Tag: Justice

  • See you tomorrow and every other day until there is justice

    See you tomorrow and every other day until there is justice

    This past weekend, braving freezing weather, Serbian students set up nearly 500 stands in dozens of cities, towns and villages across the country. They’ve not been selling Christmas trinkets – they’ve been collecting signatures.

    The action, titled “Raspiši pobedu” (Declare Victory) was less a petition, more a test of support. After more than a year of campus blockades, protests drawing hundreds of thousands, and awareness-raising marches across the country, they wanted to know – does Serbia actually want the elections we’ve been demanding?

    Jana, a first-year philosophy student staffing one of the Belgrade stands, told AFP:

    We are counting to get a rough idea of how many people support us.

    The answer, by all accounts, was emphatic. In Niš alone (Serbia’s third largest city), more than 17,000 signatures were collected. In Kraljevo (a city in south-central Serbia), 16 stands had to print additional materials due to demand. Across the country, the queues kept coming.

    Political science professor Nebojša Vladisavljević sees the students entering a new phase of mobilisation:

    The goal is to turn the support gained through protests into votes and an electoral victory.

    As has often been the case, the protest action has been well timed. On our Christmas Day (Serbia itself follows the Julian calendar), a court had ruled there were no grounds to further prosecute the former construction minister suspected of a “serious crime against public safety” in connection with the Novi Sad canopy collapse that killed 16 people and triggered the entire movement.

    Since then, three investigations have been launched. Only one has resulted in an indictment confirmed by a court – and now another avenue of accountability has closed.

    A week earlier, thousands had gathered in Novi Pazar – Serbia’s youngest town demographically, with a majority Bosniak Muslim population – for the first protest of its kind there. The immediate cause was brutal – Momčilo Zelenbaba, who travelled 190 kilometres from Jagodina to attend, explained:

    I came because 200 students lost their status and 30 professors lost their jobs.

    Dženana Ahmetović, a student protester, framed the stakes:

    We are here today to send a message to Serbia that we fight for an interim management and the survival of our university. This concerns all of us, not only Novi Pazar.

    The Novi Pazar students had become famous across Serbia after walking for 16 days – one day for each victim – to join the anniversary commemoration in Novi Sad on 1 November. Now they were paying the price for that solidarity – and students from across the country were coming to stand with them in return.

    Nearly two-thirds of citizens, regardless of political affiliation, see snap elections as a way out of the crisis. For now, President Vučić has said elections won’t be held before late 2026. The students have other plans.

    No easy framing

    Back in January 2025, I wrote about the student protests as they called their first general strike – and at the time, I hedged, suggesting you could “pretty much flip a coin” on whether the movement would bring down the government or fizzle out over concerns about the academic year.

    It turns out I was too cautious. The students didn’t just survive – they’ve forced the question of snap elections onto the agenda and positioned themselves as a serious electoral force.

    But the path from those January blockades to this past weekend’s signature campaign has been anything but straightforward, and the story is harder to tell than the familiar framing would suggest.

    Western media, when it has covered the protests at all, has often reached for a familiar narrative – plucky pro-European youth versus authoritarian regime backed by Russia.

    Vučić himself encouraged this framing, repeatedly claiming the protests were a Western-orchestrated “color revolution” and that:

    …President Putin had clearly explained everything he needed to know about it in just three sentences.

    But the students who occupied faculties across Serbia weren’t waving EU flags. In fact, when a group tried to raise the EU flag during a vigil in Belgrade, they were surrounded, shouted at, and forced to leave – while Orthodox crosses, references to Kosovo, and students wearing traditional šajkača caps became common features of the protest aesthetic, while the organisers said nothing.

    Academics have called this “depoliticization as strategy” – the deliberate bracketing of partisan and ideological markers to claim moral legitimacy in an environment where all political institutions are compromised.

    This is a movement that has rejected the regime but also rejected the opposition, that demanded elections but refused to endorse any candidate, that cycled to Strasbourg to petition the European Parliament, but wouldn’t let anyone carry a European flag at home.

    When opposition leaders attempted to join protests, they were met with suspicion and outright rejection – student “plenums” have explicitly asked political parties to stay away, banned party insignia, and have refused to let politicians speak.

    One student in the documentary Wake up, Serbia! puts the generational logic directly:

    Our parents fought during the ’90s and 2000. They accomplished something. They brought in democracy. Now we have problems with democracy. Now it’s our turn to fight to make it less corrupt.

    Another is emphatic about rejecting old divisions:

    We don’t care if the guy representing us is gonna be a Catholic, a Muslim, Christian, Indian guy, whatever. We want to change this system and we don’t want to focus on bringing back Kosovo or seeing who is Croatian in our friend group and who is from Bosnia. We don’t care about that. We care about the current situation in Serbia.

    The academic analysis puts it formally:

    …what appeared as an ‘anti-political’ stance was more accurately an anti-partisan strategy, shaped by the authoritarian context that rendered conventional political participation ineffective.

    The students claimed to be about “justice, not politics.” And yet they articulated explicitly political demands – accountability, resignations, investigations, and eventually snap elections.

    The tensions were real. While the plenums formally disavowed ideological branding, progressive-leaning groups and pro-EU civil society actors were marginalised, sometimes physically removed – even as nationalist symbols were tolerated. The documentary captures one revealing exchange about violence:

    We don’t want to be responsible for violence as an organization of students.

