Tag: Jobs

Try Reading Job Descriptions With a Growth Mindset (Opinion)
In a résumé workshop with a group of Ph.D. students, I shared a job description for a position for which they were qualified. The students had participated in an advanced pedagogy program at my university’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and the position was an instructional technologist at a small liberal arts college. Immediately, the students searched the job description for qualities and experiences they lacked and reasons why they were unqualified. Many were so turned off by the job title that they likely would not have continued reading had they come across this position on their own.

Then I encouraged the students to approach the position description with a bias toward “I’m qualified.” In other words, instead of starting with the assumption that they were not qualified for the role, do the opposite. Once they changed their mindset and believed that they were qualified, they were able to see many connections between their skills and experiences and what they read in the job description.

In my work as a graduate student career adviser, I have found that this tendency for Ph.D. students to approach descriptions for jobs outside their academic field from a deficit perspective is quite common. Graduate students who have trained for years with an eye toward an academic position in their field often see themselves as utterly unqualified when they begin to search for jobs in other sectors. This can even be the case for those who have spent considerable amounts of time on career exploration and self-reflection and feel committed to a career in a field other than academia. Once they get to the job search process, they get hung up on the job descriptions themselves.

When I told another career adviser about my “bias toward ‘I’m qualified’” approach, she said that this reminded her of the growth mindset concept. Psychologist Carol Dweck came up with the concept of the growth mindset nearly 20 years ago, and it has since been applied to everything from business to professional sports to early childhood education. In short, a growth mindset is, to cite Dweck’s definition, “based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.” In other words, you can change and improve many aspects of yourself through hard work and help from others. This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, which is the belief that your qualities are “carved in stone” and cannot be changed.

This concept has many applications in work and life, and when we are stressed about a job search it is easy to let a fixed mindset take over. However, adopting a growth mindset in just one context—reading job descriptions—can help you be more positive and open-minded in your job search. Of course, not everyone can do every job, but a growth mindset will help you see and articulate both your qualifications and your potential in a new career field.

Consider the following ways in which reading job descriptions with a growth mindset can create more opportunities in your career exploration and job search.
- See and articulate your transferable skills and experiences.
Talk to a career adviser for five minutes, and they are likely to discuss the importance of transferable skills. Yet it can be tough to conceive of your skills, know which skills are most important, see how they might come in handy in other contexts and then articulate those skills in a way that is appealing to other audiences. Here is an example from my own career about how reading a job description with a growth mindset helped me identify and articulate a skill set I didn’t know I had.

Shortly after finishing my Ph.D., I came across a job posting for a school relations manager at a nonprofit organization, liaising between high school teachers and the organization. The job fit my interests, but at first glance it didn’t seem to match my skill set. In particular, the job description asked for relationship-building skills, which I had never thought about as a skill set, let alone one that I possessed. As I reflected on my experience throughout my time in graduate school, I thought about a short-term, part-time position I had meeting once a month with high school history teachers to help them design lesson plans. I enjoyed this work and was good at it and, though I had never thought about it before, realized that I could frame this experience as relationship building. In my application materials and job interviews, I emphasized this skill set and expressed confidence in continuing to grow in this area, and I got the job.
- Open up new career fields.
Several years ago, I worked with a Ph.D. student in art history who was interested in a career in user experience research. Although she was still two years away from graduation, she started looking at job descriptions to get a better sense of the responsibilities and qualifications for the kinds of roles she desired. In her research, she noticed that many positions asked for evidence of user experience projects, and some even asked for a portfolio. While some students would have seen this as an insurmountable barrier (a fixed mindset), she instead let her growth mindset kick in and got to work building her portfolio through project-based online courses, independent projects and on-campus jobs, and continued to network with practitioners in the field. Her hard work and help from others paid off, and she was able to move into the field after she graduated.
- Compete for jobs for which you may be somewhat underqualified.
Students often let the perception of being underqualified for a job prevent them from applying. This is a well-documented tendency among women and underrepresented groups, and, for graduate students, the impostor phenomenon often contributes to reduced confidence in relation to career possibilities. Most graduate students know about this tendency and the advice to apply if you meet 60 to 75 percent of the qualifications, Yet, many still have difficulty getting over the hump to apply when they don’t meet 100 percent of the qualifications in the job description. Or, if they do apply, they undersell their qualifications in their application materials.

