Tag: Higher

Spending Soars, Rankings Fall at New College of Florida

More than two years into a conservative takeover of New College of Florida, spending has soared and rankings have plummeted, raising questions about the efficacy of the overhaul.

While state officials, including Republican governor Ron DeSantis, have celebrated the death of what they have described as “woke indoctrination” at the small liberal arts college, student outcomes are trending downward across the board: Both graduation and retention rates have fallen since the takeover in 2023.

Those metrics are down even as New College spends more than 10 times per student what the other 11 members of the State University System spend, on average. While one estimate last year put the annual cost per student at about $10,000 per member institution, New College is an outlier, with a head count under 900 and a $118.5 million budget, which adds up to roughly $134,000 per student.

Now critics are raising new questions about NCF’s reputation, its worth and its future prospects as a public liberal arts college.

A Spending Spree

To support the overhaul, the state has largely issued a blank check for New College, with little pushback from officials.

While some—like Florida Board of Governors member Eric Silagy—have questioned the spending and the state’s return on investment, money keeps flowing. Some critics say that’s because the college is essentially a personal project of the governor.

“With DeSantis, I think his motivation for the takeover was that he was running for president and he needed some educational showcase. And he picked us because we were an easy target,” one New College of Florida faculty member said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

But now, two-plus years and one failed presidential run later, money continues to flow to the college to help establish new athletics programs and recruit larger classes each year. Part of the push behind such recruiting efforts, the faculty member said, is because of retention issues.

“It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme: Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts of students, and then they say, ‘Biggest class ever’ because they have to backfill all the students who have left,” they said.

Nathan Allen, a New College alum who served as vice president of strategy at NCF for almost a year and a half after the takeover but has since stepped down, echoed that sentiment, arguing that administrators are spending heavily with little return on investment and have failed to stabilize the institution. He also said they’ve lost favor with lawmakers, who have expressed skepticism in conversations—even though New College is led by former Speaker of the Florida House Richard Corcoran, a Republican.

“I think that the Senate and the House are increasingly sensitive to the costs and the outcomes,” Allen said. “Academically, Richard’s running a Motel 6 on a Ritz-Carlton budget, and it makes no sense.”

While New College’s critics have plenty to say, supporters are harder to find.

Inside Higher Ed contacted three NCF trustees (one of whom is also a faculty member), New College’s communications office, two members of the Florida Board of Governors (including Silagy) and the governor’s press team for this article. None responded to requests for comment.

A Rankings Spiral

Since the takeover, NCF has dropped nearly 60 spots among national liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, from 76th in 2022 to 135th this year.

Though critics have long argued that such rankings are flawed and various institutions have stopped providing data to U.S. News, the state of Florida has embraced the measurement. Officials, including DeSantis, regularly tout Florida’s decade-long streak as the top state for higher education, and some public universities have built rankings into their strategic plans. But as most other universities in the state are climbing in the rankings, New College is sliding, a fact unmentioned at a Monday press conference featuring DeSantis and multiple campus leaders.

Corcoran, the former Republican lawmaker hired as president shortly after the takeover, did not directly address the rankings slide when he spoke at the briefing at the University of Florida. But in his short remarks, Corcoran quibbled over ranking metrics.

“The criteria is not fair,” he said.

Specifically, he took aim at peer assessment, which makes up 20 percent of the rankings criteria. Corcoran argued that Florida’s institutions, broadly, suffer from a negative reputation among their peers, whose leaders take issue with the conservative agenda DeSantis has imposed on colleges and universities.

“This guy has changed the ideology of higher education to say, ‘We’re teaching how to think, not what to think,’ and we’re being peer reviewed by people who think that’s absolutely horrendous,” Corcoran said.

An Uncertain Future

As New College’s cost to the state continues to rise and rankings and student outcomes decline, some faculty members and alumni have expressed worry about what the future holds. While some believe DeSantis is happy to keep pumping money into New College, the governor is term limited.

“It’s important to keep in mind that New College is not a House or Senate project; it’s not a GOP project. It’s a Ron DeSantis project. Richard Corcoran has a constituency of one, and that’s Ron,” Allen said.

Critics also argue that changes driven by the college’s administration and the State University System—such as reinstating grades instead of relying on the narrative evaluations NCF has historically used and limiting course offerings, among other initiatives—are stripping away what makes New College special. They argue that as it loses traditions, it’s also losing differentiation.