    But you want violence?

    Yes, I literally answered that. I don’t want to be labeled as an aggressive student. I would love to be labeled as an aggressive citizen.

    And the challenges of direct democracy are frankly acknowledged:

    The process of making decisions is very, very slow. Show up to the plenary session, and then we debate for 4 and a half hours and come to no conclusion. Okay, let’s have another plenary session. 4 hours, no conclusion.

    What the regime threw at them

    Throughout 2025, the government’s response has drawn on every tool in the authoritarian playbook – and a few that seemed improvised on the spot.

    Violence

    On 15 March, somewhere between 275,000 and 325,000 people gathered in Belgrade for the “15th for 15” protest – the largest mass demonstration in modern Serbian history. At 19:11, the crowd fell into commemorative silence. What happened next remains contested, but accounts from those present are astonishing. Ivana Ilic Sunderic, a veteran of Serbian activism:

    I have been going to protests for 30 years but I’ve never heard anything like this. A sound rolling toward us, a whiz… very frightening, like a sound from hell.

    Evidence surfaced of a US-made Long Range Acoustic Device mounted on a Gendarmerie vehicle. Interior minister Ivica Dacic dismissed the devices as “loudspeakers available on eBay.” Vučić issued a high-stakes ultimatum:

    If there was a single piece of evidence that a sound cannon was used against demonstrators, then I would no longer be president.

    In June, the human rights organisation Earshot published forensic analysis concluding it was highly likely that protesters were subjected to a targeted attack using a directional acoustic weapon. Vučić remains president.

    By June, on Vidovdan – the national holiday commemorating the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, freighted with nationalist symbolism – riot police charged a largely peaceful protest of 140,000 people, using pepper spray, shields and batons. Student Luka Mihajlović became a symbol of the crackdown – beaten and arrested while standing calmly with hands raised.

    Institutional warfare

    The government adopted amendments to the Higher Education Law in March, promising a 20 per cent budget increase and 50 per cent tuition fee reduction – but in parallel came Regulation 5/35, altering the ratio of teaching to research hours from 20:20 to 35:5.

    Because research was no longer compensated, and blockades prevented teaching, professors supporting the protests would receive only 12.5 per cent of their usual salary – roughly €70 a month:

    This is obviously a try to break us down, but we are trying to endure and to support our students in spite of the punishments.

    By May, a government Working Group was drafting yet another Higher Education Law – this one allowing foreign universities to operate without local accreditation while receiving state subsidies, and introducing a voucher system forcing state faculties to compete with private ones.

    Jelena Teodorović (an Associate Professor at the Faculty of education, University of Kragujevac) warned of:

    …a fierce fight for financing that would force faculties to make studying faster and easier, ultimately resulting in worthless knowledge and worthless diplomas.

    Vučić, in Niš, made his preferences clear:

    Private faculties have shown to be significantly more stable and serious.

    A BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network) investigation published in December documented systematic retaliation – hundreds fired or demoted, over 100 teachers and 25 school directors dismissed for supporting the protests, and criminal charges launched against University of Belgrade rector Vladan Đokić.

    Last week, thousands gathered in Novi Pazar after the university administration revoked student status for 200 students absent due to protests and dismissed 30 professors. One public sector worker describes the coercion around pro-government rallies:

    We have a rally tomorrow, are you going? I’m not going. But, your contract is expiring.

    Counter-mobilisation

    Throughout 2025, the government has maintained a surreal counter-protest camp known as “Ćaciland” – part propaganda tool, part dark comedy. One student on the inhabitants argues they’re not students:

    They are adults. There are people 50 plus years old. It’s so transparent that they are protected by the government and actually sent there by the government.

    Another describes attempts to interview residents:

    People were interviewing people in the camp and they were like, “Oh, no, no, no, no.” Hiding their faces, being embarrassed. And the ones who spoke were like, “Oh yeah, I’m not going to the faculty for the past 2 years. I just came here.” Like, €200 a day – that sounds like a good deal.

    Some say the camp’s composition was, in fact, more sinister than laughable:

    Members of the brigade that was dismembered after Milošević left in 2000 – the brigade that actually killed Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić – the veterans of that brigade are right now supporting the students 2.0.

    Co-option

    The regime has repeatedly tried to reframe itself as being on the same side as the students – just against “lower-level corruption.”

    Vučić launched what he branded a new “anti-corruption offensive,” conveniently timed to coincide with the peak of protests. Pro-government commentators began echoing student demands for transparency, presenting Vučić as a fellow enemy of the oligarchs. Several mid-level officials were dismissed, and state media framed these changes as evidence that the president was listening.

    During a visit to Sremska Mitrovica, Vučić declared:

    I trust these young people. I trust them more than those who put them up to this. People will no longer tolerate it – that is why they want us to change. They do not want those who destroyed the country to come to power. They want none of them. But they do want us – different, better, changed.

    The European dimension

    On 3 April, eighty students set off on bicycles from Novi Sad, beginning a 13-day journey to Strasbourg. Their stated mission:

    For the world to hear the voice of Serbia. For European institutions to put pressure on the authorities.

