Tag: interference

  • The paper was her lifeboat — UMD called it interference 

    The paper was her lifeboat — UMD called it interference 

    Riona Sheikh walked onto the University of Maryland’s campus her freshman year not knowing a soul. “I was a little lonely,” she recalls. It was September 2024, and the Maryland native didn’t have a large wave of high school classmates who’d joined her at UMD. These were uncharted waters. 

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    In high school, Sheikh had been on the student paper, and she thought joining one at UMD could be her lifeboat. She saw the diverse array of student-run outlets on UMD’s campus staffed with journalists from a range of backgrounds: La Voz Latina, The Black Explosion, Mitzpeh, The Diamondback. The tradition of starting independent publications had run strong at UMD for decades. Her desire for community and passion for journalism could be melded together, she realized. What was stopping her from creating her own? 

    A month later, she founded Al-Hikmah, the campus’s first Muslim student newspaper. At first, she thought the idea would flounder. “I had zero confidence in starting it, but I did it anyway,” she remembers. She sent interest forms out to other students still feeling unsure. But within a year, they had a 16-member staff and an established digital presence. 

    Drawing on her experience as a high school student journalist, Sheikh wanted her tenure as founder and editor-in-chief to prioritize editorial independence. Her high school journalism teachers had generally been open to letting the students report on broad swaths of topics — until  Oct. 7, 2023, that is. After the attacks, they said the school paper wouldn’t report on any aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “because it’s too controversial,” Sheikh recalls them telling her. Al-Hikmah would be different: students would be able to report on events even if they were controversial. 

    It took almost exactly a year for Sheikh to be proven wrong. 

    On Oct. 21, Sheikh and one of her Al-Hikmah colleagues, Rumaysa Drissi, decided to cover protests outside of Jimenez Hall, where Students Supporting Israel were hosting an event that featured Israel Defense Forces soldiers. Prior to the event, Sheikh and Drissi had asked SSI if they could report on the event from the classroom and were told no. So they covered the protesters’ response outside, until they noticed protesters entering the building with their signs. Sheikh and Drissi decided to follow to capture first-hand footage and photography of a controversy as it unfolded — Sheikh filming on her cellphone, and Drissi taking photos on her camera. 

    That decision would prove consequential. Sheikh and Drissi were detained alongside two protesters in the building’s hallway, during which time the Al-Hikmah reporters repeatedly stated they were student journalists and offered to call their on-duty editor. 

    Footage from both the reporters and UMPD officers shows that after Sheikh reiterated that she was a student journalist, a UMPD officer responded, “That doesn’t mean anything. You were screaming and disrupting the event.” Despite the cameras capturing the entire interaction, no footage shows either Sheikh or Drissi shouting. 

    Nevertheless, Sheikh and Drissi were handed down student conduct charges from the university, including “intentionally and substantially interfering with the lawful freedom of expression of others” and “engaging in disorderly or disruptive action that interferes with University or community activities.” Their filming and photography — basic newsgathering — was now cloaked in terms of interference and disruption. 

    Reporting reshaped as disruption 

    In December, FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative (SPFI) sent a letter to UMD’s Office of General Counsel, urging the school to drop the charges. SPFI’s letter called on the university to refrain from punishing the journalists who covered the disruptive protest. Student reporters documenting others who may be engaged in misconduct, SPFI argued, shouldn’t be exposed to the same charges, investigations, and punishments as the people they’re covering. So far, the school has refused to drop the charges. 

    An associate general counsel from UMD reasoned that “the students at issue are alleged to have done more than merely cover, as journalists, other individuals’ protest of the SSI event; instead, it is alleged they were aware of and participated in such protest, albeit by recording and planning on reporting on it, rather than waving signs and shouting.” Coverage of a protest, it seems, equals participation in said protest in the eyes of UMD officials. 

    “It’s like we’re being treated as if we just did something else entirely,” Sheikh says. “It makes me worry about our coverage of pro-Palestinian protests in the future.”

    Sheikh and Drissi are awaiting their disciplinary hearings and face the possibility that their coverage will land them with sanctions. 

    ‘A lens that I can keep’ 

    During her sophomore year, Drissi joined Al Hikmah as a writer and photographer. She had always considered herself a creative person — picking up sketching, drawing and, from there, photography. It was photography that stuck. “It connects me to the world and lets me see it through a lens that I can keep,” she says. 

    Leading up to the coverage of the Oct. 21 protest, the Al-Hikmah photographer who originally had been assigned to go expressed their hesitancy. Drissi volunteered instead. “I switched in with them,” she recalls. “I’ll cover this event, because people deserve to see what’s actually happening,” she remembers thinking. 