When you approach a position description for a job that interests you but feels like a reach, start with the job responsibilities and imagine yourself performing the tasks listed. If there are things on the list you haven’t done before, imagine how you could build on the skills and capacities you have in a new setting and then improve over time. Next, go through each qualification and look for some connection, however tenuous, to something you have done before and write it down. If you have trouble doing this on your own, work with a career adviser who can help. Usually this process helps you see capacities and qualifications you didn’t know you had and will give you confidence that you can grow into a role that feels like a stretch.
- Apply for jobs for which you may feel overqualified.
This next piece of advice addresses the other end of the spectrum—jobs for which you feel overqualified. Ph.D. students who are entering a field other than academia are making a career transition, which often requires spending some time in a role that might feel beneath your qualifications. This is especially true in certain industries like publishing, journalism, marketing and communications, and others. It can feel demoralizing for doctoral students to apply for jobs that only require a bachelor’s degree.

In this case, use a growth mindset to imagine how you could advance within the organization or how this first position could be a stepping-stone to another opportunity in a couple of years. Keep in mind that people with advanced degrees tend to get promoted to a higher level and more quickly than those with just a bachelor’s. You won’t be stuck in this first role forever, and it will give you a chance to demonstrate your skills in your new field.

Underlying these tips is a nudge to get online and read some job descriptions, even if you aren’t yet ready to apply. Just make sure that when you do, you suit up with your growth mindset first.

Rachel Bernard is the GSAS Compass Consultant at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she focuses on career development for master’s and doctoral students. She is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing a national voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.
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March 24, 2025
Arkansas Passes Higher Ed “Reform” Bill

Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a wide-ranging bill last Tuesday, upending the state’s higher education budget and clamping down on DEI and student protests, according to The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The Arkansas ACCESS Law includes a number of measures prioritizing funding for trade schools and short-term credential programs, including using the lottery system to fund school scholarships and eliminating support for Advanced Placement accelerated learning tracks in an effort to encourage career readiness over traditional college prep.

The law also doubles funding for the state’s Academic Challenge Scholarship and expands eligibility to trade school applicants; prohibits colleges from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or participating in any external DEI programs; and amends the state’s excused absence policies to prevent students from participating in protests.

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March 24, 2025
Small Business Administration to Take Over Student Loans

A day after White House officials said the Education Department would administer the student loan program, President Donald Trump announced that the Small Business Administration would be taking over the $1.7 trillion portfolio.

He told White House reporters that the move would happen “immediately,” though he didn’t say how that process would work. Currently, federal law requires the Education Department to manage student loans, so the president doesn’t have the authority for the move, several experts and advocates said Friday.

Neither the White House nor the Small Business Administration responded to requests for more information or details about the plan.

In response to questions about how moving loans to SBA would work, the Education Department referred Inside Higher Ed to an interview that Education Secretary Linda McMahon did Friday with Fox News. McMahon said she’s working with the SBA on a strategic plan.

The announcement follows Trump’s executive order, signed Thursday, directing McMahon to close her department “to the maximum extent of the law.” McMahon and others have said a smaller version of the department would focus on core functions, which many experts presumed to include the student loan program. (Trump also said Friday that the Department of Health and Human Services would take over programs that support students with disabilities.)

Kelly Loeffler, who leads the SBA, wrote on social media that her agency “stands ready to take the lead on restoring accountability and integrity to America’s student loan portfolio.” Whether the department has the capacity to take on the program is an open question; Loeffler is planning to cut 43 percent of the staff, Politico and other news outlets have reported. The SBA runs several programs to support small businesses, including providing loans and helping with disaster recovery.

The Education Department issues about $100 billion in student loans each year and disburses $30 billion in Pell Grants. That funding is crucial to students who rely on the government to help pay for college.

But borrowers have struggled over the years to navigate the cumbersome student loan system and often have faced difficulty in repaying their loans. Meanwhile, the federal government’s growing loan portfolio has become a key issue for lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle. Former president Joe Biden’s fix was in part to make student loan forgiveness more accessible and make loan payments more affordable.

Trump said Friday that the loan system “will be serviced much better than it has in the past,” adding, “it’s been a mess.”

Agency Blindsided

It wasn’t clear Friday afternoon whether SBA would also take over the Pell Grant program and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid—a form that millions of students rely on to access federal, student and institutional aid. Currently, the Office of Federal Student Aid, which is part of the Education Department, administers those programs. That office was hit hard by recent mass layoffs at the department, and experts have questioned whether it will be able to fulfill its many responsibilities, which also include overseeing colleges and rooting out fraud in the federal student aid system.

