monday, the Senate confirmed Linda McMahon as the new secretary of education, and shortly afterward, she released a memo laying out department personnel’s “final mission”: “the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education.”
The next day, department leaders scheduled a meeting to announce a major reduction in force, which current staffers say is rumored to include layoffs of nearly 50 percent of the workforce—but the meeting was canceled at the last minute, according to a department employee.
Then, on Wednesday, media outlets, citing sources in the administration, reported that President Trump would sign an executive order to abolish the Education Department as soon as Thursday, sending frenzied staffers scrambling to prepare.
When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Thursday morning on X that Trump wouldn’t be signing the order that day after all, one staffer said it felt like cruel misdirection.
“It’s definitely feeling like whiplash,” they said. “Folks had steeled themselves for today … Everyone seems ready to rip off the Band-Aid, and the delay feels like a game to torture people.”
Several current department employees, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on background and on the condition of anonymity, offered a chaotic picture of upheaval and uncertainty within the department, with staff scrambling to prepare for the dissolution of their offices, even as the administration’s plans and timeline remain unclear.
One current employee told Inside Higher Ed that McMahon’s memo announcing the administration’s plan to downsize the department was “insulting and antagonizing.”
“The notion that we should be honored to undertake this ‘final mission’ is absurd,” they said. “It’s basically saying, ‘You should thank us for firing you.’”
One career staffer who’s been with the department for more than a decade said most employees are anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop. Over the past few weeks, they said, anger and indignation have turned to heartbreak.
“Reality is sinking in everywhere … Folks are seriously depressed,” they said. “And yet, working to advance the goals of this administration may actually be worse than not having a job.”
‘Slash and Burn’
Trump has advocated for eliminating the 45-year-old Education Department since the early days of his campaign. When he nominated McMahon as secretary, he said he hoped she would “put herself out of a job.” Still, many department employees were taken aback by the sudden escalation.
The longtime staffer said that when Trump was inaugurated, they anticipated some serious changes at the department. But the speed and wantonness of the move to abolish it has surprised them.
“I foolishly believed they’d try to take a studied approach to any changes, consult with seasoned career staffers with institutional knowledge and expertise,” they said. “Instead it’s slash and burn.”
Last week, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management directed all federal agencies to prepare for “large-scale reductions in force” and the elimination of “non-statutorily mandated functions,” which could be a precursor to the Trump administration’s plans to heavily reduce the head count at Education Department as much as possible without congressional approval.
A draft of Trump’s forthcoming executive order, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, includes a two-paragraph guideline for winding down department activity and little else. James Kvaal, who served as under secretary of education under President Joe Biden, said the absence of a plan is revealing and concerning.
“[The document] reflects a lack of clarity within the Trump administration about what they’re trying to do, or even disagreement among certain elements,” Kvaal said.
Department staffers are concerned about the administration’s strategy for implementing its ambitious spending cuts. One employee who spoke with Inside Higher Ed was placed on administrative leave last month and said their experience was “chaotic and haphazard.” The staffer said cuts to programs, contracts and personnel have been largely left up to a small group of young Department of Government Efficiency employees, whose approach has been “like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what they can get away with.”
They said that if the Trump administration’s approach to cuts at the department so far is any indication how they will handle plans to gut the department, it could exacerbate the impact on students and educational institutions.
“Nobody is going to know what’s happening, which means zero accountability,” they said. “It’s going to be a mess.”
DOGE has already canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in department contracts, including some that are essential to the operation of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. And sources within the department say that hundreds of Federal Student Aid staff have either taken a buyout or been placed on leave.
A current department employee who specializes in higher education said they fear that the department’s closure—or the major cuts that precipitate it—will have a devastating impact on the sector, and on affordability and access in particular.
“There’s going to be a huge setback in the progress we’ve made even just in terms of who gets to go to college,” they said. “Universities are being put on such a high alert on every front … it’s a wholesale attack on the sector.”
