Tag: Jobs

  • Dear Colleague letter is lawless attack on DEI (opinion)

    Dear Colleague letter is lawless attack on DEI (opinion)

    On Valentine’s Day, the Trump administration surprised schools and colleges with its newest attack on DEI and student body diversity. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released a Dear Colleague letter that warned schools and colleges that they may lose federal funding if they discriminate on the basis of race.

    This letter revealed novel, unsupported legal theories regarding the application of federal civil rights laws to schools and colleges. In fact, OCR’s letter sweeps so broadly that it claims to prohibit certain considerations of race that remain perfectly legal under well-established legal doctrine.

    While the threat of losing federal funding has been a facet of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act since its passage in 1964, the letter specifically takes aim at DEI programming as well as the use of “race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming.”

    Although the letter includes some correct statements of nondiscrimination law, OCR makes assertions that are troubling and unsupported by sound legal reasoning. As part of the team that wrote OCR’s guidance on this very issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, I am disturbed by how politics is driving policy guidance that will hurt educational institutions and students from kindergarten through college.

    In describing the scope of SFFA, OCR’s latest guidance attempts to smuggle in a legal standard that appears nowhere in the court’s opinion. The letter states, “Relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information, violates the law … It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”

    Here, OCR baselessly claims that not only can colleges not consider race as a factor in admissions, they also cannot make race-neutral changes to admissions policies that help increase student body diversity—such as eliminating standardized testing. That claim falls firmly outside not only the bounds of SFFA but also the decades of Supreme Court case law that precede it.

    In Grutter (2003), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor considers whether the University of Michigan Law School could use a lottery system for admissions. In Fisher (2016), Justice Anthony Kennedy implicitly approves of the Texas top 10 percent plan, perhaps the most well-known race-neutral strategy to increase racial diversity. And in SFFA (2023), the plaintiff’s briefs themselves include endorsements of possible race-neutral alternatives Harvard could have legally pursued such as adopting socioeconomic preferences in admissions.

    Yet in its most recent letter, OCR attempts quite the head fake in its declaration that SFFA dictates that schools and colleges must abandon race-neutral strategies meant to increase student body diversity. While in reality SFFA says nothing about the permissibility of these race-neutral strategies, a separate line of cases tackles these legal questions head-on—and contradicts the Trump administration’s unfounded guidance.

    In Coalition for TJ, Boston Parent Coalition and other recent cases, groups similar to Students for Fair Admissions have challenged changes to admissions policies of prestigious, selective high schools that were adopted in part to increase student body diversity. In some cases, the schools reconfigured weighting for standardized tests; in others, schools guaranteed that each feeding middle school gets a certain number of seats. In all of the cases, the school districts won. The position now advanced by OCR in its recent letter has failed to find footing in two courts of appeal. And just last year, the Supreme Court declined to further review the decisions in TJ and Boston.

    What OCR attempts to do with its letter is extraordinary. It tries to advance a legal theory with support from a Supreme Court case that says nothing about the matter. At the same time, OCR ignores recent judicial opinions in cases that directly address this question.

    Regardless of how legally infirm OCR’s proclamations are, schools and colleges will likely feel forced to comply. This could mean that the threat alone will lead schools and colleges to cut efforts to legally pursue racially diverse student bodies and racially inclusive campus environments. As a result, our nation’s classrooms and campuses will unfortunately look less like the communities that they sit in and serve, all because of shoddy policymaking and legal sleight of hand.

    Ray Li is a civil rights attorney focusing on education policy. He recently left the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after serving as a career attorney from 2021 to 2025. In that role, he worked on more than a dozen policy documents for OCR, including guidance issued after the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA. He also served as OCR’s lead staff attorney on appellate and Supreme Court litigation matters, including for the SFFA, Coalition for TJ and Boston Parent Coalition cases. Prior to joining OCR, he advised schools, colleges and universities on legal regulatory issues, including civil rights issues, at Hogan Lovells’ education practice.

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  • New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

    New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

    New research suggests that the Department of Government Efficiency has been making inaccurate claims about the extent of its savings from cuts to the Department of Education.

    DOGE previously posted on X that it ended 89 contracts from the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, worth $881 million. But an analysis released Wednesday by the left-wing think tank New America found that these contracts were worth about $676 million—roughly $200 million less than DOGE claimed. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” website, where it tracks its cuts, later suggested the savings from 104 Education Department contracts came out to a more modest $500 million.

    New America also asserted that DOGE is losing money, given that the government had already spent almost $400 million on the now-terminated Institute of Education Sciences contracts, meaning those funds have gone to waste.

    “Research cannot be undone, and statistics cannot be uncollected. Instead, they will likely sit on a computer somewhere untouched,” New America researchers wrote in a blog post about their findings.

    In a separate analysis shared last week, the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, also called into question DOGE’s claims about its Education Department cuts.

    Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, compared DOGE’s contract values with the department’s listed values and found they “seldom matched” and DOGE’s values were “always higher,” among other problems with DOGE’s data.

