Tag: Higher

U Austin Announces $100M Gift, End to Tuition “Forever”

The University of Austin announced Wednesday that Republican megadonor Jeff Yass is donating $100 million, it’s “ending tuition forever” and it will also “never take government money.” At the same time, it said Yass’s gift represents the first third of “a $300 million campaign to build a university that sets students free.”

University president Carlos Carvalho told Inside Higher Ed he doesn’t plan for this $300 million to become an endowment meant to last forever. Instead, he said it will be invested but spent down as a “bridge” until the institution produces enough donating alumni to keep tuition free. He estimated this will take 25 years, “give or take.”

“We understand there’s risk in this approach,” Carvalho said. But he said he believes in the product, calling his students his “equity partners”—but stressed that “all they owe is their greatness.”

When the institution welcomed its first class of students last fall, it said annual tuition was $32,000, but Carvalho said nobody has ever paid tuition. The university still hasn’t earned accreditation, which can take years, but the state of Texas allowed it to grant degrees and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, an accrediting body, has granted it candidate status on its path to recognition. The university says it expects to complete “the first accreditation cycle” between 2028 and 2031.

Yass—a billionaire co-founder of financial trading firm Susquehanna International Group and a significant investor in TikTok owner ByteDance—was very recently in the news for other gifts. He had backed Republicans in a bid to end the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s Democratic majority, but voters reappointed all three justices up for re-election to another decade on the bench (though one is required to retire in a few years). He’s also provided millions in support of private K–12 school vouchers and electing Republicans to Congress.

He told The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news of the University of Austin gift, that he’s been impressed by the university, wants to eliminate stress for parents and supports separation between education and government. His donation to the fledgling institution—which Carvalho said is atop Yass’s previous $36 million gift—is another example of its continued support from prominent conservatives. Carvalho said the university has raised more than $300 million, including the $100 million going toward the new $300 million campaign. The Journal reported that real estate developer Harlan Crow, who controversially funded trips for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir and friend to Vice President JD Vance, have been among the donors.

Such donations may enable the university to do what other universities can’t: rely neither on student, nor state, nor federal contributions to survive. Instead, the university says it’s banking on alumni sustaining it. The first group of students is slated to graduate in 2028.

“Our bet: Create graduates so exceptional they’ll pay it forward when they succeed, financing the tuition of the next generation,” the university said in its announcement. “When our students build important companies, defend our nation, advance scientific frontiers, build families, and create works that elicit awe, they’ll remember who made their excellence possible. And they’ll give back.”

It went on to say that “other Americans will take notice” and invest. “Every other college gets paid whether students succeed or fail. At UATX, if our graduates don’t become essential to American excellence—and if their work doesn’t inspire others to fund this mission—we’re done.”

Some higher ed observers are skeptical. Mark DeFusco, a principal at Prometheus Education, which performs mergers and acquisitions for troubled colleges, said running a “serious college … a college as we know it” on just a $300 million fund would be “nearly impossible.”

“If they can pull it off, God bless ’em,” DeFusco said. “While I really understand their urge, the practicality doesn’t seem like it’s possible, and I’d like to see the details.”

Carvalho said the university currently has 150 students in its freshman and sophomore classes, and he plans to grow total enrollment to 400 to 500 for now. “We need this first phase of growth to be small,” he said.

“We talk about building the Navy SEALs of the mind,” he said. “The Navy SEALs are not a class of thousands and thousands.”

He said the university offers courses in, among other things, computer science, journalism and prelaw, and wants to launch programs in all three areas. One of the university’s founders is Bari Weiss, who also founded The Free Press and recently became editor in chief of CBS News.

Other universities have also tried to jettison tuition in favor of alumni support. In 2021, Hope College in Michigan aimed to raise $1 billion for its endowment in order to go tuition-free. As part of that plan, students would commit to donate to the college after graduation. The first cohort graduated this past spring, and 126 students have participated over the first four years, according to an annual report from the college. Roughly 85 percent of the graduating seniors and 70 percent of freshmen through juniors have donated.

Neal Hutchens, a university research professor and faculty member in the University of Kentucky’s College of Education, said the no-tuition, no-government-funding plan raises questions about how large UATX could grow and whether its model could be replicated elsewhere.

He also noted that the university’s marketing of itself as against the grain of academe isn’t unique. A video on UATX’s homepage critiques “coddling,” “virtue signaling” and the “disastrous” state of higher ed “in the Western world,” complete with images of a building with a rainbow-colored sign above an entrance, people wearing cloth masks while blowing into instruments and pro-Palestine protesters being arrested. In the video, Weiss says to understand why “the museums you love, and the publishing houses you love, and the newspapers you used to trust” are “hollowed out, you have to look at the nucleation point for this—and that is the university.”

Hutchens said New College of Florida, a public institution taken over by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s conservative board appointees, appears to be charting “a similar iconoclastic path.” He noted New College took a public stand early against what some call wokeness.