Rodrigo Diaz, a 1991 New College graduate, said that the Sarasota campus had long attracted quirky students who felt stifled by more rigid academic environments. Now the administration and state are imposing “uniformity,” he said, which he argued will be “the death of New College.”

And some critics worry that death is exactly what lies ahead for NCF. The anonymous faculty member said they feel “an impending sense of doom” at New College and fear that it could close within the next two years. Allen said he has heard a similar timeline from lawmakers.

Even Corcoran referenced possible closure at a recent Board of Governors meeting.

In his remarks, the president emphasized that a liberal arts college should “produce something different.” And “if it doesn’t produce something different, then we should be closed down. But if we are closed down, I say this very respectfully, Chair—then this Board of Governors should be shut down, too,” Corcoran said, noting that many of its members have liberal arts degrees.

To Allen, that remark was an unforced error that revealed private conversations about closure are likely happening behind closed doors.

“I think Richard made the mistake of not realizing those conversations haven’t been public. He made them public, but the Board of Governors is very clearly talking to him about that,” he said.

But Allen has floated an alternative to closure: privatization.

Founded in 1960, New College was private until it was absorbed by the state in 1975. Allen envisions “the same deal in reverse” in a process that would be driven by the State Legislature.

“I think that the option set here is not whether it goes private or stays public, I think it’s whether it goes private or closes,” Allen said. “And I think that that is increasingly an open conversation.”

(Though NCF did not respond to media inquiries, Corcoran has voiced opposition to such a plan.)

Allen has largely pushed his plan privately, meeting with lawmakers, faculty, alumni and others. Reactions are mixed, but the idea seems to be a growing topic of conversation on campus. The anonymous faculty member said they are increasingly warming to the idea as the only viable solution, given that they believe the other option is closure within the next one to three years.

“I’m totally convinced this is the path forward, if there is a path forward at all,” they said.

Diaz said the idea is also gaining momentum in conversations with fellow alumni. He called himself “skeptical but respectful” of the privatization plan and said he has “a lot of doubt and questions.” But Diaz said that he and other alumni should follow the lead of faculty members.

“Now, if the faculty were to jump on board with the privatization plan, then I think that people like myself—alumni like myself, who are concerned for the future of the college—should support the faculty,” Diaz said. “But the contrary is also true. If the faculty sent up a signal that ‘We don’t like this, we have doubts about this,’ then, in good conscience, I don’t think I could back the plan.”

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October 1, 2025
Purdue Ends GEAR UP Program After Federal Grant Cut

Purdue University is ending its GEAR UP program after the Trump administration canceled a $34.9 million federal grant to support its activities, WFYI reported. The program provided college-prep programming for more than 13,000 low-income students in Indiana, according to a 2024 press release from Purdue’s College of Education.

The grant, awarded last year, was expected to run through 2031. But the U.S. Department of Education told Purdue in a Sept. 12 termination letter that the grant application flouted the department’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education” and ran afoul of civil rights law. The letter referenced parts of the application, including plans to provide DEI training to hiring managers and professional development in “culturally responsive teaching.”

The program is “inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, the best interest of the Federal Government,” the letter read. The GEAR UP program shut down on Tuesday. Purdue did not appeal the grant termination, WFYI reported.

The Education Department has canceled at least nine GEAR UP grants, EducationWeek reported, though it continued awards for other programs last week.

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October 1, 2025
OCR Can Move Forward With RIFs, Appeals Court Says

The decision comes months after the Supreme Court ruled in a parallel case that the Education Department could move forward with firing nearly half its employees.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

After months of uncertainty, a federal appeals court ruled Monday that the Education Department can move forward with firing half of the 550 employees at its Office for Civil Rights.

In March, the department enacted a reduction-in-force plan to eliminate nearly half of its employees, including 276 at OCR, as part of wider effort to dismantle the 45-year-old agency. Those RIFs prompted multiple lawsuits against the department, including New York v. McMahon and the Victim Rights Law Center v. Department of Education; while the former challenged RIFs across the entire department, the latter case was restricted to the RIFs within OCR.

Federal district judges issued injunctions in both cases during the litigation process. Then, in July, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the McMahon case that the department could proceed with firing half its staff. Despite that ruling, a federal judge in Massachusetts refused to vacate the injunction preventing the department from firing the staff at OCR, arguing that the cases—and therefore their related rulings—remained separate.