    “DOGE has an unprecedented opportunity to cut waste and bloat,” Malkus said in a post about his research. “However, the sloppy work shown so far should give pause to even its most sympathetic defenders.”

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  • Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

    Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

    New York governor Kathy Hochul took an unusual interest in the hiring practices of the City University of New York on Tuesday when she ordered the public system to take down a job posting for a professorship in Palestinian studies at Hunter College.

    CUNY quickly complied, and faculty at Hunter are up in arms over what they call a brazen intrusion into academic affairs from a powerful state lawmaker.

    The job posting was 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.”

    “We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches,” the posting continued.

    In a statement Tuesday night, Hochul said the posting’s use of the words “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid” amounted to antisemitic attacks and ordered CUNY to “immediately remove” the posting.

    A few hours later, CUNY complied, and system chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez echoed Hochul’s criticisms of the posting.

    “We find this language divisive, polarizing and inappropriate and strongly agree with Governor Hochul’s direction to remove this posting, which we have ensured Hunter College has since done,” he wrote in a statement.

    Hochul also directed the university system to launch an investigation at Hunter “to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom.” Matos Rodríguez appeared to imply the system would follow that order as well, saying, “CUNY will continue working with the Governor and other stakeholders to tackle antisemitism on our campuses.”

    A CUNY spokesperson declined to say whether the system would launch a probe into the posting at Hunter but wrote in an email that “each college is responsible for its own faculty job posting.”

    Hochul’s order came after pro-Israel activists, including a former CUNY trustee and current professor, publicly voiced concerns about the posting.

    “To make a Palestinian Studies course completely about alleged Jewish crimes is akin to courses offered in the Nazi era which ascribed all the world’s crimes to the Jews,” Jeffrey Weisenfeld, who served as a CUNY trustee for 15 years, told The New York Post.

    Faculty at Hunter are livid about the decision, according to multiple professors who spoke with Inside Higher Ed both on the record and on background. They say it’s a concerning capitulation to political pressure from an institution they long believed to be staunchly independent.

    One longtime Hunter and CUNY Graduate Center professor, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their job, said faculty across the system were “outraged at this craven act by our governor and our chancellor.”

    “It shows that [Matos Rodríguez] has no commitment to academic freedom or moral compass that would allow him to stand up at this moment of political repression,” they said.

    CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, the union representing more than 30,000 faculty and staff members across the system’s 25 campuses, wrote a letter to Matos Rodriguez on Wednesday evening condemning the posting removal and calling on leadership to reverse their decision.

    “An elected official dictating what topics may be taught at a public college is a line that should not be crossed,” the letter reads. “The ‘divisive concepts’ standard for universities is something devised in Florida that shouldn’t be exported to New York. What’s needed are inclusive ways of teaching, not canceling concepts and areas of study.”

    It was unclear Wednesday whether the job posting would be edited and reposted or if the opening would be eliminated. A CUNY spokesperson declined to respond to questions about the job’s future, but the anonymous faculty member said they believed Hunter officials were revising the post, intending to relist it.

    The anonymous professor said they were worried that Hunter president Nancy Cantor, who took on the role last August after leading Rutgers University–Newark for a decade, could face severe scrutiny after the posting.

    “We fully support this initiative by our president to make this Palestinian studies cluster hire,” the anonymous professor said. “I’m very worried about Nancy Cantor’s tenure at Hunter. I think this is part of a campaign by the far right to get rid of Félix [Matos Rodríguez], and it would not surprise me in the least if he threw Nancy Cantor under the bus to save his own skin.”

    Heba Gowayed, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter, said she was shocked that Hochul had made the job posting a priority, especially as threats to academic freedom and attacks on higher education from Republicans are intensifying.

    “This is an unprecedented overstep in authority, but instead of coming from Republicans, it’s coming from a Democrat in one of the bluest states in the country,” she said. “They’re the ones that are supposed to be fighting to protect academic freedom. This is a tremendous abdication of that responsibility.”

    ‘A Climate of Fear’

    The anonymous professor said their colleagues are grappling with contending emotions: rage and fear. There’s a great appetite to speak up, they said, but they also feel it’s more dangerous than ever, even for tenured faculty.

    “People are worried across the board,” they said. “That is the kind of climate of fear that this sort of action creates.”

    It’s not the first time CUNY has responded to pressure from pro-Israel activist groups in faculty workforce decisions. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, CUNY institutions have declined to renew contracts for two vocally pro-Palestinian professors: Danny Shaw at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who says he was the target of a pro-Israel pressure campaign to get him fired after 18 years of teaching, and lecturer Lisa Hofman-Kuroda at Hunter, who was reported for pro-Palestinian social media posts.

    Shaw, who is currently suing CUNY for breach of contract, told Inside Higher Ed that the decision to remove the job posting did not surprise him.