“That’s not necessarily been an easy fix for New College to just automatically thrive,” he said. He said he’s curious if such institutions are going after the same donors, and they may eventually be competing more with one another than the institutions they’re setting themselves apart from.

However, Hutchens said, UATX might be able to gain currency in the tech industry and make further inroads with people with deep pockets.

“It doesn’t take too many $100 million gifts to add up to a pretty good endowment,” he said.

Asked about assertions that his university pushes conservative ideology, Carvalho said, “We have a core curriculum that is teaching the best that has been done and has been seen in the Western tradition,” from philosophy to science, literature and more. He said none of those things are conservative.

“We do have an institution that’s very patriotic,” he said, adding that if that’s a “conservative statement these days—again, not my choice.”

Source link

November 5, 2025
University President Elected Lt. Gov. of New Jersey

Caldwell has served as president of Centenary University since 2023.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

As running mate to Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, Centenary University president Dale Caldwell, a Democrat, won the New Jersey gubernatorial race on Tuesday in a 56 percent–to–43 percent victory over Republicans Jack Ciattarelli and James Gannon.

“Every single day of this campaign has been a reminder of what a special place New Jersey is,” Caldwell wrote on X Wednesday. “I’m humbled and honored to be your next Lieutenant Governor.”

Caldwell has served as president of Centenary, a Methodist university in Hackettstown, N.J., since 2023. Prior to assuming the presidency, he served on Centenary’s board, and he is also a pastor at Covenant United Methodist Church in Plainfield. Caldwell was the university’s first Black president and in January will become New Jersey’s first Black lieutenant governor.

“Centenary University would like to congratulate Gov. Elect Mikie Sherrill and Lt. Gov. Elect Dale Caldwell, Ed.D., on their victory in the recent New Jersey gubernatorial election,” university officials wrote in a statement Wednesday.

Centenary officials have not yet announced who will serve as interim president or their plans to find a permanent replacement when Caldwell departs in January.

Source link

November 5, 2025
Higher Education Inquirer : University of Phoenix’s “TransferPath” App: Convenience or Marketing Hype?

The University of Phoenix has launched TransferPath, a mobile app promising prospective students a quick estimate of how many previous college credits might transfer toward a Phoenix degree. At first glance, it sounds like a win: upload your transcripts, get a pre-evaluation, and move faster toward completing your degree. The EdTech Innovation Hub article covering the launch presents the app as an unambiguously positive innovation—but a closer look raises serious questions.

The EdTech piece reads more like a press release than investigative reporting. It offers no insight into how pre-evaluations are calculated, whether faculty are involved, or how often initial predictions align with final credit acceptance. Without this transparency, students risk developing false confidence and making financial or academic decisions based on incomplete or misleading information.

The app also reflects the asymmetry of power between institution and student. While marketed as a convenience, it is ultimately a recruitment tool. The University of Phoenix controls which credits are accepted, and the app’s messaging may funnel students into its programs regardless of whether other paths would better serve their educational goals.

Missing from the coverage is context. Phoenix’s history as a for-profit institution has drawn scrutiny over retention rates, student debt, and degree outcomes. Presenting TransferPath without acknowledging this background creates a misleading narrative that the app is purely a student-centered innovation. Equity concerns are similarly absent. Students without smartphones, stable internet, or digital literacy may be excluded or misled. There is no evidence that the app serves all students fairly or that its credit predictions are accurate across diverse educational backgrounds.

TransferPath may indeed offer some convenience, but convenience alone does not equal value. Prospective students deserve clarity, honesty, and rigorous evaluation of how tools like this actually function. They need more than marketing optimism—they need realistic guidance to navigate the complexities of credit transfer, institutional incentives, and long-term outcomes.

Until such transparency and accountability are provided, TransferPath risks being more of a recruitment gimmick than a meaningful step forward in higher education.

Source link

November 5, 2025
UC to Stop Funding Systemwide Postdoc Program

To date, the system has spent $162 million on fellows’ salaries, averaging about $7.36 million per year.

Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Starting next fall, the University of California system office will no longer pay for the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a fellowship established in 1984 to encourage more women and minority Ph.D.s to pursue academic careers.

The fellowship program, available at all 10 UC campuses and three national laboratories, has inspired numerous copycats at other state universities, including at the University of Maryland, the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, the University of Michigan and Pennsylvania State University. But its focus on recruiting diverse candidates has also been criticized by conservatives who claim it’s a pipeline for young hires with radical leftist politics.

The UC system office will stop providing financial support for the program beginning with fellows hired after summer 2025, a system spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. Since 2003, the UC system office has paid the $85,000 salaries of PPFP fellows for their first five years on the faculty; then the UC campus where they are employed takes over. To date, the system has spent $162 million on PPFP faculty salaries, averaging about $7.36 million per year.

“Due to the severe budget constraints currently facing UC, the PPFP faculty hiring incentive is sunsetting as of fall 2025,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “While the University will continue to provide five years of salary support to PPFP fellows hired by summer 2025 and in earlier years, no new incentives will be provided going forward. Campuses will still be able to hire PPFP fellows as part of their normal search and hiring processes, but the additional financial contribution from the incentive program will no longer be available.”