The government appealed that decision and requested a stay of the RIF injunction. On Monday the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit granted that request, giving OCR the green light to fire half its staff.

“We note the district court’s careful analysis concluding that the Department’s decision to reduce by half the staff of OCR, a statutorily-created office, imperils Congress’s mandate that OCR ‘enforce federal civil rights laws that ban discrimination based on race, sex, and disability in the public education system,’” the court’s opinion read. “In this stay posture and at this preliminary stage of the litigation, however, we cannot conclude that this case differs enough from McMahon to reach a contrary result to the Supreme Court’s order staying the injunction in McMahon.”

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October 1, 2025
Judge Dismisses Tuition Price-Fixing Lawsuit

A federal judge in Illinois has dismissed a lawsuit accusing the College Board and 40 highly selective private colleges and universities of conspiring in a price-fixing scheme to inflate tuition costs.

In a decision released last week, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis determined that the plaintiffs, a Boston University student and an alum of Cornell University, “have not plausibly alleged that Defendants entered into an agreement” demonstrating collusion on pricing.

The class action lawsuit, filed just shy of a year ago, alleged that the defendants overcharged tuition for students of divorced or separated parents by considering the financial information of the noncustodial parent, as well as the custodial one, in calculating financial aid awards. The plaintiffs claimed that the formula increased their tuition by an average of $6,200.

The lawsuit alleged that the price-fixing arrangement among the 40 institutions began in 2006, when the College Board began requiring both parents to submit financial information for its College Scholarship Service profiles, regardless of the student’’ custody arrangements. While last week’s decision acknowledged the practice inflated tuition prices at the institutions named, Ellis found no evidence that they had conspired.

“Nothing in Plaintiffs’ complaint suggests that the University Defendants exchanged their own internal financial aid decisionmaking processes or guidelines or otherwise shared with the other University Defendants the amount of financial aid they planned to offer a particular student,” she wrote. “Nor does the complaint allege that the University Defendants all agreed on the same exact formula for calculating financial aid based on the [noncustodial parent’s] financial information.”

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October 1, 2025
ED Digs Its Heels in Over Student Loan Caps

After two days of talks, Department of Education officials have made it clear that they won’t budge over some new student loan regulations.

Specifically, the department has said it won’t negotiate its proposed definition of a professional program, at least for now. That definition limits the category to 10 specific degrees, including law, medicine and theology.

“At this point, we would like to keep the language where it is,” Tamy Abernathy, the department’s director of policy coordination, said Tuesday morning. “It’s not an exhaustive list, but it is fixed at this point in time, with the caveat that if it needs to be negotiated at a future date, it would be.”

If the department stands firm on this position, dozens of health-care graduate programs, like clinical psychology and occupational therapy, would not be on the list and could be subject to a $20,500 annual cap on student loans. If these programs were to be deemed professional, federal student loans would be capped at $50,000 a year and $200,000 over all. (Graduate programs are capped at $100,000 over all.)

With a lower cap, the programs could see steep enrollment drops and some might have to close, experts say. But members of the advisory committee tasked to weigh in on the department’s proposals pushed back over the first two days, and some are hopeful that the tone of conversation will shift for the remainder of the week.

At the very end of Tuesday’s meeting, committee members submitted their own definition for professional programs, which has not been released to the public but will be discussed Wednesday. The committee is scheduled to meet through Friday and then for another week in November before voting on the regulatory changes. If the committee doesn’t reach unanimous consensus, the department can propose its own draft regulations, which will be subject to public comment.

Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed shortly after Tuesday’s meeting that the department is continuing to negotiate in good faith but is aiming “to curb excessive graduate student borrowing in the federal student loan program.”

“At this time, we remain persuaded that limiting the list of eligible programs to those defined in current regulation—while remaining open to expanding that list through future rule making—is the better approach for both students and taxpayers,” Kent said. “We are committed to working with negotiators and the public to hear and thoughtfully consider differing perspectives.”

This round of rule making is just one part of the department’s larger effort to quickly interpret Congress’s sweeping overhaul of federal student aid through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law in July. When it comes to student loans in particular, ED has to clarify each of the law’s provisions and implement them before the July 1, 2026, deadline.

Higher ed experts say that heated debate over how to define professional versus graduate programs reflects how the loan caps are likely one of OBBBA’s most consequential changes for the sector.