Kvaal said that even under Biden, the department in general—and the student aid office in particular—were severely understaffed, a problem that he has said contributed to the bungled rollout of the new FAFSA last year. He added that further reductions could hobble agencies’ capacity to perform essential duties like student loan and aid disbursement.
“The department was thinly staffed even prior to these cuts, and as a result it was difficult to run programs smoothly and deliver benefits that students needed,” he said. “If there are, in fact, hundreds of people leaving FSA, that could put our progress with FAFSA at risk and upend our efforts to prevent student loan defaults. If nothing else, asking senior managers to focus on nudging their staff out the door and preparing for legislation that will never come is a real distraction.”
Both Kvaal and current employees are concerned that when the Trump administration does release concrete plans for distributing the department’s responsibilities, they will welcome the private sector into administering services like student loans and financial aid.
“It seems like the longer-term goal here would be to privatize the FSA, like they’re doing with Social Security,” one staffer said. “That’s a mess waiting to happen and would take way longer than four years. In the interim, the damage could be enormous.”
A draft executive order obtained Thursday by Inside Higher Ed directs the newly confirmed education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps” to return authority over education to the states and facilitate closure of the Department of Education “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
If signed, the order—which has been rumored for weeks but is not yet official—would be the first step in carrying out the president’s controversial campaign promise to abolish the 45-year-old department, which he believes is unconstitutional and has grown too large.
Several media outlets reported Wednesday night that Trump would sign the order as soon as Thursday, but shortly after the news circulated, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X, “President Trump is NOT signing an Executive Order on the Department of Education today” and called the reports “fake news.”
Still, the reports set off a wave of comments from advocates and analysts. Liberals warned that shutting down the Education Department would be devastating for families and students, while conservatives backed Trump’s plan and said the draft order was key to cleaning up the agency.
McMahon, who took office Monday and will spearhead the closure effort, is supportive of overhauling the agency. She told department staff earlier this week to prepare for a “momentous final mission” to eliminate “bureaucratic bloat” and return education to the states.
Although vague, the secretary’s memo and the draft executive order give policy experts some idea of what could come next.
At the very least, they expect to see a major reduction in staff and a diminished federal role in education; some of that work is already underway. The agency has slashed millions in contracts and grants as well as fired dozens of employees. A larger reduction in force is also in the works, fueling concerns among department staff.
“There is probably not going to be anything in [the order] that isn’t already happening, largely,” said Kelly McManus, vice president of higher education at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic group. “The secretary’s final mission was clear … so I’m not particularly worked up about the EO specifically, because I don’t think it’s going to fundamentally change that.”
Abolishing the department would require an act of Congress, which McManus said the draft order appears to acknowledge. She and other experts say any effort to close the department will be lengthy and complicated.
“This is not a flip-on, flip-off situation here,” she said. “Practically, there will have to be a process … You cannot shut the doors tomorrow and be done.”
The 416-word draft order gives little detail as to what the “steps” of dismantling the department are or what would happen to certain congressionally mandated programs such as the Pell Grant, the student loan system or the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. However, the document does say that any funds allocated by the department should comply with federal law, including Trump’s previous orders on diversity, equity and inclusion and transgender athletes—both of which have been caught up in court.
Neither Trump nor McMahon has so far offered any plan outlining how closing the department would work, though some conservative plans recommend moving the Office for Federal Student Aid to the Treasury and sending the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department.
More than 4,000 people currently work for the department, which was created in 1979 and now has a $80 billion discretionary budget. Each year, the agency issues about $100 billion in student loans and doles out more than $30 billion in Pell Grants.
Shutting down the department isn’t popular with voters, recent surveys have found. One recent opinion poll found that 61 percent of all respondents “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed the idea of eliminating the department. Another showed that up to 72 percent either opposed the plan or weren’t sure how they felt. That number was 49 percent among Republicans.