The University of California system is facing a decline in state funding and pressure from the Trump administration to implement a number of changes that weaken or abolish diversity, equity and inclusion practices. In March, former system president Michael Drake announced a systemwide hiring freeze and other cost-saving measures. At the same time, the system board prohibited campus officials from asking job candidates to submit a diversity statement as part of the hiring process. In August, the Trump administration demanded that the University of California, Los Angeles, pay a $1.2 billion fine for allegedly failing to address antisemitism on campus, as well as overhaul numerous policies related to admissions, hiring, athletics, scholarships, gender identity and discrimination.

In a thread posted to Bluesky, Sarah Roberts, a professor of information studies, gender studies and labor studies at UCLA, called the PPFP program a “jewel in the crown for faculty development and recruitment at the University of California.”

“To my mind, not only is this a direct attack by a UC central admin content to capitulate and emulate the federal position that arrived via extortion letter, it is part of a much larger plan, congruent with UC central admin, of weakening and eliminating faculty governance and power,” Roberts wrote about the decision to end funding for the program.

Despite its origins, the PPFP no longer explicitly seeks women and minority candidates and instead considers applicants “whose life experiences and educational background would help to broaden the perspectives represented in the faculty of the University of California,” according to the website.

This is a recent change; in 2024, the PPFP webpage included the tagline “advancing excellence through faculty diversity.” The criteria also stated that “faculty reviewers will evaluate candidates according to their academic accomplishments, the strength of their research proposal, and their potential for faculty careers that will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity through their teaching, research and service. Faculty reviewers also may consider the mentor’s potential to work productively with the candidate and commitment to equity and diversity in higher education.”

The PPFP, and fellow-to-faculty programs at large, have drawn criticism from conservatives including John D. Sailer, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has written extensively on the programs. He believes they allow universities to recruit scholars who “embrace positions on the fringes of leftist politics.”

“Ideological screening has downstream consequences for our sensemaking institutions,” Sailer wrote in a February article. “Ultimately, the fellow-to-faculty model pushes conformity across once-distinct academic fields. As the UC professor put it, ‘it erodes disciplinary boundaries,’ flattening all forms of inquiry into a discussion of race and oppression.”

Source link

November 5, 2025
UC Can Hire Undocumented Students

The California Supreme Court chose not to review a lower court’s decision that concluded the University of California system is discriminating against undocumented students by not allowing them to work in on-campus jobs. As a result, the lower court decision stands, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The California Supreme Court’s move not to take up the case is the latest development in a lawsuit filed by a University of California, Los Angeles, alumnus and lecturer last year. The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Altshuler Berzon LLP, UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

Undocumented students, backed by a legal theory developed by scholars at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, have argued that state entities, such as the public university system, are permitted to hire undocumented individuals. But the UC Board of Regents rejected the idea last year.

A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeal for the First District ruled in August that the UC system’s employment policy “facially discriminates based on immigration status and, in light of applicable state law, the discriminatory policy cannot be justified.” The ruling asked the system to reconsider its hiring policy. But the UC Board of Regents appealed that decision two months ago.

UC spokesperson Rachel Zaentz said in a statement that the California Supreme Court’s decision “creates serious legal risks for the University and all other state employers in California.”

But undocumented students and their advocates are celebrating. Iliana G. Perez, a plaintiff and former UCLA lecturer, said as a formerly undocumented immigrant, she’s seen how employment restrictions can hold immigrant students back.

“The California Supreme Court’s decision not only reaffirms that discriminating against undocumented immigrants from accessing on-campus employment cannot continue to be tolerated, but it also gives the UC the clarity to finally unlock life-changing opportunities for the thousands of immigrant students who contribute to its campuses, and to the state’s economy and workforce,” Perez said in a news release from the Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

Source link

November 5, 2025
Would We Rather Humanities “Be Ruined Than Changed”? (opinion

Like most of my colleagues in art history, English, history, modern languages, musicology, philosophy, rhetoric and adjacent fields, I am concerned about the current crisis in the humanities. Then again, as a student of the history of the modern university, I know that there haven’t been too many decades over the last 150 years during which we humanities scholars have not employed the term “crisis” to portray our place in the academy.

Our Greek forebears, as early as Hippocrates, coined the term “kρίσις” to describe a “turning point”; kρίσις, a word related to the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, is etymologically connected to practices like “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging.” In fact, the most widely mentioned skill we humanists offer our students, critical thinking, originates from the same practice of deliberate “sieving.” Thus, when we call ourselves critics and write critical theory, we admit that crisis might just be our natural habitat.

What’s Different This Time Around?