The department’s “limited list of programs designated as professional could have big implications for students,” said Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “It could push some students into the private student loan market, which has fewer borrower protections than federal student loans, or limit access for [others] who are unable to obtain private loans. This could lead to lower numbers of graduates in highly critical career fields such as mental health, nursing and education.”

An Appetite for Change?

The department’s latest proposal, as of Tuesday, was similar to the existing statutory definition cited by Congress in the new legislation, which says a professional program must prove a student has the skills necessary beyond a bachelor’s degree to pursue a certain licensed profession.

But the statutory definition from the Higher Education Act of 1965 includes a nonexhaustive list of examples; the department’s proposal is finite. The HEA definition says, “Examples of a professional degree include, but are not limited to,” whereas the department’s proposal says, “These programs are designated as professional” and then lists 10 degrees: in pharmacy, dentistry, medicine, osteopathy, law, optometry, podiatry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic medicine and theology.

Abernathy explained that despite removing the phrase “including but not limited to,” the department’s proposal is not exhaustive, as it gives the secretary flexibility to designate additional professional degrees through rule making in the future. So while the department does not “have an appetite” to change the definition now, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be able to later, she said.

But several committee members were not satisfied with that explanation. Scott Kemp, a student loan advocate for the Virginia higher ed council and the committee member representing state officials, said he came to the table with the understanding that the department was open to changing that list now.

“We’re already in rule making right now, and there’s an opportunity to do that here,” he said. “I guess the understanding is that that door has been closed. But for our constituents who disagree with this list and have been giving us an earful about it, what would it take to have the secretary designate a rule-making process to discuss the list?”

Andy Vaughn, president of a for-profit graduate school in California and the representative for proprietary institutions, said that in his view the most “glaring omission” from the list is mental health practitioners.

“We rarely have a week in our country where some national story about mass violence doesn’t hit our news feeds, and every time that happens, mental health is the foundational, seminal place that we point to,” Vaughn said. “So including mental health license programs—one way or the other—is really critical, because this is going to decimate the pipeline of mental health professionals.”

In a later interview with Inside Higher Ed, he added that while he agrees the overall price of tuition is too high, it’s “really hard” to get certain high-cost programs, especially those that take three or more years, under the $100,000 limit for programs that are not deemed professional.

And even if the department were to come back to the table to amend the list at a later date, he believes it would be “too late,” as enrollment for many high-demand programs would have already dramatically declined.

“It’s hard to say with certainty what exactly happens if professional designation is not granted,” he said. “But I can tell you with certainty it’s not going to increase the pipeline.”

Vaughn, Scott and eight other committee members representing taxpayers, state officials and various types of universities broke out into a private caucus twice during Tuesday’s meeting to further discuss the definition. By the end of the day, they’d drafted a new proposal that will drive the conversation with department officials tomorrow.

“The department has said they’re willing to have this conversation, but I believe we must,” Vaughn said.

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October 1, 2025
The PM’s announcement on higher level participation is a win for the HE sector

You could read “abolishing the 50 per cent participation target” as a vote of no-confidence in higher education, a knee-jerk appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters. But that would be both a political/tactical mistake and a fundamental misreading of the policy landscape.

To recap: in his leader’s speech to Labour Party Conference on Tuesday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that two thirds of people under 25 should participate in higher level learning, whether in the form of academic, technical, or work-based training, with at least ten per cent pursuing technical education or apprenticeships by 2040.

So let’s start by acknowledging, as DK does elsewhere on the site, that the 50 per cent participation target has a totemic status in public discourse about higher education that far outweighs its contemporary relevance. And, further, that party conference speeches are a time for broad strokes and vibes-based narrativising for the party faithful, and soundbites for the small segment of the public that is paying attention, not for detailed policy discussions.

An analysis of Starmer’s speech on Labour List suggests, for example, that the new target signals a decisive break with New Labour, something that most younger voters, including many in the post-compulsory education sector, don’t give the proverbial crap about.

True North

What this announcement does is, finally, give the sector something positive to rally around. Universities UK advocated nearly exactly this target in its blueprint for the new government, almost exactly a year ago, suggesting that there should be a target of 70 per cent participation in tertiary education at level four and above by 2040. Setting aside the 3.333 percentage point difference, that’s a win, and a clear vote of confidence in the post-compulsory sector.