Minimizing a D.C. ‘Footprint’
Trump has signaled for months, if not years, that he wants to shut down the Education Department, and many analysts have already taken a position on the issue.
To Michael Brickman, an adjunct fellow at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, nothing about the draft was a surprise. Like McManus, he noted that much of what the order directs McMahon to do is already underway.
Brickman expects the next steps will focus on finding new and “better” ways to maintain the department’s core functions as required under law with “less funding, less staff and possibly in conjunction with other agencies.”
“I don’t think anybody’s talking about cutting major programs,” he said, referencing financial aid services like the Pell Grant and disability protection acts like IDEA. “So the question will be, what is required under law? What can Congress change? And how can the department streamline things to minimize the footprint in D.C.?”
Shutting down the Education Department likely would be disruptive for colleges and students, advocates say.
J. David Ake/Getty Images
McManus stressed that it will be important to protect these core functions, especially the ones related to higher ed, saying it doesn’t make sense to send them back to the states.
“What is most important is that those core statutory functions have the people, capacity and expertise to be able to do effective oversight of how taxpayer dollars are being spent,” she said. “We are significantly less concerned about where those people sit, as long as there is the ability to safeguard taxpayer investments and to make sure that programs that are statutorily required and that have had long bipartisan support, like Pell Grants, are being effectively implemented.”
In Brickman’s view, some of the department’s regulatory operations, like analyzing and creating reports on grant or contract applicants and managing third-party accreditors, are simply “make-work.” By hiring hundreds of staff members to execute these tasks, he said, the department pulls tax dollars from local governments and then forces those same communities to spend more writing grant proposals to get it back.
“There’s just a lot of work and churn that evidence shows does not lead to improved student outcomes,” he said.
But when asked what the Trump administration has done to convince stakeholders he not only intends to tear down the department but also build it back up again, Brickman didn’t directly answer the question. Instead, he referenced actions of the Biden administration.
“The Biden administration broke the entire Federal Student Aid system on purpose … They were trying to illegally turn the trillion-plus-dollar portfolio from a loan program into a grant program,” he said. “That is not what the Trump administration is doing. The Trump administration has tried to improve these programs and make them actually work again.”
Although what Biden did was “unfortunate,” Brickman said, it also creates an opportunity.
“This mess isn’t being created; it’s being responded to,” he said. “I hope institutions that may be predisposed to oppose anything coming from the Trump administration will welcome this as the end of a failed experiment that just put more restrictions on teaching and learning.”
Democrats Push Back
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers, student advocacy groups, civil rights organizations and left-leaning think tanks warn that Trump has no intention of rebuilding, only dismantling. The American Federation of Teachers, a key higher ed union, said the order is a government attempt to “abdicate its responsibility to all children, students and working families.”
Randi Weingarten, the union’s president, recognized in a statement Wednesday night that there are certainly ways the department could be more efficient, but she implied that’s not Trump’s goal.
“No one likes bureaucracy, and everyone’s in favor of more efficiency, so let’s find ways to accomplish that,” she said. “But don’t use a ‘war on woke’ to attack the children living in poverty and the children with disabilities, in order to pay for vouchers and tax cuts for billionaires.”
Senate Democrats criticized the pending executive order to abolish the Department of Education as a press conference Thursday.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images
Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State, blasted the Trump administration’s plans at a press conference Thursday. She said that Trump and his unelected government efficiency czar Elon Musk “don’t know what it’s like to count on their local public school having the resources to get their kids a great education … And they don’t care to learn why. They want to break the department, break our government, and enrich themselves.”
To the American Association of University Professors, “dismantling the Department of Education would hasten us into a new dark age.”
Former Biden under secretary James Kvaal told Inside Higher Ed that the draft order should dispel any notion that Trump is not trying to shut down the department. But at the same time, he said, the GOP administration’s approach to doing so has been “schizophrenic” and “inconsistent.”