    It was a pragmatic calculation, not an ideological embrace – the students needed external pressure that the regime couldn’t suppress domestically.

    Their letter to French President Emmanuel Macron combined political clarity with poetic determination:

    We are not here to complain, but to remind you that hope still moves – and sometimes, it moves on two wheels. We refused to give up; every turn of the pedals was a protest against fear.

    The European Parliament responded in May with a resolution acknowledging the “legitimacy of student protest demands” and calling for an investigation into the sonic weapon allegations – 419 votes in favour. European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos:

    Corruption and irresponsibility are the two main triggers of the protests. They also represent the motive for dissatisfaction due to a lack of democracy, the enslavement of the media, and the impunity of politicians.

    By October, the Parliament had adopted what was described as the “harshest ever” resolution towards the Serbian regime – 457 votes in favour, featuring express support for student demands, denunciation of state repression, explicit condemnation of sonic weapons and Pegasus spyware, and a call for an EU fact-finding mission. MEP Irena Joveva said that the time of impunity for autocrats in Belgrade was coming to an end:

    We see this grotesque irony that those who order beatings call the beaten people Nazis, inventing fake ćaci students, while real students are bleeding for democracy.

    The regime’s media apparatus weaponised every European intervention, accusing the students of “selling out to Brussels” and labelling them “traitors.” Students who had carefully distanced themselves from ideological affiliation found themselves simultaneously supported by EU progressives and demonised by nationalist-authoritarian actors – their rhetorical insistence on neutrality was becoming increasingly untenable.

    The electoral gambit

    In April, moving from demands for accountability to wider demands, student plenums issued a declaration that changed the terms entirely:

    Government corruption is so deeply rooted that no functional reform is possible within the current institutional framework. Only new elections – conducted under fair and monitored conditions – can open the path to justice.

    The students had gone from demanding investigations to demanding regime change.

    November 1st marked a year since the canopy collapse. At exactly 11:52 AM, tens of thousands stood in 16 minutes of silence – one minute for each victim. Independent observers placed the Novi Sad crowd at approximately 100,000. Dijana Hrka, mother of 27-year-old victim Stefan, addressed the crowds:

    I need to know who killed my child so I can have a little peace. I am looking for justice. I want no other mother to go through what I am going through.

    A giant banner unfurled on Petrovaradin Fortress:

    See you tomorrow and every other day until there is justice.

    Vučić issued a rare televised apology:

    I apologize – both to students and to protesters, as well as to others with whom I disagreed.

    The students were unmoved. State-owned Serbian Railways suspended train traffic to Novi Sad on the day of the protest, citing an alleged bomb threat.

    Student plenums have now announced support for a civic electoral list while emphasising that students themselves won’t appear as candidates – they demand independent monitoring, transparent campaign financing, and genuine media pluralism, but they still refuse to endorse any party. Sociologist Zoran Gavrilović:

    We are witnessing the formation of a serious electoral player, because the students have become Vučić’s most serious competitor.

    The open question

    The academic analysis identifies both the strength and the risk:

    …without institutional continuity, moral mobilization risks dissipation. Without mechanisms to translate civic power into structural change, legitimacy may erode once the moment passes.

    One student puts it plainly:

    This has outgrown the student-led protests. We can do everything still – all of the organisation, the logistics – but we can’t do it all on our own. We need help for this next step.

    Another on the long game:

    We have to wake up as many people as we can until the next elections so that we can actually win. And if the election gets stolen again like they did in 2000, then we can violently protest.

    And another, more hopefully:

    You’re not aware of how many people have been woken up from a very long sleep here in Serbia. We are the students that managed to wake up the whole nation. Now it’s up to the citizens of Serbia to decide what will happen next.

    For those of us who follow student movements, there are lessons here – though perhaps not the ones we expected. The power of decentralisation is real – the movement was almost impossible to decapitate through targeted arrests or co-option precisely because it had no leaders. The importance of tactical evolution is also clear – from blockades to silent vigils to 24-hour road closures to bicycle journeys to signature campaigns, each phase wrong-footed the authorities.

    But the limits of “depoliticisation” have also been visible. Refusing to build political infrastructure, rejecting alliances with compromised but potentially useful actors, tolerating some ideological currents while excluding others – the movement may have constrained its own transformative potential.

    This weekend’s signature campaign suggests they know this. The paradox now is whether a movement built on rejecting politics can win at it.

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  • As Justice Department priorities shift, concerns about protection of students’ civil rights escalate

    As Justice Department priorities shift, concerns about protection of students’ civil rights escalate

    by Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report
    December 14, 2025

    The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window. 

    The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor.

    Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a ban on the practice known as seclusion, in which children, typically those with disabilities, are involuntarily isolated and confined, often after emotional outbursts. 

    Even after seeing the video, no legislators were willing to go as far as a ban. Nor were they when Margolis tried again a few years later.

    In 2021, however, the federal Justice Department concluded an investigation into a Maryland school district and found more than 7,000 cases of unnecessary restraint and seclusion in a two-and-a-half-year period. 

    Four months later, Maryland lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting seclusion in the state’s public schools, with nearly unanimous support.

    “I can’t really overstate the impact that Justice can have,” said Margolis. “They have this authority that is really helpful to those of us who are on the ground doing this work.”