Higher education is slowly recovering from its long-standing case of main character syndrome. Anyone reading the policy runes knows that the direction of travel is towards building a mixed tertiary economy, informed if not actively driven by skills needs data. That approach tallies with broader questions about the costs and financing of dominant models of (residential, full time) higher education, the capacity of the economy to absorb successive cohorts of graduates in ways that meet their expectations, and the problematic political implications of creating a hollowed out labour market in which it it is ever-more difficult to be economically or culturally secure without a degree.

The difference between the last government and this one is that it’s trying to find a way to critique the equity and sustainability of all this without suggesting that higher education itself is somehow culturally suspect, or some kind of economic Ponzi scheme. Many in the sector have at times in recent years raged at the notion that in order to promote technical and work-based education options you have to attack “university” education. Clearly not only are both important but they are often pretty much the same exact thing.

What has been missing hitherto, though, is any kind of clear sense from government about what it thinks the solution is. There have been signals about greater coordination, clarification of the roles of different kinds of institution, and some recent signals around the desirability of “specialisation” – and there’s been some hard knocks for higher education providers on funding. None of it adds up to much, with policy detail promised in the forthcoming post-16 education and skills white paper.

Answers on a postcard

But now, the essay question is clear: what will it take to deliver two-thirds higher level learning on that scale?

And to answer that question, you need to look at both supply and demand. On the supply side, there’s indications that the market alone will struggle to deliver the diversity of offer that might be required, particularly where provision is untested, expensive, and risky. Coordination and collaboration could help to address some of those issues by creating scale and pooling risk, and in some areas of the country, or industries, there may be an appetite to start to tackle those challenges spontaneously. However, to achieve a meaningful step change, policy intervention may be required to give providers confidence that developing new provision is not going to ultimately damage their own sustainability.

But it is on the demand side that the challenge really lies – and it’s worth noting that with nearly a million young people not in education, employment or training, the model in which exam results at age 16 or 18 determine your whole future is, objectively, whack. But you can offer all the tantalising innovative learning opportunities you want, if people feel they can’t afford it, or don’t have the time or energy to invest, or can’t see an outcome, or just don’t think it’ll be that interesting, or have to stop working to access it, they just won’t come. Far more thought has to be given to what might motivate young people to take up education and training opportunities, and the right kind of targeted funding put in place to make that real.

The other big existential question is scaling work-based education opportunities. Lots of young people are interested in apprenticeships, and lots of higher education providers are keen to offer them; the challenge is about employers being able to accommodate them. It might be about looking to existing practice in teacher education or health education, or about reimagining how work-based learning should be configured and funded, but it’s going to take, probably, industry-specific workforce strategies that are simultaneously very robust on the education and skills needs while being somewhat agnostic on the delivery mechanism. There may need to be a gentle loosening of the conditions on which something is designated an apprenticeship.

The point is, whatever the optics around “50 per cent participation” this moment should be an invigorating one, causing the sector’s finest minds to focus on what the answer to the question is. This is a sector that has always been in the business of changing lives. Now it’s time to show it can change how it thinks about how to do that.

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October 1, 2025
How Higher Education Can Lead the AI Shift – Campus Review

Artificial intelligence is no longer a fringe experiment in education; it is reshaping how institutions design learning, support students, and organise academic work. Although pilot programs and experimentation environments are becoming more common, few institutions have successfully scaled AI to achieve real transformation.

The new white paper, From Pilots to Transformation: Scaling AI for Student Success in Higher Education, produced by Ellucian and Nous Group, offers research-based recommendations for moving from experimentation to institutional-scale impact.

Drawing on insights from sector leaders, global references, and lessons from neighbouring industries, the paper explores the need for deep cultural and strategic alignment in scaling AI initiatives.

It emphasises the importance of incorporating equity, ethics, and student trust into AI projects from the start, while also examining how AI is profoundly reshaping academic work, learning experiences, and governance.

Additionally, the paper provides practical steps that institutions can take to move beyond isolated pilot programs toward sustainable, sector-wide transformation.

Zac Ashkanasy, Principal at Nous Group, frames the challenge clearly: “The real transformation lies in how institutions prepare their people, redesign their roles, and embed AI responsibly into their operating models,” he says.

For institutions across Australia, the message is clear: students are adopting AI faster than staff. Institutions that lead with purpose today will shape the future of the sector, while those that hesitate risk falling behind.