    “This is McCarthyism 2.0,” he said. “Administrators won’t protect us. It’s been made pretty clear that at the end of the day, it’s either their necks on the chopping block or ours.”

    Last spring, when the student-led pro-Palestinian encampment protests spread from Columbia University across town to the City College of New York, CUNY leadership drew criticism for calling the New York Police Department to disperse students. Gowayed said that decision shocked faculty across the system, who took pride in their institution’s progressive reputation and history of academic integrity.

    Even then, she said she was “disturbed that they have let it get to this higher level of censoring faculty for a completely legitimate job posting.”

    The Palestinian studies position was one of two Hunter planned to hire, and Gowayed said faculty and leadership at Hunter had been supportive of the plans to expand their research and teaching capacity in an area of growing interest.

    “Whatever your feelings on Palestine, this is a research area in a widely recognized field of scholarship on genocide and apartheid,” Gowayed said. “These are well-established fields, whether you’re studying the Belgian Congo or Rwanda or Palestine, and the posting wasn’t even saying what approach the faculty should take … The reaction to this posting is so discrepant from the actual academic integrity of the job search.”

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  • Teachers’ union sues to block Trump admin’s DEI guidance

    Teachers’ union sues to block Trump admin’s DEI guidance

    The lawsuit comes after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from carrying out parts of two executive orders cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion.

    Pete Kiehart/The Washington Post/Getty Images

    A coalition of educators and sociologists is challenging the Department of Education and its unprecedented Dear Colleague letter—which declared all race-conscious student programming illegal—in a lawsuit filed late Tuesday evening.

    The American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association argue in the complaint, which was submitted to a Maryland federal court, that following the letter’s dictates “will do a disservice to students and ultimately the nation by weakening schools as portals to opportunity.”

    “This vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself … It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It would upend campus life.”

    The expected legal challenge came just three days before a Feb. 28 compliance deadline. The four-page guidance document says that colleges and universities must rescind any race-based policies, activities and resources by the end of the day or risk investigation and the loss of federal funding.

    The department justifies its demands through a new interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned the consideration of race in college admissions. Although the Supreme Court’s decision applied specifically to admissions, the Trump administration believes it extends to all race-conscious activities.

    On Friday, a judge from the same federal court in Maryland issued a temporary injunction in a separate lawsuit that blocked parts of President Trump’s antidiversity executive orders.

    But higher education legal experts say that the Dear Colleague letter and the executive orders, though similar, are independent levers, so the injunction doesn’t affect the department’s guidance. The Education Department has also said it is still moving forward with its interpretation of the law and the deadline stands.

    So now all eyes are on this most recent court case, as higher education leaders wait to see if the judge will issue a second injunction and block the guidance.

    “The Department of Education’s new policy, reflected in the February ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, seeks to undermine our nation’s educational institutions and is an unlawful attempt to impose this administration’s particular views,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, the legal group representing the plaintiffs. “We will continue to pursue every legal opportunity to oppose and stop harmful attacks on freedom of expression and on the values like inclusion, diversity and belonging that make us all and our nation stronger.”

    In the meantime, higher education advocacy groups are urging colleges and universities to stay calm and not overreact to the Dear Colleague letter.

    On Tuesday the American Council on Education sent a letter to Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of civil rights, requesting that he “rescind the DCL” and work with higher education institutions to ensure a clearer understanding of the letter before setting a new compliance deadline.

    “Over the last two years, our colleges and universities have worked hard to assess and modify, as appropriate, policies and practices in light of the decision in the SFFA case and applicable civil rights laws,” ACE president Ted Mitchell wrote. “It is unreasonable for the department to require institutions to appropriately respond to this extremely broad reinterpretation of federal law in a mere two weeks and in the absence of necessary guidance.”

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  • An argument against teaching demos (opinion)

    An argument against teaching demos (opinion)

    I have always found the teaching demo portion of a faculty job candidate’s visit to be the least useful component of assessing that individual’s fit for the position. Think about it—for teaching-focused institutions, teaching demos are held in high regard and are often a mandatory component of candidate job-talk visits. The prevalent belief appears to be that without seeing an individual in action in front of a live classroom, one cannot assess their teaching ability.

    To me, it seems rather like expecting an interviewing physician to come into an ongoing surgery and take over the operation for half an hour before retreating and handing the patient back to the original surgeon. This seems hardly fair to the visiting physician or the beleaguered patient.

    A teaching demo often involves the job candidate having to go teach a portion of a lecture in an already existing and functioning course. Right off the bat, the entire premise of the teaching demo is unnatural and flawed. Neither the demo giver nor the demo receivers benefit, and the observers (i.e., the hapless search committee members), who are the ones most invested in the demo, gain nothing of value, either. Yes, maybe you can determine in 20 minutes how a candidate speaks in front of an audience, but that factoid can be gathered from a research or job talk presentation as well. In that job talk presentation, perhaps the candidate can also talk about his or her teaching philosophy. That to me seems more valuable and more useful information to gather.