    To that end, Drissi hasn’t allowed the university’s investigations to stop her reporting. Both she and Sheikh have continued their coverage, which includes community, global, and faith issues. Drissi described covering her community as a “duty” — especially since being detained and placed under investigation. 

    “It feels even more important to me to make sure that student voices are heard,” she says. 

    Al-Hikmah, like its staffers, has no plans of slowing down. The paper is taking additional steps to safeguard its journalists who report on protests, like getting press passes, Sheikh says. In the meantime, Al-Hikmah will keep sailing through uncharted waters. 

    “You’re always going to face obstacles and barriers when you’re carving out a new space, but we have to remember why we’re doing this, and who we’re doing it for.”

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  • Fulbright Board Resigns En Masse Over Political Interference

    Fulbright Board Resigns En Masse Over Political Interference

    Secretary Rubio directed officials to intervene in the final stage of the Fulbright selection process.

    John McDonnell/Getty Images

    All 12 members of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board have resigned over what they say is political interference in the selection process for recipients of the prestigious international grant, according to sources familiar with the program and a letter announcing their resignation Wednesday morning.

    The FFSB normally has final say in the selection process, after initial application reviews by the Institute for International Education and host countries’ Fulbright commissions. This year was different. Inside Higher Ed broke the story last month that Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed State Department officials to intervene in the final stages of the selection process, adding a new step to cull proposals they felt did not comply with President Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.

    In their letter, posted to Substack on Wednesday, the former board members wrote that the State Department’s “unprecedented” intervention in the selection process was illegal and unethical and compromised national diplomatic and research interests.

    “Under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the Board has followed the law, operating with independence pursuant to its statutory mandate,” they wrote. “The current administration has usurped the authority of the Board and denied Fulbright awards to a substantial number of individuals who were selected.”

    Sources familiar with the program, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on background to avoid retaliation, said that State Department officials—led by Darren Beattie, under secretary for diplomacy and public affairs—ultimately rejected more than 20 percent of the FFSB’s selected finalists in a last-minute intervention. Of the approximately 900 approved applicants for the U.S. Visiting Scholars program, for example, Beattie vetoed roughly 200.

    Many of the proposals that were cut focused on the effects of climate change or gender disparities; others seemed to have been denied based on their inclusion of words that triggered an anti-DEI keyword search that State Department officials used to conduct their final review, according to sources inside the selection process who shared details with Inside Higher Ed in May.

    A person familiar with the program said the board members were stonewalled by high-level State Department officials throughout the process. When they learned that many of their selected finalists hadn’t received their acceptance letters by late May—more than a month later than anticipated—they wrote multiple letters to department officials asking for an explanation. None came; in fact, the person familiar with the program said the members only learned about the new step in the selection process from rumored communications between foreign Fulbright commissions and outside media reports.

    Eventually, the person familiar with the FFSB said, the board members felt they had no choice but to resign.

    The source also said that 1,200 applications from foreign faculty and researchers to the Fulbright Foreign Scholars program—all of which were reviewed and accepted by the FFSB—were still “sitting on Beattie’s desk,” and that he seemed poised to feed them through the same content filters he used on Americans’ applications.

    A senior State Department official confirmed the board members’ resignations in an email to Inside Higher Ed, calling the move “nothing but a political stunt.” The spokesperson also said that the statute in the “Fulbright Hayes Act [sic]” does not give the FFSB “exclusive and final say” in the selection process, as the members argue.

    “The 12 members of the Fulbright Board were partisan political appointees of the Biden Administration,” the official wrote. “It’s ridiculous to believe that these members would continue to have final say over the application process, especially when it comes to determining academic suitability and alignment with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

    The FFSB is a politically appointed board; the members who just resigned were indeed all appointed by President Biden. They include some big names in Democratic Party politics, such as Jen O’Malley Dillon, former White House deputy chief of staff and chair of the Harris-Walz campaign; Mala Adiga, Biden’s former deputy assistant; and Louisa Terrell, former White House director of legislative affairs. Others are business leaders and philanthropists.

    Their resignations now open up all 12 seats, which are usually term-limited, to Trump appointees. One person familiar with the Fulbright program said the board members had factored this into their decision to resign. But after being shut out from the end of the selection process, the board members felt they had to leave.

    “To continue to serve after the Administration has consistently ignored the Board’s request that they follow the law would risk legitimizing actions we believe are unlawful and damage the integrity of this storied program and America’s credibility abroad,” the members wrote in their letter.

    President Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget eliminates nearly all Fulbright funding and would gut the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which houses the scholarship. The person familiar with the program said they believe the Trump administration is narrowing the funnel for Fulbright recipients and upending the selection process in order to undermine the program without eliminating it entirely, which only Congress can do.