“It can’t be true that students of color and with disabilities will have their civil rights protected, but also the federal government is not going to be involved in those decisions,” he said.
But at the same time, Kvaal and others note that, ultimately, the Trump administration lacks the legal authority to actually close the Department of Education, making full abolishment more complicated than the president suggests.
Shuttering the agency would require 60 votes in the Senate as well as a majority in the House, as the department’s existence is written into statute. And with a 53-seat majority in the Senate, Republicans don’t currently have the votes unless some Democrats back the plan.
“[The Republicans] don’t have the votes to close the department, and they already plan to enforce their plans on DEI, so it’s not clear what the EO adds to that,” Kvaal said. “It’ll get sorted out in the courts.”
Katherine Knott and Liam Knox contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump is planning to sign an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to close the agency, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported.
The president’s order—scheduled to be signed at 2 p.m. in the Oval Office—is the first step in carrying out his controversial campaign promise to abolish the 45-year-old department. A draft of the order provided to Inside Higher Ed criticizes the department for spending “more than $1 trillion without producing virtually any improvement in student reading and mathematics scores.” Trump’s press secretary called reports about the order “fake news.”
Education advocates have already shown staunch opposition to the executive action. The American Federation of Teachers, a key higher ed union, was one of the first groups to pipe up when the news broke Wednesday evening, calling the order a government attempt to “abdicate its responsibility to all children, students and working families.”
“The Department of Education, and the laws it is supposed to execute, has one major purpose: to level the playing field and fill opportunity gaps to help every child in America succeed,” union president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “No one likes bureaucracy, and everyone’s in favor of more efficiency, so let’s find ways to accomplish that. But don’t use a ‘war on woke’ to attack the children living in poverty and the children with disabilities, in order to pay for vouchers and tax cuts for billionaires.”
The president and his allies have promoted the idea of dismantling the agency since the early days of his 2024 campaign, saying the department has grown too big and interferes in matters best left to local and state authorities. They also argue the agency’s existence violates the Constitution (because the document doesn’t mention education) and is a prime example of federal bloat and excess.
Read More on Trump’s Plans to Break Up the Department
Such an order has been rumored for weeks, and higher education officials have been nervously waiting for the shoe to drop since McMahon was confirmed by the Senate Monday afternoon. But the secretary backed plans to break up or diminish the department at her confirmation last month, and shortly after taking office, she wrote to agency staff about their “momentous final mission,” which includes overhauling the agency and eliminating “bureaucratic bloat.” She never did directly use the words “dismantle” or “abolish” but pledged to “send education back to the states.”
“As I’ve learned many times throughout my career, disruption leads to innovation and gets results,” she wrote. “We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul—a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great.”
Eliminating the Education Department and sending key programs such as the Office for Civil Rights to other agencies was a key part of the conservative blueprint Project 2025’s plans to reshape education policy in America. But recent public opinion polls have foundsupport for keeping the agency.
One survey conducted by the progressive think tank Data for Progress, on behalf of the Student Borrower Protection Center, a left-wing advocacy group, showed that 61 percent of all respondents “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed the idea of eliminating the department. Another poll from Morning Consult, a data-driven insights company, showed that a large chunk of voters—41 percent—actually want to increase funding to the department.
The order doesn’t mean the department will close tomorrow or even this month, as it calls for the secretary to create a plan to wind down operations. McMahon also told senators during her confirmation that only Congress can shut down the agency altogether.
Higher Ed Officials Brace for Impact
As talks about the department’s demise ramped up in recent weeks, lawmakers, student advocacy groups, civil rights organizations and left-leaning think tanks warned how destructive dismantling the department could be.
Democrats in the House started pushing back on the idea as early as Feb. 10, when they walked directly up to the department’s front doors and demanded a meeting with then–acting education secretary Denise Carter. Denied entry, they argued the department’s existence is key to supporting students with disabilities and making higher education accessible to all.