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    Within the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a small office devoted to educational issues, including seclusion, as well as desegregation and racial harassment. The division intentionally chooses cases with potential for high impact and actively monitors places it has investigated to ensure they’re following through with changes. When the Educational Opportunities Section acts, educators and policymakers take notice.

    Now, however, the Trump administration is wielding the power of the Justice Department in new and, some say, extreme ways. Hundreds of career staffers, including most of those who worked on education cases, have resigned. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also has been decimated, largely through layoffs. The two offices traditionally have worked closely together to enforce civil rights protections for students. The result is a potentially lasting shift in how the nation’s top law enforcement agency handles issues that affect public school students, including millions who have disabilities. 

    “There are those who would say that this is an aberration, and that when it’s over, things will go back to the way they were,” said Frederick Lawrence, a lecturer at Georgetown Law and former assistant U.S. attorney under President Ronald Reagan. “My experience is that the river only flows in one direction, and things never go back to the way they were.”

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

    The Justice Department’s lawyers historically have worked on a few dozen education cases at once, concentrating on combating sexual harassment, racial discrimination against Black and Latino students, restraint and seclusion, and failure to provide adequate services to English learners. 

    In the last 11 months, however, the agency has sued over and opened investigations into concerns about antisemitism, transgender policies and bias against white people at schools. It sued at least six states for offering discounted tuition to undocumented immigrants and pressured the president of the University of Virginia to resign as part of an investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies. And it joined other federal departments to form a special Title IX investigations team to protect students from what the administration called the “pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities.”  

    As the Educational Opportunity Section’s mission shifted, it shrunk in size. In January, before President Donald Trump took office, about 40 lawyers tackled education issues. In the spring, the U.S. Senate confirmed Harmeet Dhillon as leader of the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon founded the conservative Center for American Liberty, which describes itself as “defending civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations.”

    After her confirmation, staff who weren’t political appointees began resigning en masse, concerned Dhillon would promote only the administration’s agenda. 

    By June, no more than five of the 40 lawyers were left, according to former employees. Some new staff have been hired or reassigned to the section, but the head count remains well below usual. It’s far from enough to sustain the typical workload, said Shaheena Simons, who was chief of the Educational Opportunities Section until she resigned in April. “There’s just no way the division can function with that level of staffing. It’s just impossible,” said Simons, who took over the section in 2016. “The investigations aren’t going to happen. Remedies aren’t going to be sought.” 

    Department officials responded to a list of questions from The Hechinger Report about changes to their handling of student civil rights protection with “no comment.” 

    The Department of Justice, including its educational work, has always been somewhat subject to White House interests, said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. During President Joe Biden’s term, for example, the agency pursued allegations of discrimination against transgender students, reflecting administration priorities. 

    McCluskey added, though, that the Trump administration is more aggressive in how it is pursuing its goals and is bypassing typical protocols, noting that in many cases “it’s like they’ve already decided the outcome.”  

    Related: Which schools and colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration?

    An investigation into allegations of antisemitism at the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, took just 81 days before the department concluded the school had violated federal law. DOJ investigations typically have taken years, not months, to complete. 

    Lawrence, who also serves as president of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, said he could not speak to specific investigations, but the UCLA timeline “does suggest a rather accelerated process.”

    A federal judge recently ruled that the administration could not use the findings from its UCLA investigation as a reason to fine the university $1.2 billion, which if paid would have unlocked frozen federal research funding. She wrote that the administration was using a playbook “of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding.” 

    As new investigations are opened, older ones remain unresolved, including one of practices in Colorado’s Douglas County Public Schools.

    In 2022, Disability Law Colorado submitted a complaint to the Justice Department about the district’s use of seclusion, as well as restraint, where school employees physically restrict a student’s movement.

    The following year, three other families sued the school system, alleging racial discrimination against their children. The students were repeatedly called monkeys and the N-word, threatened with lynchings and “made by teachers to argue the benefits of Jim Crow laws,” according to the complaint.

    Related: Red school boards in a blue state asked Trump for help — and got it

    The Department of Justice decided to investigate both issues. Four staffers were assigned to the restraint and seclusion investigation, said Emily Harvey, co-legal director at Disability Law Colorado.  

    As part of the inquiry, Justice officials visited the district twice. The second time was during the final week of Biden’s presidency. 

    After that visit, Douglas County didn’t hear anything about the investigation from the Trump administration until a mid-May email. “Good morning,” it read. “We are having some staffing changes.”

    The email, which The Hechinger Report obtained through a public records request, said that going forward, the district could contact two staffers on the restraint and seclusion case. The racial harassment case would be reduced to only one employee until another Justice staffer returned from leave in the fall. 

    One Douglas County parent, who asked her name be withheld because she is afraid of retaliation from the district, said that although she knew the investigation could take a couple of years, the longer it goes without a resolution, the more children could be harmed. 

    “The justice system is just moving so incredibly slow,” she said. 

    The parent said she knows of dozens of families who have dealt with restraint and seclusion issues in the district. Her own son, she said, was secluded in kindergarten. “He was scared of the person who put him in there. He kept saying, ‘I can’t go back,’” she said. “I never envisioned, until my son was secluded, a world where the school would not care about my child.” 