A look at the helpful statistics provided by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences indicates that this latest crisis in humanities enrollments and degree completions is not like the previous fluctuations in our history, but more foundational. Things sounded bad enough when a state flagship like West Virginia University slashed modern languages (and math!) two years ago. But when that beacon of humanistic learning, the University of Chicago, pauses Ph.D. admissions across all but two of its humanities programs, we know the crisis is existential. Wasn’t it Chicago’s Kalven report that once stated boldly, and for the entire nation, that the university was “the home and sponsor of critics”?

Cultures of Complaint, and a Pinch of Hubris

Feeling powerless in the face of dwindling enrollment and support for our disciplines, some of us have resorted to digging up conspiracy theories, perhaps because, as Stanley Fish opined, in the psychic economy of academic critics, “oppression is the sign of virtue.” The tenor of such virtue-signaling complaints is that an unholy alliance of tech and business bros and their programs, together with politicians and academic leaders, promote only “useful” disciplines and crowd out interest in the humanities.

I think intellectual honesty would demand we remember that it was the humanities, custodians of high-culture education (Bildung), that once upon a time crowded out the applied arts, crafts and technologies, accusing them of lacking intellectual depth. Humanistic Ivy League and Oxbridge schools championed the classics, philosophy and literary studies as “liberal” and sneered at professional education in the “mechanical arts” (engineering, agriculture, business, etc.) as “servile.” When the humanities (and natural sciences) faculty at these elite colleges refused to open their classist “gentlemen’s education” to larger publics, land-grant universities and technological institutes emerged to increase access and to educate teachers, lawyers and engineers.

Could it be that today’s humanists still retain some of this original hubris toward technical, vocational and applied training, which makes the current inversion of disciplinary hierarchy even tougher to accept? Are warnings against instrumentalizing the humanities for economic gain (Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit) or applying them to support vocational or technical disciplines (Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors) echoes of such hubris? Will this mentality, based on the knowledge economy of the late 19th century, convince today’s students to work with us?

Angsting About Ancillarity

The modernist poet W. H. Auden, in his book-length poem about anxiety, wrote that “We would rather be ruined than changed / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” For sure, some among us deny the signs of the time, yearning for the golden days when humanities departments were ever expanding, arguing that an essential third Victorianist (focusing on drama) be added to the colleagues already focusing on fiction and poetry. If these golden days ever existed (in the early 1970s?), they are gone now. Nostalgia for the simulacrum persists.

Closer to reality, many colleagues in the humanities have been “climbing the cross of the moment,” adapting to the inversion of disciplinary hierarchies at our institutions and accepting the mandate to show at least some measurable outcomes instead of our beloved unquantifiable humanistic critique. We have been aligning with the new lead disciplines by creating a vast infrastructure of certificates, degrees, journals, book series and organizations in the medical, health, digital, environmental and energy humanities, in science and technology studies, computational media, and music technology.

However, as Colin Potts observed, when we partner with our colleagues in these better-funded and high-visibility disciplines, we are rarely “co-equal contributors.” We are like alms seekers, condensing our lifelong training and knowledge into an ethics, civics and policy module required for our partners’ accreditation, or infusing technical writing and communication skills into a STEM curriculum to amplify their majors’ impact. These collaborations offer a modicum of recognition and an honorable mention in a holistically minded National Academies consensus report. But they also make us feel dreadfully ancillary.

Institutional strategic plans that exalt the value of the humanities with terms like “cornerstone,” “core” and “heart” only deepen our suspicions, especially when our budgets don’t match the performative strategic grandiloquence. From the medieval through the 18th-century university, the humanities suffered the trauma of being “handmaidens to theology” (ancillae theologiae), then the doctrinal master discipline. Now, technology has taken theology’s place, and we are once again “pleasant (but more or less inconsequential) helpmeets.” Trauma redux.

Hyperbole Won’t Help

In an existential crisis, hyperbole in the defense of our field no longer feels like a vice. Therefore, some of us now claim that the end of the humanities heralds the end of humanity and human civilization. Brenna Gerhardt, for example, warned that, because of the 2025 funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, “we may find that a society that forgets to ask what it means to be human forgets how to be one.”

Similarly, the 2024 World Humanities Report asserts that “the humanities are of critical importance” at a time when the “world and planet [are] under duress” and in dire need of “tools and concepts that will foster change and help us live under these shared, if still uneven, conditions.” These kinds of well-meaning statements, and the desperate daily news item (preferably from Oxbridge) amplifying our relevance and adaptability, burden the academic humanities with a responsibility incommensurate with the cultural and educational work we can perform. Their claim that “either you support the humanities, or inhumanity prevails” scares only us, but nobody else. As the authors of WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse find, “The humanities appear to the public to be siloed in universities (unlike the sciences).”

This I Believe

If the previous paragraphs didn’t sound resilient and hopeful enough, please remember that my first obligation as a humanist is to be a critic, not a cheerleader. I believe that the humanities do have an important place in the ecosystem of higher education and at each university, that integrating STEM and liberal arts practices increases student success and leads to better research and scholarship, that humanistic considerations contribute to a more just and benign world, and that we need to continue our important work in core education.