Trump’s executive order pointed out that the Education Department manages a portfolio the size of Wells Fargo but with significantly fewer employees. “The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” the order said.

An official high up at Federal Student Aid said Friday that the office was blindsided by the announcement. Just a day before, the official said, the plan was to move the loans to the Treasury Department. Agency officials have yet to receive any plans or communication about handing over the reins to SBA or what that would entail, the official said.

‘Clear Violation’

The federal statute that created FSA specifically gives that office authority to administer student financial assistance programs. Additionally, laws dictating how federal funding is allocated explicitly send money to the Education Department for the student aid programs. A former department staffer told Inside Higher Ed that the administration is “clearly circumventing the spirit and intent of the law if you were to move to functions.”

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State, agreed, writing on social media that the announcement “is a clear violation of education [and] appropriations law.”

Beth Maglione, interim president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, added in a statement that only Congress can move the student loan portfolio to a different agency; if the legislative branch agreed, doing so would take time.

“The administration would first need to articulate a definitive strategy outlining how the work of administering student aid programs would be allocated within the SBA, determine the necessary staffing and resources, and build the requisite infrastructure to facilitate the transition of these programs to another federal agency,” she said. “In the absence of any comprehensive plan, a serious concern remains: how will this restructuring be executed without disruption to students and institutions?”

Not a ‘Crazy Idea’

Some conservative policy experts who support shutting down the department cheered the move. Lindsey Burke, director for the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, wrote on social media that “without student loans at ED, there will be little left at the agency. Just a few programs—certainly not enough to justify a cabinet-level agency.”

Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, like the Heritage Foundation a conservative think tank, acknowledged in an email to Inside Higher Ed that there are a lot of open questions about how the SBA move would work. But she said the announcement shows that the Trump administration understands that the recent staffing cuts “will likely make it too difficult to keep these programs properly administered otherwise,” she wrote.

Akers noted that since SBA currently manages its own loans, “it isn’t a crazy idea that they could pull this off.”

“Frankly, the department has handled student loan administration poorly, so the bar is pretty low on what would constitute an improvement,” she added. “I expect that the existing student loan infrastructure (and remaining staff) will likely move over to SBA, and there won’t be immediate changes in how these programs are run. That’s my hope. Because if things change too quickly, I expect that students will see disruptions that could affect their enrollments and personal finances.”

Liam Knox contributed to this report.

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March 21, 2025
Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands

Acquiescing to demands from the Trump administration to address alleged antisemitism on campus, Columbia University has agreed to overhaul disciplinary processes, ban masks at protests, add 36 officers with the authority to make arrests and appoint a new senior vice provost to oversee academic programs focused on the Middle East, among other changes.

The decision, announced Friday afternoon, is the latest move in Columbia’s ongoing face-off with the federal government over last year’s pro-Palestinian protests, which spawned the nationwide encampment movement. Columbia yielded despite concerns about the legality of the demands, as well as of an associated effort by the Trump administration to strip the university of $400 million in research funding.

“We have worked hard to address the legitimate concerns raised both from within and without our Columbia community, including by our regulators, with respect to the discrimination, harassment, and antisemitic acts our Jewish community has faced in the wake of October 7, 2023,” university officials said in a Friday statement.

The acknowledgment is a rare admission of antisemitism on campus, despite the fact that a Title VI investigation by the Department of Education has not yet been completed.

Columbia announced additional efforts that the Trump administration didn’t request, including advancing the university’s Tel Aviv Center (though initial details are sparse) and creating a K-12 curriculum “focused on topics such as how to have difficult conversations, create classrooms that foster open inquiry, dialogue across difference and topics related to antisemitism.” That curriculum will be free for schools.

Columbia did not place the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Department into “academic receivership” for a minimum of five years, as the Trump administration demanded, but the parties appeared to reach a compromise. A new senior vice provost will review a broader range of programs, expanding beyond the department targeted by Trump to include “the Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; the Middle East Institute; the Tel Aviv and Amman global hubs; [and] the School of International and Public Affairs Middle East Policy major,” according to the university.

The new senior provost, who has not yet been named, will review programs “to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced” and evaluate “all aspects of leadership and curriculum” among other changes, which may include academic restructuring.

The full list of changes can be found here.