    When Harvey, of Disability Law Colorado, first contacted the Department of Justice, she hoped for statewide reform. She wanted to see a ban on seclusion, like Margolis had helped secure in Maryland, and for the state to commit to more accurate tracking of use of restraints. The way Colorado law is written, restraints must be recorded only if they last more than a minute. Douglas County, the second largest in the state with 62,000 students, reported 582 restraints to the Colorado Department of Education in the 2023-24 school year. The number of shorter-term restraints, however, is unknown. 

    “We believe this is an arbitrary distinction,” Harvey said. “My hope was that the Department of Justice would potentially weigh in on that as a violation” of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    Related: How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year

    Douglas County school administrators said in a statement to The Hechinger Report that their “focus is on taking care of each and every one of our students” and that they take all concerns seriously. 

    They have worked with the federal government to set up school visits and interviews during their visits, according to emails from January. 

    Subsequent emails between district and federal officials describe a phone call over the summer and requests for additional documents. Another DOJ employee was included in the messages.

    There are signs that the Justice Department is not abandoning restraint and seclusion work, said Guy Stephens, founder of the national advocacy group Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint. A webpage about previous cases that was removed after Trump took office has been restored, and in July, the DOJ announced a settlement with a Michigan district over these issues.

    Yet Stephens has concerns. “There are still people very, very dedicated to this work and the mission of this work, but it’s very hard to work in a system that is shifting and reprioritizing,” he said.

    Former DOJ employees worry that it might not only be future investigations that are markedly different. The department has historically monitored places where it has reached agreements that demand corrective action, rewriting them if districts or colleges fail to live up to their promises. It also provides support to achieve the new goals. Now, provisions written into past resolutions might be at odds with Trump administration actions, and oversight of some settlements is ending early.

    Take, for instance, a DOJ investigation into Vermont’s Elmore-Morristown Unified Union School District over allegations of race-based harassment against Black students. Investigators found that the district didn’t have a way to handle harassment or discrimination not targeted at a specific person, according to David Bickford, the school board chairman. 

    As part of a settlement agreement signed two weeks before Trump was inaugurated, the district agreed to provide staff training on implicit bias. A Trump executive order, however, calls for eliminating federal funding for anyone that discusses such a concept in schools. 

    Bickford said that the district has complied with everything the settlement called for, including professional development. 

    The investigation itself, he said, was extremely thorough, and required handing over nearly a thousand pages of documentation. Since then, the district has sent regular reports to the department but has not received any lengthy response or input, Bickford said. He also noted there had been staffing changes in who the district reports to. 

    Related: Federal policies risk worsening an already dire rural teacher shortage

    Justice officials decided to end supervision of a 2023 settlement early following a racial harassment investigation in another Vermont district, Twin Valley. The original plan was to monitor the district for three years. In October 2024, investigators visited the district to check in. In a letter two months later, officials noted that while Twin Valley had made significant progress, they still had several areas of concern, including how the district investigated complaints, as well as “persistent biased language and behavior on the basis of multiple protected classifications; a pervasive culture of sexism; and lack of consistent and effective adult response to biased language and behavior.” 

    Even so, the department was pleased overall with its visit, said Bill Bazyk, superintendent of Windham Southwest Supervisory Union, which includes Twin Valley. “But things certainly sped up after the election,” said Bazyk, who started his job after the case had been settled.

    Throughout the spring, Bayzk and his staff checked in with the department, and in May the district was told oversight of the settlement would end a year early, as Twin Valley had fully complied with the terms. 

    “We were doing all the right things,” Bayzk said, noting that the district’s work on diversity and equity is ongoing. “We took the settlement very seriously.”

    The investigation began in 2021 after the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont filed a complaint. Legal Director Lia Ernst said it is possible that Twin Valley resolved those lingering problems between December and May, stressing that it’s impossible to know from the outside. But still, she said, there is a larger pattern of ambivalence to the Justice Department’s approach to civil rights complaints.  

    “It is disappointing to see that one ending early,” she said. “It is my hope that it is ending early because Twin Valley has made so much progress, but it is my fear that it is ending early because DOJ just doesn’t care.” 

    Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at [email protected] or on Signal: @sbutry.04.

    This story about the Justice Department was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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  • Nicola Rollock: Progress on racial justice and equity in higher education is “artificial”

    Nicola Rollock: Progress on racial justice and equity in higher education is “artificial”

    Nearly seven years ago, in February 2019, UCU published Staying Power, an investigation into the professional experiences of 20 Black woman professors in UK higher education, authored by Nicola Rollock. At the time, the total number of UK Black women professors numbered only 25.

    Against the backdrop of an often highly hierarchical higher education academic culture that assumes capacity for high workloads, and with numerous unwritten codes of conduct, many of Rollock’s respondents documented instances of bullying, racial stereotyping, low-level aggressive behaviour and the constant tacit expectation to prove themselves, leading to feelings of stress, anxiety, exhaustion and burnout. But despite these experiences, they had navigated a career path to professorship, adopting strategies to advance their careers, while absorbing setbacks and blockages strewn in their paths.

    In the intervening years, the conversation about race, equity and higher education intensified. Later in 2019 recent graduates Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi published Taking up space, which documented their experiences as Black students at the University of Cambridge. In October of that year the Equality and Human Rights Commission published the findings of a national investigation into racial harassment in universities.