    One big issue for me about the teaching demo is that the students in attendance know it’s a demonstration and are probably not too fussed about paying too much attention, knowing that whatever the demonstration covers, the contents are unlikely to make it into the exams or quizzes given by their regular instructor. So it would not be surprising if they base their evaluations entirely on random criteria, such as one’s sense of sartorial style.

    Essentially, the demo serves as a distraction for students—a way to let their minds wander from their regular programming. I would argue that this sort of demoing is disruptive for student learning and regular instructor teaching. We are taking away valuable time that students would have gotten their regular teaching in order to subject them to a teaching demo, which they know doesn’t matter in the long run.

    And of course, this sort of demo interrupts the teaching plans of the regular instructor. Now that instructor has to hang around for the length of the time of the demo letting their attention wander, just like the students. And then the instructor has to go back to their regular class, out of which half an hour or longer has already been squandered.

    Furthermore, whatever evaluations are garnered from the teaching demo are not exactly trustworthy. There is evidence that course evaluations (conducted after an entire semester) are biased against women and minority professors. And mind you, that’s after an entire semester—how on Earth can one expect a 25- to 35-minute demo evaluation to be unbiased? They most assuredly are not unbiased and are probably reflective of similar biases against minority and women candidates. I’ve been on and chaired several search committees, and have seen some really random comments listed on the demo evaluations. Needless to say, those comments were not germane to the actual situation, in that they provided no useful evidence about the candidate’s teaching ability.

    Also, these sorts of teaching demos are especially rough on candidates who have social anxiety or are introverted. Teaching involves building rapport with your students—20 minutes is hardly enough time to do that. It is entirely possible for a candidate to be unfairly assessed based on a tiny sliver of time. A great teacher could have a bad teaching demo, and a poor teacher could have a great teaching demo—how accurate is it to judge someone’s teaching abilities based on a short lecture? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to actually take the time to pore over the candidate’s teaching evaluations instead? Yes, they are prone to error, but it stands to reason they are not as prone to error as a teaching demo. Preferring a teaching demo over a more complete semester-long evaluation is akin to judging a movie from its trailer. A trailer can be great, but the movie may still be terrible. Ditto with teaching demos.

    Alternatives to Teaching Demos

    I propose some alternatives to teaching demos. The first is to include a small teaching portion in the job talk itself. Give the candidate the leeway to talk about his or her teaching philosophy and perhaps about their approach to pedagogy. That, when combined with actual semester teaching evaluations, would be far more useful than a 20- or 30-minute demo. Anyone can fake being nice and approachable for 20 or 30 minutes—doing that over the course of a semester is a lot more difficult. Even faculty members who are perceived as rude and unapproachable by their usual students can pass themselves off as wonderful and approachable for a 20-minute window. How they behave throughout the semester is far more useful and predictive information.

    Another alternative to a live teaching demo could be to make it asynchronous. Have the candidate record a video lecture of themselves, and then have faculty and students watch the video to rate the candidate on their teaching performance. After all, the goal is to see how the candidate presents and teaches—why not take away the anxiety component of the live demo and instead make it a lot more equitable? Sure, recording a video could be anxiety-provoking in its own right, but it can’t be more anxiety-provoking than a live demo in front of a crowd, can it?

    The third alternative to live teaching demos is to open up the candidate’s research presentation to students as well. Far too often, the research presentations are only attended by department faculty members (some of whom have to be reluctantly corralled from their offices by the search committee chair). Opening these presentations up to students would serve a dual purpose, both bolstering the audience numbers and giving the students attending a good idea of how the candidate communicates. This does much the same job that the teaching demo does, but more effectively and efficiently.

    Conclusion

    To conclude, I am suggesting that we do away with the teaching demos in faculty job candidates’ visits. It is high time that we eliminate useless rituals that we follow just because of tradition. Let’s send teaching demos the way of the dodo.

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  • What college presidents are thinking about in 2025

    What college presidents are thinking about in 2025

    College presidents showed tepid support for tenure with a little more than a third agreeing that the pros outweigh the cons, according to Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Presidents, conducted with Hanover Research and released in full today.

    That was just one of many findings across the annual survey, now in its 15th year.

    Presidents were optimistic in some areas, with most expressing confidence that their institutions will be financially stable over the next five to 10 years and positivity about the job itself. But campus leaders also expressed concerns about politicians trying to shape institutional strategies, which they see as an increasing risk, plus a seeming lack of improvement on undergraduate mental health, even as campuses make more investments in related services.

    Inside Higher Ed earlier this month released a portion of the survey findings that unpacked how presidents viewed the second Trump administration. The bulk of the survey’s political findings were covered in that initial release, with college presidents largely worried President Donald Trump will negatively affect higher education in this new term.

    This year’s survey included responses from 298 respondents across two- and four-year institutions, including public, private nonprofit and a small number of private for-profit colleges.