Interim president Katrina Armstrong announced the move in a statement titled “Sharing Progress on Our Priorities,” calling it “a privilege to share our progress and plans” after a difficult year of protests and scrutiny.

“At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make,” Armstrong wrote in the message posted Friday afternoon, which she signed, “Standing together for Columbia.”

Critics, however, have argued that yielding to the Trump administration undermines academic freedom and urged Columbia to fight the demands.

Legal scholars at Columbia and in conservative circles have noted that the Trump administration’s demands were likely unlawful. However, it seemed the university had no desire for a protracted legal fight.

After the news broke—first reported by The Wall Street Journal—many critics panned the move.

In a Friday press call, American Association of University Professors President Todd Wolfson blasted Columbia for failing to stand up to Trump.

“This is not the outcome we wanted to see we wanted to see Columbia stand up for their rights for academic freedom and freedom of speech on their campus and we did not expect for them to not only capitulate to the demands of the federal government but actually go beyond the initial demands as far as we can tell,” Wolfson said.

“This is an unprecedented intervention into academic freedom—never before in Columbia’s 250+ years has the federal government tried to exert control over a department before. And Trump et al. are only getting started,” Columbia history professor Karl Jacoby wrote on Bluesky.

Outside experts pointed to the likelihood that more universities will give in to Trump’s threats now that Columbia has yielded.

“Trump gets exactly what he wants from Columbia. Next up: most of the big-name institutions in American higher education. This is a turning point in the history of our industry,” Robert Kelchen, a professor of education and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, wrote in a Bluesky post.

(Ryan Quinn contributed to this report.)

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March 21, 2025
USDA Cancels Hundreds of Journal Subscriptions

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has canceled nearly 400 of the National Agricultural Library’s roughly 2,000 journal subscriptions, Science reported this week.

The decision to cancel the subscriptions came at the direction of the Department of Government Efficiency, a new agency led by South African billionaire Elon Musk who donated $288 million to President Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign.

The eliminated journal titles include any of those published by 17 presses, most of which are affiliated with universities or nonprofit scientific societies, including Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; the American Phytopathological Society, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, the cuts spared journals published by for-profit publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley, which collectively accounted for more than half of the library’s journal subscriptions, according to Science’s analysis.

USDA told staff members Friday that though the agency would consider restoring some of the journals, they were only given hours to submit justifications.

“Peer-reviewed publications are literally the cornerstones and building blocks of science, and taking these away from scientists at USDA is like you’re building a house and pull out the foundation: Everything else above becomes more unstable,” said Chris Stelzig, executive director of the Entomological Society of America. “USDA scientists are doing this work to protect the American food supply, and it frustrates me that that’s not being recognized here.”

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March 21, 2025
UC System Freezes Hiring, Bans Diversity Statement Mandates

The University of California System’s president announced a systemwide hiring freeze and other “cost-saving measures, such as delaying maintenance and reducing business travel where possible.”

“Because every UC location is different, these plans will vary,” president Michael V. Drake said in a Wednesday letter to the campuses of one of the country’s largest higher education systems. He said “every action that impacts our University and our workforce will only be taken after serious and deliberative consideration.”

Drake pointed to a “substantial cut” to the system in the California state budget atop the Trump administration’s disruptive national reduction in support for postsecondary education. He said the administration’s executive orders and proposed policies “threaten funding for lifesaving research, patient care and education support.”

“The Chancellors and I are preparing for significant financial challenges ahead,” Drake wrote.

Whenever hiring does resume, UC universities and their components will no longer be able to require that applicants submit diversity statements. Janet Reilly, chair of the UC Board of Regents, said in a separate statement Wednesday that the board directed the system to eliminate such mandates.

“While the University has no systemwide policies requiring the submission of diversity statements as part of employment applications, some programs and departments have used this practice,” Reilly said.

Paulette Granberry Russell, president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, told Inside Higher Ed that, “while I think diversity statements added value on the front end of a search,” it’s far more important to have a structured approach to faculty hiring. She said this approach should eliminate biases and consideration of “non–job-related criteria,” such as accents or lack of eye contact, from the process.

Diversity statements, she said, are “not the defining factor in whether or not somebody’s going to be successful” if they earn the position.

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March 21, 2025
Trump Administration Attempts to Deport, Bar Entry to Scholars

Earlier this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and recent Columbia University graduate, and threatened him with deportation. The Trump administration said Khalil, who is of Palestinian descent, was a national security threat and accused him of terrorist activity for leading student protests at Columbia last year.