    The UK higher education sector was pursuing action on race awarding gaps, and developing the Race Equality Charter to embed anti-racist practice in institutions. Students’ unions campaigned for ethnic and cultural diversity in the curriculum, and for bursaries and additional support to open up pathways for Black students into research careers. Senior appointments were made to spearhead equality, diversity and inclusion, and commitments to change were published. In 2020, Rollock curated Phenomenal women: portraits of Black female professors, a landmark photography exhibition at London Southbank Centre which then went on to be displayed at the University of Cambridge.

    The conversation reached a peak in the wake of the global outcry following the murder of George Floyd in the US in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic and during the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. And while it was understood that work on anti-racism was often slow, and under-resourced, there was a sense at the time that some in the sector were prepared both to confront its history and adjust its practice and culture in the present.

    Looking around today, the picture seems much more muted. There’s been political backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, and against the notion of institutional and structural racism more generally. “Woke” is more frequently heard as a term of criticism rather than approbation. And though 97 institutions have signed up to the Race Equality Charter and work on awarding gaps has been integrated into access and participation policy, the sense of urgency in the national anti-racism agenda has ebbed.

    What lies beneath the cycle

    For Nicola Rollock, who now divides her time between a professorship in social policy and race at Kings College London, and consultancy and public speaking, this cycle is nothing new. Earlier in her career she was commissioned by the Runnymede Trust to investigate the extent to which the recommendations of the Macpherson inquiry (which followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the failure of the Metropolitan Police to bring his killers to justice) had been implemented in the decade following its publication.

    Some of the recommendations were relatively straightforward: senior investigating officers (SIOs) should be appointed when there is a murder investigation – tick. Families should be assigned a family liaison officer, when they have experienced a murder – tick,” she says. “But the recommendations pertaining to race – disparities in stop and search, the recruitment, retention and progression of Black and minority ethnic officers – the data had barely moved over the ten year period between 1999 and 2008–9. I was stunned. At the time, I couldn’t understand how that was possible.

    Rollock’s subsequent work has sought to explain why, despite periodic bouts of collective will to action on racism, it persists – and to lay bare the structures and behaviours that allow it to persist even as the white majority claims to be committed to eradicating it. In 2023 she published The Racial Code – a genre-busting tour de force that forensically unpacks the various ways that organisations and individuals perform racial justice in ways that continually fail to achieve a meaningful impact, told through the medium of short stories and vignettes that offer insight into what it feels like to experience racism.

    One story in particular, set in a university committee meeting, at which a Black academic is finally awarded a long-awaited (and inadequate) promotion, and responds in the only way she feels is open to her, offers a particularly forceful insight into the frustration felt by Black women in academia at what can feel like being simultaneously undervalued and expected to be grateful to be there at all. Recurring motifs throughout the book, such as the Count Me In! diversity awards – embraced with enthusiasm by white characters and viewed with deep scepticism by Black ones – demonstrate the ways that while racism may manifest subtle differences across different contexts and industries, it thrives everywhere in shallow and performative efforts to tackle it.

    For Rollock, the choice of fiction as a medium is a deliberate effort to change hearts as well as minds. Though each of the propositions offered in her stories are grounded in evidence; they are, indeed, the opposite of fictional, the story format affords much greater opportunity for fostering empathetic understanding:

    Many of us know the data, we know the headlines, but we don’t know about the people behind the headlines: what is it like to be part of a group that is under-represented? How does it feel to be overlooked for promotion despite possessing the right qualifications and experience? I don’t think we truly understand what it is to fight, to strategise, to manage disappointment predicated on the colour of one’s skin. For me, storytelling is a way of providing that connection. It is a way of giving life to feelings.

    For white readers, The Racial Code offers a glimmer of insight into the experience of marginalisation. And for Black readers, it offers a language and a way of understanding and giving coherence to experiences of racism.

    Where we are now

    Here, Nicola Rollock offers her often sobering reflections on the last six years in response to my prompts – sharing her observations of the same patterns of injustice she has been analysing throughout her career.

    Debbie McVitty: Since 2019–20 we’ve seen a lot of focus on EDI in universities and on racial justice specifically – a number of senior appointments, public commitments, working groups and initiatives. And then, the political backlash, the anti-woke agenda, the attacks on “DEI” – how do you make sense of the period we’ve been through? Has there been “progress”? How should we understand the nature of that progress, if so? And what do we need to be wary of?

    Nicola Rollock: I have long been interested in why change happens at certain moments: what are the factors that enable change and what is the context in which it is most likely to occur. This is largely influenced by my work on the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry when, as a young researcher, I believed that we were at a historic turning point when it came to racial justice only to see, in 2009, political commitment subsequently and deliberately wane.

    In 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, I was simultaneously disturbed by what had happened and attentive to people’s reaction. Many white people described themselves as having “woken up” to the traumas of racism as a result of his death. Books on race and racism rapidly sold out and I couldn’t help but wonder, where on earth have you been, that you’re only waking up now? I – and others who work on these issues – have been sat in meetings with you, in board rooms, universities, in Parliament, have marched on the streets repeatedly making a case for our dignity, for respect, for equity – and it is only now that you decide that you are waking up?