    More on the Survey

    Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Presidents was conducted with Hanover Research starting in December and running through Jan. 3. The survey included 298 presidents of two- and four-year institutions, public and private, for a margin of error of 5 percent. Download a copy of the free report here.

    On Wednesday, March 26, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a webcast with campus leaders who will share their takes on the findings. Register for that discussion here.

    Faculty Tenure

    Tenure is often championed by professors and presidents alike for the protections it provides when it comes to issues of academic freedom. But just over a third of college presidents surveyed here—37 percent—indicated that the pros of tenure outweigh the cons.

    By institution type, presidents at public doctoral universities were most likely to support tenure, with 82 percent agreeing that the pros outweigh the cons.

    The overall finding came as a surprise to some observers, especially as politicians in some states are increasingly taking aim at tenure.

    Anne Harris, president of Grinnell College in Iowa, said she was surprised that presidential support was so low, adding that tenure plays an important role at liberal arts colleges, such as the one she leads.

    “For the small liberal arts college model, tenure is the continuity of mentorship, of advising, of those long-term relationships that we rely on … to see students through, to high graduation rates, to all those things,” she said. “From my perspective, the pros are very, very salient for what tenure does, not just for academic freedom and for the pursuit of research, but also for what it does for the continuity of advising and mentoring for students.”

    Michael Harris, a professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University (and no relation to the Grinnell College president), noted tenure can “be a thorn in the side of presidents and provosts” but that it can also serve as a buffer to political attacks on academic freedom.

    “It’s disappointing to me that presidents don’t have a better opinion of tenure, particularly in this current moment. I understand the challenges that tenure causes, and how it might limit the institution financially, or in decision-making—well-known areas where tenure can slow things down. But at this moment it’s just disappointing to me that there wasn’t more belief in tenure,” Harris said.

    Yet he believes that even the presidents who don’t like tenure will continue to protect it.

    “Presidents understand—even if tenure is a pain for them to deal with—the damage it would do to them in recruiting faculty [to lose tenure]. So there’s a self-interested argument on keeping tenure, even if they personally would like for the whole industry to get rid of it.”

    Campus Speech

    After pro-Palestinian student protests broke out on campuses nationwide over the bloodshed in the war between Israel and Hamas, many institutions changed their campus speech policies. Almost half of presidents surveyed—45 percent—noted that their institution updated its speech policies within the last 18 months, with public institution leaders most likely to say so.

    Additionally, almost a third of survey respondents (29 percent) indicated that their campus has an institutional neutrality policy, according to which college leaders should not comment on social or political matters that do not directly threaten the core mission. Such policies saw an uptick amid the fallout of the recent protests, which many congressional Republicans cast as antisemitic.

    Few respondents whose institution does not already have an institutional neutrality policy said it’s likely to adopt one.

    Despite recent student protests, presidents overwhelmingly blamed politicians for escalating tensions over campus speech concerns, versus other groups: Some 70 percent said politicians were primarily at fault, while just 18 percent blamed students.

    Presidents speaking on a panel about the survey findings at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting in Washington on Feb. 12 suggested campus speech concerns are overblown.

    “One incident goes viral, it gets all sorts of publicity,” Jon Alger, president of American University, said, while arguing that “99 percent of campus conversations” typically go well.

    Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of the City University of New York, also speaking at ACE, said that social media often inflates speech issues with incomplete narratives for the sake of virality. He added that outside actors also weaponize such tensions to further their own political agendas.

    In a separate December survey of two- and four-year students by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab, nearly all respondents supported institutional efforts to promote civil dialogue, and 40 percent were at least somewhat concerned about the climate for civil dialogue and student free expression at their institution.

    Economic Confidence

    Presidents surveyed expressed strong financial confidence, despite difficult headwinds for the industry in recent years, which have seemingly been exacerbated by Trump’s recent executive actions threatening funding, prompting hiring freezes and more.

    Among respondents, 87 percent signaled that they expect their institution to be financially stable over the next five years, and 83 percent said the same over a 10-year timeline. But nearly half of presidents, 49 percent, believe their institution has too many academic programs and needs to close some. Some 19 percent responded that they had serious merger or acquisition talks recently, about the same as last year’s survey.

    This year, most of the presidents weighing mergers cited a desire to ensure their institution’s financial stability and sustainability, rather than risk of closure.

    Nine percent of all presidents said it’s somewhat or very likely that their institution will merge into or be acquired by another college within the next five years, with presidents of private nonprofit baccalaureate institutions especially likely to say so (21 percent).

    Presidents also saw risks beyond the business side. More than half—60 percent—believe politicians’ efforts to influence strategy are an increasing risk to their institution.

    However, some presidents at public institutions see that tension as inherent to the sector.

    “I think we’re a little bit naïve if we expect to be totally independent from the voices of our elected officials in helping to set the direction they think is important for the public investment that is being made in our institutions,” said Brad Mortensen, president of Weber State University in Utah.

    Presidents of public and private nonprofit institutions expressed similar levels of concern on this point.