In a public statement to The Guardian, Khalil described himself as a “political prisoner.”

“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” he said. “Visa holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”

That prediction has begun to come true. In the past three weeks, immigration officers have targeted international students they suspected of participating in pro-Palestinian protests, raiding their dorm rooms and revoking their visas. In recent days, the administration’s dragnet has widened to include faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars and researchers.

At least two of those international scholars were employed by U.S. institutions and in the country on valid work or academic visas. An Indian postdoctoral research fellow at Georgetown University was detained outside his home for alleged pro-Palestinian activity that the administration has yet to specify; and a Lebanese professor at Brown University’s medical school was denied reentry after attending the funeral of assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nusrallah.

Another case involves an unidentified French scientist, who, according to a statement from the French Minister of Higher Education and Research, was denied entry into the U.S. because of his “personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy.”

Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and an associate political science professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, said the administration’s “completely arbitrary” crackdown on foreign scholars threatens academic freedom and undermines the role of U.S. institutions in global research exchange and scholarship networks.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the administration has decided it’s going to use the force of the state to intimidate faculty and students,” he said. “They’re basically doing a kind of stochastic terrorism.”

The administration is also targeting international doctoral candidates who participated in pro-Palestinian protests last year, revoking their visas and sending ICE agents to apprehend them.

Momodou Taal, a British Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University who made national headlines when he overturned an academic suspension for protest activity that would have forced him to leave the country, received a visit from ICE agents on Wednesday. Just days earlier, Taal filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking to block immigration officials from deporting international students for protesting.

Taal told Inside Higher Ed he’d been expecting a knock on his door since Trump’s inauguration, and that immigration officials were targeting students and scholars for protected pro-Palestinian speech.

“It goes against the ideals that this country espouses, or at least claims to espouse,” Taal said. “I’ve not been convicted of a crime, I’m not being charged with any crime or accused of any crime. So why should I be living in fear over what I decide to say and the causes I support?”

Teresa R. Manning, director of policy at the conservative National Association of Scholars, said, “We see it as more an issue of security and safety than an issue of academics or free speech.”

“The real threat to free speech is the complete leftwing domination of American education,” Manning said. “No conservatives are allowed. That’s the real threat, not our attempt to guard the nation’s security and safety and protect against potential terrorist threats.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment Thursday, nor did a spokesperson for ICE. A spokesperson for the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which oversees and promotes global academic and research exchange, did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Georgetown Fellow Detained

On Monday night, immigration officials arrested and detained Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, outside his home in Rosslyn, Virginia. Suri was in the country on a J-1 visa, a nonimmigrant document meant to promote academic and cultural exchange that is usually reserved for students and scholars; according to his lawyers, Department of Homeland Security agents told him his visa had been revoked.

A peace and conflict studies scholar, he was at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service conducting research for his dissertation on the U.S. peace process in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“If an accomplished scholar who focuses on conflict resolution is whom the government decides is bad for foreign policy, then perhaps the problem is with the government, not the scholar,” Suri’s lawyer Hassan Ahmad wrote in a statement Thursday.

After his arrest, Suri was first brought to a migrant holding cell in Virginia before being transported to Louisiana, where he’s currently awaiting trial in the same detention center as Khalil, according to Suri’s lawyers.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement on X that Suri had been detained for “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” though she failed to provide any evidence.

Suri’s wife, a U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent and a graduate student at Georgetown, is the daughter of Ahmed Yousef, former adviser to the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, The New York Times confirmed. Yousef, who has called the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks a “terrible error,” told The Times that he left his position a decade ago and that his daughter and son-in-law have no involvement in political activism on behalf of the organization.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered that Suri be kept in the country until a lawsuit brought by his lawyers is resolved, according to The Washington Post.

In a post on BlueSky Thursday, Virginia representative Don Beyer wrote that “the arrests of academics like Suri and Mahmoud Khalil are intended to have a chilling effect and discourage the free expression of political views which Trump dislikes.”

A Georgetown spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the university was “not aware of [Suri] engaging in any illegal activity, and we have not received a reason for his detention.”

“Suri is an Indian national who was duly granted a visa to enter the United States to continue his doctoral research on peacebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We support our community members’ rights to free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate, even if the underlying ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable. We expect the legal system to adjudicate this case fairly.”