However, I don’t think that we academic humanists have sufficient standing to make hyperbolic claims about what we can achieve. Just consider: Have we ever advanced how many majors and faculty positions would be enough to keep the world humane and civilized? Have we, as Roosevelt Montás asks in Rescuing Socrates, ever overcome the “crisis of consensus … about what things are most worth knowing”? And should we lecture our STEM colleagues on ethics and gender equity when, as recently as 2019, fewer than one-third of tenure-track faculty and fewer than one-fourth of non-tenure- track professors in U.S. philosophy departments were women?

We humanists are really good at asking critical questions, “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging” at the highest levels of abstraction, but we are not so good at offering solutions. When we do, they often come from the same intellectual heights that have alienated us from undergraduate populations and the public. In a recent essay for the Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Wayne Stables takes us beyond hyperbole. He asks us to envision our lives and work “as if the humanities were dead,” thereby (he hopes) freeing us to consider collective action based on the likes of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Wendy Brown. He believes this kind of “critical orientation” may help us survive “the troubling interregnum” in which we now find ourselves.

While I sympathize with Stables’s call to action (though I would add Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, bell hooks and Judith Butler to his list), I believe it takes us back to the time when the humanities strove to be “all breathing human passion far above.”

I recommend we befriend the idea that our humanistic values and practices may relate to more public-oriented and holistic goals, as exemplified by the University of Arizona’s successful degree in the public and applied humanities, which wants “to translate the personal enrichment of humanities study into public enrichment and the direct and tangible improvement of the human condition” and offers a “fundamentally experimental, entrepreneurial, and transdisciplinary” educational experience that “focuses on public and private opportunities that straddle rather than fall between purviews, or are confined by them.”

Since the introduction of this new kind of humanities program, connected with such fields as business, engineering and medicine, the number of students majoring in the humanities at Arizona has increased by 76 percent. This true kind of integrated partnership, and similar initiatives at St. Anselm College, Virginia Tech and my home institution of Georgia Tech, give me hope for a turning point—kρίσις—for the humanities in higher education.

Richard Utz is senior associate dean for strategic initiatives in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Source link

November 5, 2025
Partial Victory for Freedom of the Press at Indiana U

The decision by Indiana University administrators to allow the Indiana Daily Student newspaper to resume occasional publication is a victory for the advocates of free expression on campus. The Student Press Law Center, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the American Association of University Professors, along with student newspapers across the country, spoke out loudly in defense of Indiana student journalists. Particular praise goes to the students at the Purdue Exponent, which printed the censored homecoming issue of the Indiana Daily Student and distributed it around Bloomington, Ind., in solidarity with fellow journalists.

It’s rare for administrators to quickly reverse course and effectively admit they made a mistake. But while we need to celebrate a win, we also need to recognize how partial and temporary it was—and the enormous threat to freedom of the press that still exists at Indiana and beyond.

What Indiana University administrators did was one of the worst attacks on a free press at a public university in the history of American higher education. It combined three of the most terrible types of censorship of the press: 1) imposing massive content restrictions by attempting to ban the newspaper from printing any news, 2) banning the newspaper completely from being printed when the editors refused to obey these unlawful demands and 3) firing the professor who served as newspaper adviser, student media director Jim Rodenbush, for defending freedom of the press.

While the first two forms of repression have now been (temporarily) lifted, the last one still remains. When the newspaper adviser who was fired for opposing censorship remains fired, it’s still censorship. And Chancellor David Reingold’s decision to allow the newspaper to publish still includes severe budget cutbacks and elimination of university support for the publication.

Suppression of a free press at Indiana is linked to its broader repression of free expression. FIRE recently ranked Indiana University as the worst public university in America for free speech (and the student newspaper’s article about this ranking reportedly was one of the reasons why the administration cracked down on the free press). The repression by Indiana administrators has been astonishing. In December 2023, Indiana University suspended professor Abdulkader Sinno for the crime of reserving a room for an event critical of Israel. At the same time, the administration also canceled its art museum exhibit of abstract art paintings by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian American artist who had been critical of the Israeli government. In 2024, Indiana officials banned all expression on campus between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., which a federal judge paused while an ACLU lawsuit against the censorship continues.

In my 2020 report for the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement about freedom of the press on campus, I noted some of the severe threats to free expression: punishing independent media advisers who fail to rein in student newspapers, censoring campus papers directly, restricting access to campus, limiting the rights of faculty and staff to speak to reporters, and many more. But perhaps the greatest threat to journalism on campus is economic, when student newspapers are defunded and eventually decline from a thousand budget cuts.

The dire economic environment for newspapers across the country has also affected student publications. The drop in advertising revenue has hit campus newspapers, and many universities would rather put resources into public relations staff under the control of administrators rather than support student journalists who challenge them.

What universities can do to respect freedom of the press: First, do no harm. Stop trying to censor newspapers. Enact free expression policies that protect freedom of the campus press and the rights of their advisers and sources.