    What happened around Floyd deeply occupied my mind. For a long time, I played with the idea of a film set in a dystopian future where Black communities agree to deliberately sacrifice the life of a Black man or woman every five years to be murdered by a white person in the most horrific of circumstances. The ordeal would be recorded and shared to ensure broad reach and the fact of the crime would have to be unequivocal to ensure that white minds were convinced by the stark racist brutality of what had occurred.

    The aim of the sacrifice? To keep the fact of racism alive in the minds of those who, by and large, have the most power to implement the type of change that racially minoritised groups demand.This dynamic is in itself, of course, perverse: the idea of begging for change that history indicates is unlikely to come in the form that we want. The approach then must be not to beg for change but to enable or force it in some other, more agentic way that centres our humanity, our dignity and wellbeing.

    Moving back to reality, I would argue that there has been a complacency on the part of liberal whites about the prevalence and permanence of racism and how it operates which is why so many were shocked and awakened when Floyd was murdered. This complacency is also endemic within politics. Politicians on the left of the spectrum have not shown sufficient competence or leadership around racial justice and have failed to be proactive in fostering equity and good relations between communities. Those on the right continue to draw on superficial markers to indicate racial progress, such as pointing to the ethnic mix of the Cabinet, or permitting flimsy and dangerous comments about racism or racially minoritised communities to persist.

    Both sets of positions keep us, as a society, racially illiterate and naive and bickering amongst ourselves while the radical right builds momentum with a comparatively strong narrative. We are now in a position where those on the left and the right of the political spectrum are acting in response to the radical right. These are dark times.

    Universities themselves are, of course, subject to political pressure and regulation but even taking account of this, I would argue that the lens or understanding of racial justice within the sector is fundamentally flawed. Too often, universities achieve awards or recognition for equity-related initiatives which are then (mis)used as part of their PR branding even while their racially minoritised staff continue to suffer. Or artificial targets are established as aspirational benchmarks for change.

    This is most evident in the discussions surrounding the representation of Black female professors. In the years following my research, I have observed a fixation with increasing the number of these academics while ignoring their actual representation. So for example, in 2019–20 the academic year in which Floyd was murdered, there were 40 Black female professors in total (i.e. UK and non-UK nationals) within UK universities. They made up just 2 per cent of the Black female academic population. Compared with other reported ethnic groups, Black female academics were the least likely of all female academics to be professors as a proportion of their population.

    Fast forward to the 2022–23 figures which were published in 2024, the most recent year available at the time of this interview. They show that the number of Black female professors increased to 55 but when we look at their representation only 1.8 per cent of Black female scholars were professors – a decrease from 2019–20. And, in both academic years, Black female professors made up the smallest percentage of the female professoriate overall (0.6 percent in 2019-20 and 0.8 percent in 2022-23). In other words, the representation of Black female professors as a group remains relatively static in the context of changes to the broader professoriate. Numbers alone won’t show us this and, in fact, perpetuate a false narrative of progress. It indicates that current interventions to increase the representation of Black female professors are not working – or, at best, are maintaining the status quo – and we are overlooking the levers that really impact change.

    Universities themselves are responsible for this “artificial progress” narrative via their press releases which too many of us are quick to consume as fact. For example, a university will announce the first Black professor of, say, Racially Marginalised Writing and we fall over ourselves in jubilation ignoring the fact that the university and the academic choose the professorial title (it is arbitrary) and, that there is a Black academic at the university down the road who is Professor of Global Majority Writing covering exactly the same themes as their newly appointed peer.

    The same can be said of press releases about appointments of the “youngest” professor within an institution or nationally. We never ask, the youngest of how many or, how do you know, given that official statistics do not show race by age group. Look closely and you may well find that there are no more than say five Black professors at the institution and most were appointed in the last couple of years. Is being the youngest of five a radical enough basis for celebrating advancement? I would suggest not.

    Debbie McVitty: Staying power – like The Racial Code – was powerful in its capturing and articulation of the everyday frustrations and the burdens of being marginalised, but with the clear link to structural and organisational systems that enable those problematic interpersonal relationships and to some extent seem to allow or endorse their hiding in plain sight. How helpful is the concept of “lived experience” as data to prompt institutional change, or in what conditions is it most useful?

    Nicola Rollock: I am fundamentally uncomfortable with the phrase “lived experience.” In the context of race, the term forces underserved groups to pronounce their status – as if for inspection to satisfy the whims of others when the fact is it is those others who are not being sufficiently attentive to inequity. We end up compensating for their failures. My concern with regard to race is that lived experience becomes the benchmark for intervention and standards: it is seen as sufficient that an initiative about race includes or is led by some Black people irrespective of their subject specialism or expertise. The fact that racial justice is a subject specialism is ignored. When we foreground lived experience over subject specialism, the objective is not real change, it is tokenism. I would like to see the subject of racial justice treated with the same degree of rigour and seriousness as we treat, say science or mathematics.

    Debbie McVitty: Another really critical theme across both Staying Power and The Racial Code is agency – the coping tactics and strategies Black women (and men) use to function in what they can often experience as a hostile, toxic cultural environment, whether that’s seeking out allies, being highly strategic and dogged about promotion processes, developing their own analytical framework to help them make sense of their experience, and so on. Covid in particular drove a conversation about work-life balance, wellbeing and compassionate leadership – do you think Black women in academia have been in a position to benefit from any of that? Have the go-to coping strategies changed as a result?