Brown Professor Denied Entry

Media outlets have reported that Rasha Alawieh, an assistant professor of medicine and clinician educator at Brown, was flown out of the U.S. last week despite a court order requiring the government to inform a judge ahead of any deportation. The federal government said Alawieh was returning from Lebanon, where she had attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nusrallah. Officials also said she had deleted “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders from her phone.

Alawieh never made it past Boston’s Logan International Airport. On Monday, a DHS spokesperson posted on X that Nusrallah was “a brutal terrorist” and that Alawieh had “openly admitted” attending his funeral and supporting him.

“A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied,” the spokesperson wrote. “This is commonsense security.”

The White House then reposted DHS’s statement with a photo of President Trump waving goodbye out of a drive-thru window at McDonald’s during a campaign stop.

Kamola, of the AAUP, said claims of Alawieh’s supposed connections to Hezbollah were “spurious.” One of Alawieh’s lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Asked whether Brown is defending Alawieh’s academic freedom or disciplining her, Amanda McGregor, a spokesperson for Brown, replied only that “Alawieh is an employee of Brown Medicine with a clinical appointment to Brown University.”

“Such appointments carry a faculty title, though the employment resides with Brown Medicine,” McGregor wrote in an email.

Interrogated for Anti-Trump Texts

Meanwhile, foreign academics traveling to the U.S. are being hassled and turned away by border agents.

Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, told Agence France-Presse that a French scientist from the country’s National Center for Scientific Research was heading to a conference near Houston, Texas, when the scientist was denied entry and expelled. The minister did not reveal the scientist’s name.

“This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” Baptiste said. “Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values we will continue to proudly uphold.”

On Wednesday, Baptiste met with counterparts from other European Union nations to discuss “threats to free research in the United States,” according to a post on X.

As the Trump administration escalates its attacks on foreigners in American academe, international students are increasingly apprehensive about studying at U.S. institutions and scholars worry about attending conferences or accepting fellowships in the country. Kamola said the end result may be the destruction of America’s reputation as a bastion of academic freedom.

“I think the message is: Everybody who wants to speak about Palestine, everybody who wants to argue that higher education should be more inclusive or diverse, anybody who wants to defend free speech in ways that the current regime finds unacceptable could potentially face retaliation,” Kamola said. “The intention is to not only sow chaos but to sow fear.”

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March 21, 2025
Search for Higher Ed Legislation Proposed in Congress

Welcome Inside Higher Ed‘s legislation tracker, a database of the key higher-ed related bills lawmakers have proposed in Congress. Few will likely become law, but the proposals offer insights into how Republicans and Democrats want to reshape the sector.

So far, lawmakers have proposed 31 bills that would directly impact colleges and universities.

You can search the database below to learn more about each proposal. The current session of Congress runs through the end of 2026 which means this list will grow. We’ll update the database regularly, so please check back for updates.

Questions, comments or think we’re missing a bill? Email [email protected].

The database was last updated March 20.

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March 21, 2025
A way to honor the teach-in movement at 60 (opinion)

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the teach-in movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The first teach-in was held at the University of Michigan, March 24–25, 1965; by the end of the spring semester, teach-ins had spread to college and university campuses across the nation, educating tens of thousands of students, faculty and community members about the moral, political and strategic reasons why the escalating Vietnam War was doomed to failure.

The teach-ins were sparked by the Johnson administration’s launch of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam in late February 1965. But it is less its antiwar ideas than its strategic and tactical brilliance that makes the teach-in movement so relevant today, offering a valuable model for resisting the threat that the Trump administration’s authoritarianism and hatred of the liberal university poses to academic freedom and free speech on campus, the university’s funding of scientific research, the college and university’s role in battling racial and sexual discrimination, and higher education’s cosmopolitanism and international character.

Though we tend to think of the campus antiwar movement as led by radical students who used militant tactics, breaking university regulations and the law in their protests, the teach-in movement was initiated by faculty, not students, and it did not break any such regulations or the law. Its only tools were education—offered by knowledgeable speakers—and effective publicity and outreach. In fact, the very idea of a teach-in was the result of a tactical retreat.