Second, integrate journalism into the curriculum. Offer classes about journalism, but recognize that many different classes (and especially writing-focused classes) can encourage students to publish their work, both online and in print. Good journalism is just good writing, and colleges should encourage students to publicly express their ideas on a wide range of topics.

Third, support campus journalism financially. Colleges ought to provide a substantial fund to campus newspapers to publish ads promoting events and activities on campus. By allocating this money for newspaper ads and then allowing campus programs and student organizations to freely use it for their events, colleges can promote what they are doing while supporting independent journalism. The belief that student newspapers shouldn’t be subsidized and must independently finance every word they print is a strange concept for colleges that are devoted to subsidizing the free exchange of ideas.

Student newspapers are the most important extramural activity on college campuses, and more essential than much of the courses, research and administrative work that receives vastly greater funding. A campus newspaper is more than just a critical source of information about what happens at colleges: It’s an education for writers and readers alike. It’s a bridge between the campus and the community, where growing news deserts make student papers more important than ever. And the campus newspaper is a symbol of intellectual debate, the most public place at a college where ideas are exchanged and arguments between different viewpoints are heard.

Source link

November 5, 2025
Trinity Christian College Announces Closure

Trinity Christian College outside Chicago will close at the end of the current 2025–26 academic year due to insurmountable financial pressures.

The college announced the move Tuesday, citing a litany of challenges, which include “post-Covid financial losses; persistent operating deficits; a decline in college enrollment and increased competition for students; and a shift in donor giving and financial circumstances,” according to a statement from officials posted on a frequently asked questions webpage.

Acting President Jeanine Mozie said in a video message that the Board of Trustees considered multiple options to address “significant and rapidly evolving financial challenges,” but ultimately, there was “no sustainable path forward for our beloved institution.”

The FAQ page noted that the Board of Trustees considered “significant programmatic changes, strategic partnerships, and the like” but “determined that these and other alternatives were insufficient to overcome the college’s deficit” and sustain Trinity’s mission over the long term.

The closure announcement follows a recent leadership change at the college. Former president Aaron Kuecker resigned in August after less than two years in the top job but nearly 14 at Trinity altogether. Multiple staff members were also reportedly laid off in August.

A review of the college’s finances shows that Trinity operated at a loss in eight of the last 10 fiscal years and relied significantly on a small pool of donors. An estimated 76 percent of all financial contributions came from just three donors in 2024, according to Trinity’s latest audit.

Trinity also had less and less cash on hand. According to the audit, “cash and cash equivalents” fell from nearly $7.2 million in fiscal year 2023 to just under $5 million—a drop of nearly 31 percent. Trinity also had a meager endowment, valued at $11 million at the end of the 2024 fiscal year. (A recent study found the median endowment across the sector is $243 million.)

Bondholders warned the college in June that Trinity was at risk of violating its financial covenants because of its limited liquidity, according to publicly available documents.

Both faculty numbers and student head count had dropped in recent years, bond documents show. Both of those numbers have been in decline in recent years with total faculty falling from 145 to 126 and enrollment dropping from a total head count of 1,068 in fall 2019 to 872 last year, despite a recent tuition reset to attract students. Trinity aimed to hit 1,081 students by the 2027–28 academic year, financial documents show.

Trinity was founded by Chicago businessmen in 1959 and is located on a 56-acre campus in Palos Heights, Ill., outside Chicago, which was recently estimated to be worth $25 million.

College officials announced teach-out and transfer agreements with Calvin University in Michigan as well as Olivet Nazarene University and Saint Xavier University, both of which are in Illinois.

Trinity follows several other small, cash-strapped Christian colleges that have announced closures this year, some of which have shut down abruptly, such as Limestone University and St. Andrews University. Siena Heights University, a Roman Catholic institution, also announced plans to close. On the secular side, Northland College in Wisconsin closed earlier this year, and Pennsylvania State University announced plans to shut down seven rural campuses by 2027 after years of shrinking enrollment.

Source link

November 4, 2025
When Was Higher Education Truly a Public Good? (Glen McGhee)
Like staring at the Sun too long, that brief window in time, when higher ed was a public good, has left a permanent hole for nostalgia to leak in, becoming a massive black hole for trillions of dollars, and a blind-spot for misguided national policies and scholars alike.

The notion that American higher education was ever a true public good is largely a myth. From the colonial colleges to the neoliberal university of today, higher education has functioned primarily as a mechanism of class reproduction and elite consolidation—with one brief, historically anomalous exception during the Cold War.

Colonial Roots: Elite Reproduction in the New World (1636–1787)

The first American colleges—Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and a handful of others—were founded not for the benefit of the public, but to serve narrow elite interests. Their stated missions were to train Protestant clergy and prepare the sons of wealthy white families for leadership. They operated under monopoly charters and drew funding from landowners, merchants, and slave traders.

Elihu Yale, namesake of Yale University, derived wealth from his commercial ties to the East India Company and the slave trade. Harvard’s early trustees owned enslaved people. These institutions functioned as “old boys’ clubs,” perpetuating privilege rather than promoting equality. Their educational mission was to cultivate “gentlemen fit to govern,” not citizens of a democracy.