    Being a President

    Most presidents like the job, even if they question how their time is spent. The overwhelming majority of respondents—89 percent—agreed, at least somewhat, that they enjoy being a college president.

    Additionally, 88 percent of respondents said that their own governing boards were supportive.

    However, more than half—56 percent—question whether the presidency can be capably handled by one person. Presidents also indicated they would prefer to focus on strategic planning, fundraising and community engagement but often find other pressing demands, such as dealing with personnel issues and managing institutional finances, eating into their time.

    A quarter of respondents said that the hardest part of the job was navigating financial constraints. Other areas of difficulty that emerged in the survey include too many responsibilities with too little time to do the job, enrollment challenges and external political pressures.

    Asked how long they expected to be in their job, a plurality (47 percent) answered five years.

    Harris, the SMU professor, is skeptical that most presidents will last that long. He said the finding that nearly half of presidents expected to be in their jobs over the next five years prompted him to “laugh out loud,” and he noted that data from ACE’s latest American College President Survey showed the tenure for college leaders has fallen to just over five years.

    “Either a whole bunch of first-year presidents filled out the survey and they’re going to stay another five years, or somebody is missing the boat on how long they’re actually going to serve,” he said. For reference, the plurality of survey respondents, 33 percent, have served as president of their current institution for five to 10 years. The rest were roughly split between less than three years, three to approaching five years and 10 or more years served.

    Last year saw numerous high-profile presidents abruptly resign, including from the nation’s wealthiest institutions—some of whom had only been in the job for a matter of months.

    Student Mental Health

    College presidents also expressed confidence about their institution’s approach to student mental health.

    The overwhelming majority reported that their institution has done a good or excellent job of promoting student health and wellness across multiple areas. On mental health, in particular, 81 percent said this. And 69 percent said that their institution has been effective in addressing the student mental health crisis, though only 37 percent felt the same was true of the sector as a whole.

    Despite the confidence in their institution’s efforts, only 44 percent of presidents somewhat or strongly agreed that undergraduate mental health is improving on their campus. Just 23 percent said the same of undergraduate mental health across higher education.

    Harris, the Grinnell College president, suggested that finding may not be cause for alarm but rather for deliberation. She noted that “more students accessing mental health resources, to me, is not necessarily a sign of a mental health crisis, it’s a sign of mental health self-advocacy.” Still, she said that colleges still need to develop a better understanding of student mental health issues.

    Other Findings

    Artificial intelligence is another category that prompted mixed feelings.

    About half of respondents—51 percent—believe their institution is responding adeptly and appropriately to the rise of AI, but only 29 percent said the same was true across the sector.

    About the same share over all (52 percent) said their institution had established a campuswide AI task force or strategy.

    Survey respondents noted that the most common uses for AI for their institutions included virtual chat assistants and chat bots, research and data analysis, predictive analytics to identify student performance and trends, learning management systems, and use in admissions processes.

    A third of presidents (32 percent) said their institution has set specific climate-related or environmental sustainability goals. Institutions in the Northeast and West appeared to lead here and on other sustainability-related questions, by region.

    The survey period ended Jan. 3, ahead of Trump taking office for a second term and ahead of his administration issuing a Dear Colleague letter attempting to dramatically widen the scope of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action in admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

    At the time of the survey, nearly all presidents (88 percent) said their institution had been able to maintain or increase previous levels of student diversity since that Supreme Court decision. Looking only at presidents whose institutions previously practiced affirmative action (n=22), closer to half said they’d been able to maintain or increase previous levels of diversity.

    Separately, 10 percent of all presidents said their institution had curtailed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts beyond admissions since the decision, with presidents in the South and Midwest likeliest to say this, by region.

    Groups such as ACE have cautioned against anticipatory compliance to the Education Department’s Dear Colleague letter, which does not have the force and effect of law. Other legal experts note that the letter is not subject to the current preliminary injunction against parts of two White House executive orders that also seek to limit diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

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  • Calif. judge rules adjuncts should be paid for nonclassroom work

    Calif. judge rules adjuncts should be paid for nonclassroom work

    A superior court judge in California ruled last week that adjunct faculty in the Long Beach Community College District should be paid for work they do outside the classroom, including lesson prep, grading and holding office hours, EdSource reported.

    The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed in April 2022 by two part-time professors who argued that they are only paid for time spent teaching in the classroom, and that “failing to compensate adjuncts for out-of-classroom work is a minimum wage violation,” according to the decision by Judge Stuart Rice.

    Rice concurred, noting “a myriad of problems” with the district’s argument that minimum wage rules don’t apply, EdSource reported.

    Still, Rice stayed the decision pending further proceedings, so it doesn’t go into effect immediately. A similar lawsuit is under way in Sacramento County, brought by adjuncts against 22 community college districts, as well as the state community college system and its Board of Governors.

    Adjunct professor John Martin, who chairs the California Part-time Faculty Association and is a plaintiff in the Sacramento case, celebrated the Long Beach ruling.