Initially, Michigan’s Faculty Committee to Stop the War in Vietnam had envisioned a work moratorium, a day when faculty did not teach their regular academic classes so that the whole university could focus on the Vietnam War. But this moratorium idea proved immensely controversial, drawing all kinds of denunciations, especially from the state’s war-hawk politicians, who labeled it an anarchist hijacking of the university that denied students access to their classes. Seeing that this controversy was distracting people from the war itself, the faculty shrewdly changed course. Instead of a work moratorium, they came up with the idea of an antiwar teach-in that would begin after classes ended and go on through the night (from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.).

Some on the left saw this tactical shift as unfortunate, even cowardly, and feared that few students would attend such an evening event. But they were wrong. This first teach-in drew some 3,000 students, faculty and community members. It was, in the words of one its speakers, Carl Oglesby, “like a transfigured night. It was amazing: classroom after classroom bulging with people hanging on every word of those who had something to say about Vietnam.” Michigan’s antiwar faculty then helped raise funds for more teach-ins in May, which connected with faculty and student activists on more than 100 campuses, with the movement reaching its peak at a University of California, Berkeley, weekend teach-in that drew some 30,000 participants. All this provided a major boost to the peace movement and helped make the campuses a center of antiwar activism.

In our own era, college and university administrations have tightened campus regulations to restrict mass protest and have been quick to have even nonviolent anti-Gaza war student protesters arrested for the most minor campus rule violations. In fact, last spring there were more than 3,000 arrests nationally, for campus antiwar encampments that were quite tame compared to the disruptive student protests that erupted in the Vietnam era’s most turbulent years.

The decline of free speech on campus since the 1960s is also evident when one reflects back on the famous case of Marxist historian Eugene Genovese. At a Rutgers University teach-in, Genovese, in 1965, provoked a huge right-wing backlash by saying that he did “not fear or regret the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.” Despite calls for Genovese’s firing from many supporters of the war, including then-former Vice President Richard Nixon, Rutgers’ administration, while disdaining Genovese’s pro-Vietcong views, defended his right to free speech and refused to fire him—though two years later Genovese, tired of the death threats and political pressure, opted to leave Rutgers. One hears no such campus administration defense of free speech today as Trump, who pardoned his J6 rioters, pursues arrests and deportations of anti-war student protestors, including the arrest and detention of recent Columbia University graduate and Green Card holder Mahmoud Khalil.

All this repression has struck fear into the hearts of student activists. So, while direct action and civil disobedience have their place in campus protest, they are, understandably, not in vogue at this authoritarian moment. This is a time when important news outlets, such as The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, the business community, the U.S. Senate minority leader, and campus administrators cower in fear of the Trump administration. This seems like a good time for faculty to act boldly yet strategically, taking the lead, showing that their campuses can, without rule-breaking or civil disobedience, become major centers of education about Trump’s authoritarianism, his embarrassingly illiberal and predatory foreign policy, and his crude attacks on education, the courts, the press, the First Amendment and federal agencies. Faculty should use their skills as teachers and scholars, as their predecessors did in 1965, but this time help teach America about the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and education, in a new national wave of teach-ins that would honor our past and offer hope for the future.

Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies at New York University. His research focuses on student protest, free speech and the Black Freedom Movement in 1960s America. His most recent book is Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory and the University of Georgia in the 20th Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).

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March 21, 2025
Bret Stephens Don’t Know Higher Education

What I want to know is why The New York Times lets opinion columnist Bret Stephens lie about higher education institutions.

I understand this is a strong charge, and perhaps it’s unfair. Maybe Stephens is merely uninformed and parroting bad information.

I’m thinking these things because we recently had the rare occasion of a pundit (Stephens) being challenged in real time by two experts (Tressie McMillan Cottom and M. Gessen) in the form of a three-way conversation printed under the headline “‘It Is Facing a Campaign of Annihilation’: Three Columnists on Trump’s War Against Academia.”

The conversation is moderated by Patrick Healey, another Times journalist, who gives Stephens the first word on the question “What went wrong with higher ed? How did colleges become such easy pickings?”

Stephens hearkens to the infamous Yale Halloween incident from 2015, when students committed the grave error of speaking intemperately to university administrators about a communication that seemed to authorize racially insensitive Halloween costumes over the objections of students.

Stephens wonders why these students weren’t expelled or at least suspended, justifying a crackdown for what may have been a break in decorum but was undeniably the exercise of free speech. Stephens ostensibly is against the threats of the Trump administration against Columbia University and others, and yet here he is essentially authorizing the administration rationale of punishing institutions that are not sufficiently punitive toward protesting students.