    If the administration continues unwinding the program, they said, they worry that the recently selected cohort will be left stranded without funding or resources once the new budget takes effect.

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  • Govs. DeSantis, Hochul threaten academic freedom with political interference

    Govs. DeSantis, Hochul threaten academic freedom with political interference

    It’s no secret that politicians are getting more involved in higher education. And while some level of involvement with how colleges and universities operate is appropriate given the amount of taxpayer money spent on campuses, nobody should be surprised to learn that greater political involvement can pose academic freedom risks.

    Last Monday, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the creation of Florida’s own Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), named after the Trump Administration’s Elon Musk-led initiative to cut federal spending. The Florida task force is to conduct “a deep dive into all facets of college and university operations and spending and make recommendations to the Board of Governors and State Board of Education to eliminate any wasteful spending.”

    There are viewpoint-based decisions that governors and legislatures have to make about colleges as part of the political and appropriations process. But the more granular those decisions, the more they threaten to substitute academic judgment with political judgment.

    During his live announcement, DeSantis expanded on what he called “the DOGE-ing of our state university system,” saying it would include “examining courses, programming, and staff” with an aim towards helping students gain “meaningful employment.” But the governor also, troublingly, made clear that he’s continuing to take aim at a particular set of viewpoints:

    [S]ome of the ideological studies stuff, we just want to prune that and get that out, and we want to make sure that these universities are really serving the classical mission of what a university should be. And that’s not to impose ideology.

    Politicians have long complained about taxpayer money spent on what they see as frivolous academic pursuits — the proverbial degree in “underwater basket weaving” — but what DeSantis posits goes further. This task force won’t simply be focused on (say) eliminating majors that offer no real job prospects. Rather, it will seek out courses involving “ideological studies stuff,” presumably by reviewing course descriptions or syllabi, that in the task force’s view is not worth teaching. 

    That’s not just an invitation to viewpoint discrimination — it’s an explicit mandate.

    It’s not hard to see how this could threaten academic freedom by pressuring faculty members to substitute state-level politics for their academic judgment. 

    For example, let’s say the University of Florida’s Chinese Studies department decides that, to understand contemporary China, students need to take a class on Marxist-Leninist political thought. It’s easy to see how this could be relevant given that China is a Communist country. It’s also easy to see how an outside agency like Florida DOGE might view this as an effort to propagandize students into Marxism.

    What’s the likely result?

    • Most obviously, the department might decide to avoid conflict with the government by eliminating the class altogether despite believing it was needed, therefore impoverishing students’ education.
    • Even if it did decide to require the class, the department is likely to pressure its instructor not to include things that look pro-Marxist, regardless of whether the professor thinks it would be the best material for the course. That poorly serves students and limits a professor’s ability to engage in the intellectual pursuit of teaching, to boot.
    • Finally, even if the department were to offer the class without compromising on content, its instructor will most certainly feel “in the crosshairs,” restricted from following his or her academic conscience lest he or she get the class eliminated through an incautious word.

    Colleges should not be immune from investigations into waste and abuse. And there are viewpoint-based decisions that governors and legislatures have to make about colleges as part of the political and appropriations process. But the more granular those decisions, the more they threaten to substitute academic judgment with political judgment. It remains to be seen whether this is how Florida DOGE will actually operate, but the governor’s remarks create plenty of cause for concern.

    Lest there be any doubt that governors of any party are capable of interfering in isolated academic decisions if given the opportunity, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (no friend of DeSantis) last Tuesday ordered the immediate removal of a CUNY-Hunter College job posting for a professor of Palestinian Studies. Hochul also ordered “a thorough review of the position to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom.”

    The job listing certainly listed plenty of controversial topics, calling for a “historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.” Yet the very next sentence stated, “We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches.”

    Critics are unlikely to believe that the job was really open to scholars with diverse approaches to whether, say, Israel is an “apartheid” state. Maybe it was, maybe not. But one can’t make that determination simply based on the language of the listing, and there is no reason to believe that the governor of New York is (or should be expected to be) the best-qualified person to make that call.

    Faculty members are supposed to be hired because they are subject-matter experts who have the ability and knowledge in the field to make informed academic judgments. Readers may recall that Winston Churchill famously opined that democracy is “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” That’s just as true when it comes to academic faculty making academic decisions — like it or not, there are no better alternatives. Even if one believes a particular group of public college faculty is, itself, making decisions that harm higher education, as DeSantis and Hochul both seem to believe, there’s one thing we can know for sure: transferring that job to politicians will only make it worse.

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