Private Enterprise in the Republic (1790–1860)

After independence, the number of colleges exploded—from 19 in 1790 to more than 800 by 1880—but not because of any commitment to the public good. Colleges became tools for two private interests: religious denominations seeking influence, and land speculators eager to raise property values.

Ministers often doubled as land dealers, founding small, parochial colleges to anchor towns and boost prices. State governments played a minimal role, providing funding only in times of crisis. The Supreme Court’s 1819 Dartmouth College decision enshrined institutional autonomy, shielding private colleges from state interference. Even state universities were created mainly out of interstate competition—every state needed its own to “keep up with its neighbors.”

Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Credential Capitalism (1880–1940)

By the late 19th century, industrial capitalism had transformed higher education into a private good—something purchased for individual advancement. As family farms and small businesses disappeared, college credentials became the ticket to white-collar respectability.

Sociologist Burton Bledstein called this the “culture of professionalism.” Families invested in degrees to secure middle-class futures for their children. By the 1920s, most students attended college not to seek enlightenment, but “to get ready for a particular job.”

Elite universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton solidified their dominance through exclusive networks. C. Wright Mills later observed that America’s “power elite” circulated through these same institutions and their associated clubs. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital helps explain this continuity: elite universities convert inherited privilege into certified merit, preserving hierarchy under the guise of meritocracy.

The Morrill Acts: Public Promise, Private Gains (1862–1890)

The Morrill Act of 1862 established land-grant colleges to promote “practical education” in agriculture and engineering. While often cited as a triumph of public-minded policy, the act’s legacy is ambivalent.

Land-grant universities were built on land expropriated from Indigenous peoples—often without compensation—and the 1890 Morrill Act entrenched segregation by mandating separate institutions for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. Even as these colleges expanded access for white working-class men, they simultaneously reinforced racial and economic hierarchies.

Cold War Universities: The Brief Public Good (1940–1970)

For roughly thirty years, during World War II and the Cold War, American universities functioned as genuine public goods—but only because national survival seemed to depend on them.

The GI Bill opened college to millions of veterans, stabilizing the economy and expanding the middle class. Massive federal investments in research transformed universities into engines of technological and scientific innovation. The university, for a moment, was understood as a public instrument for national progress.

Yet this golden age was marred by exclusion. Black veterans were often denied GI Bill benefits, particularly in the South, where discriminatory admissions and housing policies blocked their participation. The “military-industrial-academic complex” that emerged from wartime funding created a new elite network centered on research universities like MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley.

Neoliberal Regression: Education as a Private Commodity (1980–Present)

After 1970, the system reverted to its long-standing norm: higher education as a private good. The Cold War’s end, the tax revolt, and the rise of neoliberal ideology dismantled the postwar consensus.

Ronald Reagan led the charge—first as California governor, cutting higher education funding by 20%, then as president, slashing federal support. He argued that tuition should replace public subsidies, casting education as an individual investment rather than a social right.

Since 1980, state funding per student has fallen sharply while tuition at public universities has tripled. Students are now treated as “customers,” and universities as corporations—complete with branding departments, executive pay packages, and relentless tuition hikes.

The Circuit of Elite Network Capital

Today, the benefits of higher education flow through a closed circuit of power that links elite universities, corporations, government agencies, and wealthy families.
1. Elite Universities consolidate wealth and prestige through research funding, patents, and endowments.
2. Corporations recruit talent and license discoveries, feeding the same institutions that produce their executives.
3. Government and Military Agencies are staffed by alumni of elite universities, reinforcing a revolving door of privilege.
4. Elite Professions—law, medicine, finance, consulting—use degrees as gatekeeping mechanisms, driving credential inflation.
5. Wealthy Families invest in elite education as a means of preserving status across generations.
What the public receives are only residual benefits—technologies and medical innovations that remain inaccessible without money or insurance.

Elite Network Capital, Not Public Good

The idea of higher education as a public good has always been more myth than reality. For most of American history, colleges and universities have functioned as institutions of elite reproduction, not engines of democratic uplift.

Only during the extraordinary conditions of the mid-20th century—when global war and ideological conflict made mass education a national imperative—did higher education briefly align with the public interest.

Today’s universities continue to speak the language of “public good,” but their actions reveal a different truth. They serve as factories of credentialism and as nodes in an elite network that translates privilege into prestige. What masquerades as a public good is, in practice, elite network capital—a system designed not to democratize opportunity, but to manage and legitimize inequality.

Sources:

Labaree (2017), Bledstein (1976), Bourdieu (1984, 1986), Mills (1956), Geiger (2015), Thelin (2019), and McGhee (2025).
Source link
November 4, 2025
The Push for Viewpoint Diversity Misses the Point (opinion)

Much of the controversy around the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” has focused on its push for viewpoint diversity and the claim that open inquiry does not exist in our classrooms. That push builds on a long-standing conservative critique that today makes hay out of the fact that the vast majority of faculty in U.S. colleges and universities lean left.