Find out more and download the white paper to discover the strategies and actions that will help your institution scale AI responsibly and unlock the next era of student success.

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Email [email protected]

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September 30, 2025
Judge Rules Campaign Against Noncitizen Protesters Unlawful

In a scathing decision published Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that two federal agencies led a campaign to detain and deport international students and faculty for pro-Palestinian speech with the goal of chilling further protests, violating the First Amendment.

“There was no ideological deportation policy,” wrote senior U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee, in the 161-page ruling. “It was never the Secretaries’ [Marco Rubio, of the Department of State, and Kristi Noem, of the Department of Homeland Security] immediate intention to deport all pro-Palestinian non-citizens for that obvious First Amendment violation, that could have raised a major outcry. Rather, the intent of the Secretaries was more invidious—to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.”

He also stated unequivocally that noncitizens in the U.S. have the same First Amendment rights as citizens—despite the Trump administration’s argument to the contrary during the trial.

The decision, which Young said may be the most important ever to fall within his district, comes about two months after the conclusion of a two-week trial in the case of American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, during which State Department and DHS employees explained that they had been tasked with identifying noncitizen pro-Palestinian activists to investigate and deport. Young wrote in his decision that the departments’ actions make it clear that they were working together to conduct targeted deportations with the goal of chilling speech—the repercussions of which are still being felt now.

The plaintiffs, which include the AAUP, three of its chapters—at Rutgers University, Harvard University and New York University—and the Middle East Studies Association, celebrated the win in a remote press conference Tuesday afternoon.

“That’s a really important victory and a really historic ruling that should have immediate implications for the Trump administration’s policies,” said Ramya Krishnan, the lead litigator on the case and a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “If the First Amendment means anything, it’s that the government cannot imprison you because it doesn’t like the speech that you have engaged in, and this decision is really welcome because it reaffirms that basic idea, which is foundational to our democracy.”

Still, despite the victory, several of the plaintiffs emphasized just how worrying the federal government’s crusade against pro-Palestinian noncitizen students and faculty is. Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, said he believes those actions, as well as the federal government’s other attacks against academic freedom, are an even greater threat to higher education than McCarthyism was.

“The only equivalents might be the Red Scare and McCarthyism, but this is even worse, right? Because it’s not only attacking individual speech, it’s also attacking institutional independence and speech, right?” he said. “The Trump administration’s attacks on higher ed are the greatest assault on this sector that we have ever seen in the history of this country.”

So, What Comes Next?

Young previously separated this case into two phases, one focused on the government’s liability and the other on relief for the plaintiffs. According to Krishnan, the judge will schedule a later hearing to determine that relief. The plaintiffs hope Young will forbid the government from continuing to target noncitizens based on their political views, making permanent an injunction that the judge granted in March.

But Young noted in his ruling Tuesday that he is unsure what a remedy for the plaintiffs might look like in an era when the president consistently seems able to avoid recourse for unconstitutional acts.

“I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected,” he wrote, concluding the decision.

“Is he correct?”

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September 30, 2025
The Em Dash Debate We Should Be Having (opinion)

It seems a day does not go by without seeing someone confidently assert on social media that an em dash is not an indicator of AI-written text. Those social media posts are in response to an ongoing debate about whether or not the em dash is a dead giveaway of writing produced by generative AI. Some writers and academics resent that their cherished em dash is getting a bad rap. As one writes, “You can take my em dash from my cold, dead hands.”

As a writer who does not use AI, I understand the frustration with the recent em-dashes-are-a-sign-of-AI-use bandwagon. I certainly do not want to be accused of using AI whenever I use an em dash. And as an English composition instructor who wants students to write without using AI, I understand how easy it can be to latch on to a purported way of quickly identifying AI-generated writing.

But rather than get angsty about it as a writer or accusatory as an instructor, I am choosing to view the current em dash–AI kerfuffle as serendipitous. AI might be new, but a controversy about em dash usage is not, and the current debate provides an opportunity to try and temper its overuse—again.

A year before what is recognized as the birth of the World Wide Web, Robert Bringhurst, in The Elements of Typographic Style, took a shot across the bow at em dash usage. An em, in typesetting vernacular, is a square measurement where, as Bringhurst explains, “One em is a distance equal to the type size”: therefore “the em is a sliding measure.” In other words, an em is not a fixed horizontal length; it is a horizontal space proportional to the point size. So if someone is using 12-point type, then one em would be 12 points horizontally. Half of an em is called an en. So when using 12-point type, an en is six points horizontally.