That same week, several key senators wrote a letter to the department outlining their “serious concerns” about its actions.
“We will not stand by and allow the impact that dismantling the Department of Education would have on the nation’s students, parents, borrowers, educators, and communities,” the lawmakers wrote.
Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, put out a statement expressing similar concerns for students of color just minutes after McMahon was confirmed. The NAACP played a key role in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools, and has been a longtime advocate for equality and opportunity in education. He said that protecting the Department of Education is critical, since the agency not only funds public schools, but “enforces essential civil rights laws.”
“This is an agency we cannot afford to dismantle,” he said.
On Tuesday morning, EdTrust, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group, said America has reached “a dangerous turning point for public education.”
“Simply put: If we are truly to reach America’s ‘Golden Age,’ we need to build a better, stronger Department of Education, not tear it down altogether,” the organization wrote in a statement.
Kevin Carey, vice president of education at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said in a statement that eliminating the department is a “deeply unpopular idea,” citing the organization’s own new polling data.
The survey found that over all only 26 percent of adults support the department’s closure. And though the Trump administration says it is carrying out the will of the people who elected him to office, barely half of Republicans want closure. Even fewer members of the GOP support the specific consequences of shuttering the department, like moving federal financial aid to an agency with no experience overseeing the program.
“This is all part of the standard authoritarian playbook for would-be dictators engaged in tearing down democratic institutions,” Carey wrote. Dismantling the department would be “a nihilistic act of civic vandalism, carried out by ideological zealots.”
Gathering Congressional Support
But Carey and others also note that, ultimately, the Trump administration lacks the legal authority to actually close the Department of Education, making full abolishment more complicated than the president suggests.
Shuttering the agency would require 60 votes in the Senate as well as a majority in the House, as the department’s existence is written into statute. And with a 53-seat majority in the Senate, Republicans don’t currently have the votes unless some Democrats back the plan.
Still, Trump has continued to promote the concept, and red states across the country have backed it. Although the president has not disclosed specific details on how he would try to overcome the political and legal hurdles, higher education policy experts predict he’s likely to leave the skeleton of the department standing while gutting the agency of everything but its statutorily protected duties.
Conservative groups, most notably the Heritage Foundation, have suggested redistributing responsibilities by moving programs to other agencies. For example, the federal student loan system could be moved to the Treasury, and the Office for Civil Rights could be moved to the Department of Justice.
Critics of the idea say that such proposals need more specifics that spell out how exactly the plan would work, what programs would stay, which ones would go away and what agencies would take over the department’s responsibilities.
However, higher ed policy experts from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, say getting rid of the department is “a good idea.” They describe the department as “unconstitutional,” given education is mentioned nowhere in the specific, enumerated powers given to the federal government, and call it “ineffective,” “incompetent,” “expensive” and “unnecessary.”
The founding fathers chose to exclude dominion over education from the Constitution “because education was believed best left in the hands of parents and civil society—the families and communities closest to the children—and certainly not in a distant national government,” Neal McCluskey, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, wrote in a policy handbook. “Nearly 60 years of experience with major and, until very recently, constantly expanding federal meddling in K-12 education have proved them right.”
Legal challenges to the Education Department’s guidance ordering colleges to rescind all race-based programming are piling up.
A week after the American Federation of Teachers sued the Trump administration over the guidance, the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit that seeks to restrain the department from enforcing the Feb. 14 letter.
Similar to the AFT lawsuit, the NEA argues that the letter and its threat to cut federal funding would hamper public schools’ function as “the nation’s ‘nurseries of democracy.’” The NEA lawsuit was filed in the New Hampshire federal district court, while the AFT’s challenge is in Maryland district court.
“The Trump administration is threatening to punish students, parents and educators in public schools for … fostering inclusive classrooms where diversity is valued, history is taught honestly, and every child can grow into their full brilliance,” Becky Pringle, president of the NEA, said in a news release. “We’re urging the court to block the Department of Education from enforcing this harmful and vague directive and protect students from politically motivated attacks that stifle speech and erase critical lessons.”