    “It’s spot-on with what we have been saying,” he told EdSource. “We’re not getting paid for outside [the classroom] work. This has been a long time coming.”

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  • Florida equivalent of DOGE to audit state universities

    Florida equivalent of DOGE to audit state universities

    Florida governor Ron DeSantis is launching a state initiative to cut spending and optimize efficiency modeled after the Elon Musk’s federal Department of Government Efficiency, which has cut billions in contracts at federal agencies, The Orlando Sentinel reported.

    Over the course of a year, Florida’s version of DOGE intends to sunset dozens of state boards and commissions, cut hundreds of jobs, and probe university finances and managerial practices.

    “This is the DOGE-ing of our state university system, and I think it’s going to be good for taxpayers, and it’s ultimately going to be good for students as well,” DeSantis said Monday.

    He added that the state would leverage artificial intelligence to help with the initiative.

    The Republican governor also indicated that the state-level initiative would target what he referred to as “ideological study stuff” in an effort 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. It’s really to teach students how to think and to prepare them to be citizens of our republic.”

    The move comes as the state has already targeted curriculum in recent months, stripping hundreds of courses from the general education offerings of state universities earlier this year. Many of the classes touched on topics such as race, gender, sexuality, and non-Christian religions.

    Florida has also hired multiple GOP officials—some sitting, others who previously served—to lead state universities, including several who have no higher education management experience.

    In a response to DeSantis, who pressed for the need to eliminate inefficiencies, the Florida Democratic Party noted that Republicans have controlled state politics for nearly 30 years and questioned the outgoing governor’s motivations in launching the state equivalent of DOGE.

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  • Top lawyer targets tenure after being sued for ignoring it

    Top lawyer targets tenure after being sued for ignoring it

    Kansas lawmakers are considering a bill that would sap tenure of its meaning for faculty at the state’s public colleges and universities.

    House Bill 2348, introduced this month in the Kansas Legislature, doesn’t specifically say it would ban tenure. But according to the proposed law, “any special benefits, processes or preferences conferred on a faculty member” by tenure “can be at any time revoked” by a higher education institution or the Kansas Board of Regents, which governs the state’s public universities. It also says tenure wouldn’t “create any entitlement, right or property interest in a faculty member’s current, ongoing or future employment.”

    The bill would end such rights not just for future “tenure” earners but for already tenured professors, too. Mallory Bishop, a nontenured instructor at Emporia State University who serves as faculty president, said HB 2348 would “remove the core premise of tenure,” which is “you cannot be fired without cause.”

    “The bill itself seems to remove everything except the name of tenure,” Bishop said.

    It’s part of a growing trend among Republican lawmakers in multiple states seeking to weaken or eliminate tenure in public institutions. Ohio’s Senate passed a bill this year that would weaken tenure, though the House hasn’t yet followed suit. So far, no state has fully banned tenure at public institutions.

    But the Kansas bill is noteworthy for its origins. The Board of Regents and the state’s two top research universities publicly oppose it. So where did it come from?

    Steven Lovett, general counsel for Emporia State University, says he wrote it. And the top of the bill includes one sentence saying a lawmaker requested it on Lovett’s behalf.

    The bill materialized after Emporia State suffered a setback in its continued defense against a federal lawsuit filed by 11 tenured professors whom the university decided to lay off in 2022. A judge—rebuffing the university defendants’ request to toss out the suit—allowed the faculty to move forward with their allegations that they weren’t provided sufficient due process. Emporia State officials, including Lovett himself, are among the defendants in the continuing suit.

    Those faculty were among 23 tenured professors whom Emporia State laid off, citing financial pressures and other possible reasons. The university’s handling of the situation led the American Association of University Professors to censure the institution. The controversy presaged layoffs over the past two years by other U.S. universities, which also cited financial concerns and didn’t spare tenured faculty. West Virginia University made headlines in 2023 for axing a swath of tenured faculty, followed by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Western Illinois University.

    A university spokesperson wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that Emporia State supports tenure and that Lovett’s “submission of this bill comes as a surprise to the university.” But the statement also defended Lovett’s “constitutional right” as “a private citizen” to submit the legislation.

    The statement doesn’t say whether the university supports or opposes the bill. Emporia State didn’t provide an interview or respond to written questions about its position on the legislation.

    Bishop said she’s asked top university officials for their stance but hasn’t received an answer; she said university president Ken Hush told her in a private conversation that even if the bill were to pass, “tenure still exists.” Lovett—saying he was commenting as a private citizen—has told lawmakers that universities that speak out against the bill are violating state law.

    And while the university says it was surprised by Lovett’s submission of the bill, an online video of an earlier legislative hearing shows Hush appearing to urge lawmakers to support similar legislation not long before his top lawyer introduced it.

    Reversing a Court Loss?