The voice of reason appears in the form of Cottom, both an active professor at the University of North Carolina and a sociologist who studies higher education. In the words of Kevin Carey, “Reading Tressie McMillan Cottom debate Bret Stephens on higher education is like watching Steph Curry play H.O.R.S.E. against a barely-sentient lump of gravel.”

Cottom counters with lived experience over Stephens’s fever dream: “I have taught the most quintessentially tense courses my entire academic career. My course names often have the words race, class and gender in them. I do this as a Black woman. I have never had a problem with students refusing to have debates. It could be that I am a uniquely gifted pedagogue but I reject that idea.”

This becomes a pattern throughout the exchanges, where Stephens makes something up and then Cottom and/or Gessen knock it down. Later on, Stephens goes on an uninformed rant about the lack of value of degrees with the word “studies” in them before going on to extol the virtues of humanistic study in the spirit of Matthew Arnold: “It means academic rigor, it means the contestation of ideas, it means a spirit of inquiry, curiosity, questioning and skepticism. Outside of a few colleges and universities, I’m not sure that kind of education is being offered very widely.”

That Stephens is extolling the virtues of rigorous thought and questioning while parroting ill-informed tropes about higher education does not occur to him. Cottom again corrects his misapprehension with verifiable data: “It is worth pointing out that data on labor market returns really challenge the well-worn idea that such degrees are worthless. We love the joke about your barista having a liberal arts degree, but most of the softness among those degree-holders disappears when you look at state-level data and not just starting salaries after graduation.”

Cottom goes on to acknowledge that there are some problems with the kinds of institutions she wrote about in Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of the For-Profit College in the New Economy, after which Stephens jumps in with my favorite nonsense of the entire deal before being again, corrected—more gently than he deserves—by Cottom:

Stephens: I’d say the lowest-quality institutions created since the 1990s have names like Columbia and Berkeley—these are essentially factories of Maoist cadres taught by professors whose political views ranged almost exclusively from the left to the far left.

Cottom: I would counter, Bret, that the lowest-quality institutions are the for-profit colleges created as paradigmatic economic theories of exchange value that churned out millions of students in “career ready” fields who found it hard to get a job worth the debt—colleges not unlike the one that our current dear leader once ran as a purely economic enterprise.

It is worth pausing here to consider how untethered Stephens is from the truth with saying the Columbia and Berkeley are “essentially factories of Maoist cadres.” One would think that if this were the case, they would be overwhelmingly churning out graduates in those dubious “studies” majors.

Let’s go to the data.

Top majors at Columbia: political science, economics, computer science, financial economics

Top majors at Cal: computer science, economics, cellular biology, computer and information sciences, engineering

The wokeness … it burns! Actually … it’s nonexistent.

I don’t know if Stephens has convinced himself of a fantasy based on a selective accounting of what’s happening on campus, promulgated by his center-right anti-woke fellow travelers, or if he is simply a liar, but either way, he is demonstrably out of touch with reality.

Stephens consistently authorizes the “logic” of the authoritarian, even if he disagrees with the specifics of the punishment. The idea that he would claim the mantle of the protector of rights is an irony beyond understanding.

Stephens concludes, “When diffident liberal administrators fail to confront the far left, the winners ultimately tend to be on the far right.”

I take a different lesson from all of this, namely that diffident administrators found some utility in the scolding of figures like Stephens as a rationale to crack down on student dissent and protect a status quo of administrative authority. If student demands are inherently unreasonable, they don’t need to be dealt with. I seem to recall a very popular book that invented an entire psychological pathology on the basis of a handful of campus incidents in order to delegitimize student speech people like Stephens didn’t like because it threatened authority.

This was the core weakness, and it is coming home to roost, because the most important asset institutions have in defending themselves against the attacks of the Trump administration would be the students—provided there was a reservoir of trust between students and administrations, which, in many cases, there isn’t.

The whole thing is a mess, and an existential one for universities. Stephens seems to think it’s possible that the current actions by Trump are “a loud shot across the bow of academia to get it to clean up its act.” This is, I fear, only additional delusion.

I’d ask leaders of institutions who they think is going to be a bigger help in this situation, people like Stephens, who seem to believe that at least some measure of the arbitrary punishment is deserved, or the people who live and work in their communities, who understand the mission and importance of what these institutions try to do.

Listen to the experts, particularly those on your own faculty, not the pundits.

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March 21, 2025