In post-typesetting days, Bringhurst recommends that spaced en dashes – like this – be used—instead of nonspaced em dashes like this—to set off phrases within a sentence. Although he did see valid uses for the em dash, such as for written dialogue, Bringhurst contends that “the em dash is the nineteenth-century standard” and “too long for use with the best text faces” in modern times. According to Bringhurst, just as we no longer put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence (a holdover from typesetting and later typewriter days), the em dash “belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.”

While Bringhurst’s suggestion was to replace ungainly em dashes with en dashes to offset sentence interruptions, continuing debates over the em dash focus on limiting such interruptions in the first place.

In 2011, Philip Corbett of The New York Times noted an increasing use of the em dash in newspaper articles. The problem? The em dash “can seem like a tic; worse yet, it can indicate a profusion of overstuffed and loosely constructed sentences, bulging with parenthetical additions and asides.”

That same year, Noreen Malone, writing for Slate, demonstrated how the em dash “discourages truly efficient writing” and “disrupts the flow of a sentence.” Granted, a purpose of the em dash is to interrupt, but the problem was not just that people were interrupting their writing a lot, but that they were also using it in place of better-suited punctuation. Rather than figuring out the best punctuation to use for specific writing situations and purposes, people were using the em dash as the jack-of-all-trades but master of none. Would it be best to use a comma, semicolon, period or colon? Who cares? Just throw in the exotic em dash.

Now, as a direct result of its overuse as a substitute for more apt punctuation and its ubiquity in the written material that became the training data for LLMs, it is no surprise that the em dash is frequently showing up in AI-generated writing. There is no indication, as far as I am aware, that AI is intentionally trying to wrest the em dash from those who use it ethically and responsibly. But AI is fortuitously forcing us to grapple with the cavalier use of the em dash across recent decades. So what can writers and teachers do about it?

As writers, we have a roster of punctuation marks from which to draw upon for specific purposes, and our choices can bring better clarity to our writing and demonstrate writerly skill. As Andi Zeisler points out in “AI can’t have my em dash,” em dashes “don’t really need to be there,” “aren’t integral to sentence structure” and “are decidedly extra.” That does not mean that writers must lay down all their em dashes and surrender them to AI. But as writers, we should be connecting thoughts smoothly and taking care to use just the right punctuation for a specific purpose while resisting the allure of an em dash that might save us the expert work of choosing the precisely placed period, comma, parenthesis, semicolon or colon.

As teachers, we should not automatically think a student used AI when we see an em dash. I reject the notion that em dashes are a telltale of AI-written text. Whenever I suspect that something I am reading was written by AI, it is due to the writing style, not the presence of an em dash. Regardless, whether its use is attributable to AI or simply disjointed or imprecise writing, the presence of an em dash provides an opportunity to teach students how to better connect their thoughts in their writing and more carefully consider when and how to use the best punctuation for different situations.

Richard Mitchell (a.k.a. the Underground Grammarian) once wrote, about the word “input,” that “a word that means almost anything means almost nothing” and “no longer makes any useful distinction.” The same can be said about the em dash. It might be that the em dash is necessary in select situations, but in most others it is not.

Brenda Thomas has worked in various roles in online higher education, including as an adjunct faculty member and instructional designer, at several colleges and universities since 2015.

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September 30, 2025
Trump May Attempt to Tie Grant Allocation to Capitulation

The Washington Post caught wind of these latest ideas through two anonymous White House officials.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Trump administration may be moving away from using individual investigations to try to force colleges into compliance with the president’s agenda and instead encourage compliance by giving institutions that demonstrate adherence to his policies a competitive advantage in obtaining research funding, according to The Washington Post.

The new plan, which Post reporters heard about from two anonymous White House officials, would change the grant-application process and give a leg up to institutions that conform to President Donald Trump’s agenda regarding admissions, hiring and other campus policies.

If the plan takes effect, the Trump administration will no longer have to go after universities one by one through investigations and corresponding penalties, but rather can induce compliance from hundreds of institutions at once.

“It’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” one official told the Post.

The current award-selection process for federal research grants is based primarily on scientific merit. Critics say that overriding such a standard would be a demonstrable example of executive overreach and a violation of academic freedom.

“I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.

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September 30, 2025