    The university attempted to dismiss the laid-off professors’ lawsuit by arguing that tenure didn’t give them a “property right” to continued employment. “Property right,” or “property interest,” is a legal term, and if tenured professors possess this right, it could mean they should have received due process before being ousted, in accordance with the 14th Amendment.

    In December, a U.S. district court judge in Kansas allowed the case to progress, ruling that the professors’ legal complaint sufficiently alleged that the faculty did have so-called property rights to keep their jobs. The case continues.

    As the Kansas Reflector previously reported, a Kansas House Higher Education Budget Committee member asked Hush about the suit during a Jan. 31 hearing. According to a video of the proceedings, Hush said the property right ruling “means an entitlement and job forever, until this is settled in some form. Obviously, as a state agency, we’re working with the attorney general on this. And the other option to correct that is via legislation.”

    About a week later, House Bill 2348 appeared at the request of Representative Steven K. Howe—who chairs the committee Hush spoke to—on behalf of Lovett. Howe declined to comment for this article.

    The bill, however, is currently before the House Judiciary Committee—not Howe’s committee. Lovett advocated for the legislation during a Feb. 11 Judiciary hearing, in which he was introduced as “Mr. Steven Lovett, private citizen.” Lovett told the lawmakers the university didn’t encourage him to write the bill “and had no knowledge of it before I submitted it.”

    He said the bill “eliminates the property right of tenure but not tenure itself.” The idea that tenure is a property right “obligates Kansans to a long-term, unfunded fiscal liability,” he said, adding that the due process required to oust tenured faculty “costs even more.” He argued the First Amendment makes tenure and due process unnecessary to protect academic freedom.

    “A nontenured faculty member enjoys as much legal protection to pursue academic freedom as a tenured faculty member,” he said. Tenure “primarily results in nothing more than personal gain.”

    Lovett said Board of Regents members echoed part of his arguments amid the lawsuit filed by the laid-off professors, arguing that any universities that opposed the bill would be violating state law that says the board manages public universities. As of now, though, a judge has dismissed all board members as defendants, leaving only Lovett, Hush and one retired Emporia State official facing the lawsuit.

    At the end of his speech, Lovett, who’s also an associate professor of business law and ethics at Emporia State, publicly renounced the tenure the university gave him.

    Doug Girod, chancellor of the University of Kansas, followed Lovett at the lectern.

    “I don’t believe I’m breaking the law, because I am here with the full knowledge of my board,” Girod said. Eradicating “meaningful tenure” would mean losing “our best faculty, and we will not be able to replace them,” he said.

    After Kansas State University’s president spoke against the bill, Blake Flanders, the top administrator at the Board of Regents, told lawmakers the board is also against it, citing similar recruitment and retention concerns. Further, his written testimony suggested he doesn’t buy Lovett’s argument that he’s acting as a private citizen.

    He pointed out that Board of Regents policy requires legislative proposals from institutions it governs first be presented to the board for approval “before being submitted to the Legislature.” He wrote, “That policy was not adhered to in the case of this bill.” A board spokesperson didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview or answer written questions about whether the board is pushing for Lovett to be disciplined.

    Even if the bill passes, it’s unclear whether it would actually help Emporia State in its current suit or erase the meaning of tenure for other Kansas faculty who have already earned it. J. Phillip Gragson, attorney for the laid-off professors, said in an email that that would be unconstitutional.

    “While the state can certainly commit higher education academic and economic suicide by passing a bill that eliminates tenure prospectively only if it wants, the state cannot take away tenure rights from those professors who have already obtained tenure without due process,” he wrote.

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  • Federal judge bars DOGE from accessing student data

    Federal judge bars DOGE from accessing student data

    A federal judge temporarily barred Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive student data on Monday, after the American Federation of Teachers sued over privacy concerns. 

    The judge, Deborah Boardman of the District Court of Maryland, said the federal government had not provided convincing evidence that DOGE needed the information to achieve its goals. Last week, in a separate case brought by the University of California Student Association against the Education Department, a different judge declined to bar DOGE from accessing student data, saying the plaintiffs hadn’t shown any harm done. But Boardman, a Biden appointee, argued that DOGE staff being given access was enough to merit the injunction. 

    Education Department staff and student advocates raised concerns about DOGE employees’ access to student loan and financial aid data, which includes troves of uniquely sensitive, personally identifiable information. The injunction prevents the office from executing what Musk has referred to as an “audit” of the student loan system for at least two weeks while the lawsuit is ongoing, as well as from accessing financial aid data.

    “We brought this case to uphold people’s privacy, because when people give their financial and other personal information to the federal government—namely to secure financial aid for their kids to go to college, or to get a student loan—they expect that data to be protected,” AFT president Randi Weingarten wrote in a statement. 

    The court-ordered stoppage is the latest in a string of injunctions issued against Musk and the Trump administration in recent weeks, as lawsuits pile up against the administration’s attempts to swiftly upend the federal bureaucracy. On Friday, a federal judge blocked Trump from enforcing large parts of his executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

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