Recent data supports that claim. In elite institutions, like Duke and Harvard Universities, surveys suggest the number of faculty identifying as liberal exceeds 60 percent. The percentages differ not only by type of institution but by discipline, with the humanities and social sciences leaning more liberal than STEM. Some even claim that political bias corrupts academic disciplines.

Liberal faculty and commentators on higher education sometimes take the bait and respond defensively to what often is a politically motivated attack. In an op-ed in The Guardian, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd argued that the purpose of the conservative critique has been “to delegitimize the academy … [and] return colleges to a carefully constructed environment not to educate all, but to reproduce hierarchy.”

Whether or not she is right, you don’t have to look hard to see that institutions of higher education are feeling growing pressure to right their ships—to create campuses and classrooms where open inquiry flourishes, where students feel free to say what they think and to challenge ideas they disagree with. Colleges have responded by scrambling to incorporate more ideological diversity into their course offerings, to implement new programming and to recruit guest speakers who challenge progressive thinking.

All this misses the point and distracts us from the work that needs to be done to further improve the quality of the education students receive in American colleges and universities. Put simply, instead of fixating on who is in the classroom and whether they are liberal or conservative, we should be focused on how we are in the room.

Higher education’s greatest challenge to achieving open inquiry is not one of ideology or viewpoint diversity, but of disposition. Harvard University’s 2024 report from a working group on open inquiry gestured in this direction but did not flesh it out.

If we are to truly commit to open inquiry, we need to step back, pause and reflect not just on what we think, but on how we acquire knowledge, how we think, whether we are interested in learning more or if we are content with what we already know.

You can decorate campuses with all the colors of the political rainbow but not make them better places to learn.

The issue is how we show up with others. Data suggests that students in our classrooms don’t feel comfortable pushing back on each other or on their professors when they disagree. They engage in what psychologists Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman call “performative virtue-signaling.”

In conversations with students at Amherst College, we have heard that they are not just constraining their expression in academic settings but in social settings, too. It seems we are afraid of each other.

It is no wonder. The academic and public squares have not proven themselves to be especially kind or generous as of late. We need look no further than the vitriolic reactions to Charlie Kirk’s murder, and the as-vitriolic reactions to the reactions to his murder. When we do, we can see that the rush to righteousness operates across the ideological spectrum.

The work of college education is to dislodge the instinct to judge and replace it with a commitment to rigorous listening. The work of college teachers is to model an approach to the world that puts empathy before criticism.

What if instead of just talking about the right to speech, we emphasized the right to listen? But we don’t just mean any kind of listening; we mean listening in a certain way. Deep listening. The kind of listening that takes in ideas in slow, big gulps and lets them settle deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably.

It is listening that seeks to catch ideas in flight and carry them further. This is a disciplined kind of listening that resists defensiveness and instead burrows into curiosity.

To foster it, we have to cultivate in ourselves and in our students a disposition to wonder. Why does someone think that way? What experiences, places, relationships, institutions and social forces have shaped their thinking? How did they get to that argument? How did they get to that feeling? How is it that they could arrive at a different perspective than I did?

This is the heart of open inquiry, and it is much harder to achieve than it is to bring more conservatives to campus. Without the disposition to wonder, doing so will produce enclaves, not engagement, on even the most ideologically diverse campus.

This kind of open inquiry would demand that we remove the stance of moral certainty and righteousness from our ways and practices of thinking. That is the real work that needs to animate our colleges and universities.

It is hard, slow work. There is no magic bullet. Teachers and their students, liberals and conservatives, have to commit to it.

While open inquiry is a social disposition, it is also about how we orient our thinking when we are alone. We need to challenge our students to wonder not just about others but about themselves.

What would happen if we all got into the habit of asking ourselves: When was the last time we changed our mind about something? When was the last time we left a conversation or finished a text and actually grappled with our orientation to a subject?

We yearn for our students to practice open inquiry not just when they are in our classrooms, but when they are in the library or in their dorm room with a book to read, an equation to solve, a painting to finish.

The promise of this type of inquiry is exhilarating, freeing. And it opens up great possibilities of seeing the world differently or in more complicated ways.

At the end of the day, the literary scholar Peter Brooks gets it right when he says, “To honor, even only nominally, the call for ‘viewpoint diversity’ is to succumb to a logic that is at its heart hostile to the academic enterprise.” At the heart of that enterprise is a belief that viewpoint diversity is not the same thing as open inquiry. That belief requires changing the culture of learning on our campuses.

Maybe the shift does not seem responsive to the political clamor of the moment. Maybe it sounds like it demands too much and will be hard to assess.

But whatever the case, it feels revolutionary to us.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

Leah Schmalzbauer is the Clarence Francis 1910 Professor in the Social Sciences and associate provost and associate dean of the faculty at Amherst College.

Source link

November 4, 2025