NEA alleges that the Dear Colleague letter “imposes vague and viewpoint discriminatory prohibitions,” “invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement,” and causes “substantial, irreparable harm.” The NEA wants the court to declare the letter contrary to constitutional rights and place a permanent restraint on the department, preventing it from enforcing the letter’s orders.
Butler County Community College is discontinuing credit-bearing, in-person programs at its LindePointe campus in response to enrollment troubles and the looming demographic cliff in Pennsylvania. The programs are scheduled to continue through the spring semester and shut down in August.
Enrollment at the LindePointe campus has fallen sharply, from 300 students in fall 2014 to 45 in fall 2024, with a particularly steep drop during the pandemic, according to a news release from the college Tuesday.
“Our numbers simply have not rebounded to a sustainable level,” Joshua Novak, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management, said in the release.
College leaders estimate ending in-person programs will save approximately $450,000 annually.
Students in Mercer County, where the LindePointe campus is located, will still be able to take online classes and participate in dual-enrollment and workforce training programs, including training in emergency medical and fire services at a local fire department. The college has promised to create degree-completion plans for each student, which may include online courses or classes taught at its five other locations. All the other campuses continue to offer in-person courses for credit. It’s unclear what will happen to LindePointe faculty and staff, though the college plans to “explore opportunities” for them, including potential reassignments, according to the release.
The move comes after the college previously considered but didn’t ultimately move forward with plans to teach its LindePointe courses and programs at Pennsylvania State University at Shenango as part of a potential partnership between the two institutions.
“While we looked at potential partnerships and alternative models, we could not identify a solution that was feasible long term,” Megan Coval, the college’s interim president, said in the release.
Stacy Bartlett, currently the chief of staff at Point University in Georgia, will become the institution’s president, effective July 1.
Michael Benson, president of Coastal Carolina University, has been named the 27th president of West Virginia University, starting in July.
John Butler, the Haub Vice President for University Mission and Ministry at Boston College, has been appointed the institution’s president, beginning in the summer of 2026.
Elizabeth Cantwell, president of the Utah State University system, has been appointed president of Washington State University, effective April 1.
Sylvia Cox, executive vice president and chief academic officer at Southeastern Community College, has been named president of Rockingham Community College, effective May 1.
Wendy Elmore, currently executive vice president and provost of Lamar State College–Orange in Texas, has been named the institution’s next president, effective June 1.
Andrea Goldsmith, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, will become the seventh president of Stony Brook University, effective Aug. 1.
Adam Hasner, executive vice president of public policy for the Geo Group, has been named president of Florida Atlantic University.
Elizabeth Kiss, who most recently served as CEO of the Rhodes Trust, will become president of Union College, effective July 1.
Michelle Larson, president and CEO of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, has been named president of Clarkson University, effective April 1.
Dean McCurdy, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Ivy Tech Community College, has been named president of Colby-Sawyer College, effective June 1.
Heather Norris, formerly the interim chancellor of Appalachian State University, has been appointed to the position permanently, effective March 1.
Joseph Odenwald, president of Southwestern Michigan College, has been named president of Alma College, effective June 1.
Andrew Rich, dean of the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York, has been appointed president of Franklin & Marshall College, beginning this summer.
Daniel Shipp, the president of Pittsburg State University, has been named president of Maryville University in Missouri, starting in June.
Shane Smeed, president of Park University in Missouri, has been appointed president of Utah Tech University.
Gentry Sutton, currently executive vice president and vice president of advancement at Warner University in Florida, has been appointed president of the institution.
Suzanne Walsh, president of Bennett College in North Carolina, has been named president of City University of Seattle, effective July 1.
Jermaine Whirl, who most recently served as president of Augusta Technical College, has been appointed president of Savannah State University, effective April 1.