    Nicola Rollock: Universities are not places which foreground well-being. Lunchtime yoga sessions or tips about how to improve work-life balance tend to be rendered meaningless in a context where concerns about financial stability, student numbers, political unrest and national and international performance tables take precedence. So many of us have filled in forms aimed at capturing how we spend our time as academics while being aware that they are performative: they do not reflect the breadth of the activities that really take up our time.

    I find that Black scholars are often contacted to save failed relationships between white supervisors and Black doctoral students or to offer mentorship and support to Black students and junior colleagues. Then there are reference requests from Black scholars from across the globe who you want to support in the spirit of fighting the system and giving back. And this can be on top of the organisational challenges that you yourself are facing. None of this is documented anywhere. We don’t receive time off in lieu or financial bonuses for this work. It often sits casually under the often uninterrogated banner of “service.” In short, if anyone is interested in work-life balance, they should avoid academia.

    Debbie McVitty: One of the things we have unfortunately learned from the past six years is that engagement with racial justice does tend to ebb and flow and is subject to political winds and whims. What can be done to keep institutional leadership focused on these issues and keep working on building more just institutions? How can racial justice work become more sustainable?

    Nicola Rollock: Public and political commitment to EDI or what we might think of more broadly as equity, tends to move in waves and as a reaction to external pressures or pinch points. This is concerning for several reasons not least because it ignores the data and evidence about the persistence of inequity whether by social class, gender, disability.

    Commitment to advancing racial justice varies depending on one’s racial identity and understanding of the issues. Institutions will only engage with it seriously if they are compelled to do so and if there are consequences for not doing so. We saw this with the awarding gap.

    I would also say, perhaps controversially, that we racially minoritised groups need to more readily accept the history and characteristics of racial injustice. For example, if a white senior leader says they refuse to accept institutional racism, my view is that we should not spend our energy trying to convince them otherwise. We only deplete ourselves and waste time. Instead, look for pinch points or strategic points of intervention which might also work to that senior leader’s interests.

    We must also establish accurate and more stringent goals as our ambitions for racial progress and not allow our desperation for change to lessen our standards. For example, I have spent a considerable amount of time recently working in policing. Whenever something goes wrong around race, there are those who demand the Commissioner’s resignation. Why? Do we really think the next person to be appointed is going to offer a miracle transformation on race? And what influence do we really have on the appointment’s process? I am not opposed to calling for anyone’s resignation but it has to be done as part of a carefully thought through, strategic plan as opposed to being an act of frustration. I am aware however that acts of frustration are better meat for newspaper headlines over my efforts to foreground strategy and radical change.

    There is a further point that your question does not speak to which is the need for self-affirmation and self-care. I think we need to be better at working out what we want for ourselves that is not contingent on our arguing with white stakeholders and which holds on to and foregrounds our dignity, well-being and humanity. This is something I wish I had understood before I entered the workplace and specialised in social policy and race. As much as I love research, it would have probably led to my making different career choices.

    One key way in which I believe this work can be sustained is by paying closer attention to our “Elders” – those academics, activists and campaigners who have already fought battles and had arguments from which we should learn and build upon. I would like to see greater integration and connection with what we plan to do today and tomorrow informed by what happened yesterday.

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  • Virginia lawmakers call for audit of UVA’s Justice Department deal

    Virginia lawmakers call for audit of UVA’s Justice Department deal

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    Dive Brief:

    • Two Democratic leaders in the Virginia Legislature are questioning the legality of the University of Virginia’s recent deal with the U.S. Department of Justice and calling for an independent review of its constitutionality.
    • In an eight-page letter this week, state Sens. Scott Surovell and L. Louise Lucas said the agreement “directly conflicts with state law, commits the University to eliminate legislatively mandated programs, subjects the University President to personal certification requirements and potentially places UVA in violation of its statutory obligations.”
    • The pair requested UVA Interim President Paul Mahoney and Rachel Sheridan, the head of UVA’s board, to formally respond by Nov. 7. UVA did not immediately respond to questions Thursday.

    Dive Insight:

    On Oct. 22, Mahoney signed a four-page agreement with the DOJ to eventually close five investigations into UVA. In exchange, the public university agreed to adhere to the DOJ’s sweeping July guidance against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and provide the agency with quarterly compliance reports.

    In their letter, Surovell and Lucas lambasted Mahoney and Sheridan for “a fundamental breach of the governance relationship” between the university and the state.

    “This agreement was disturbingly executed with zero consultation with the General Assembly, despite the fact that the General Assembly controls the University and provides the bulk of its government funding,” they said, arguing the lack of legislative involvement could violate state statute.

    When announcing the deal, UVA said Mahoney struck the deal with input from the university’s governing board, whose members were “kept apprised of the negotiations and briefed on the final terms before signature.” Since the agreement doesn’t include a financial penalty, it did not require a formal vote from the board, the university said in an FAQ.

    Along with the board, Mahoney has said he struck the deal with input from the university’s leadership and internal and external legal counsel.

    Surovell and Lucas questioned if Jason Miyares, Virginia’s Republican Attorney General and an ally of President Donald Trump, had counseled the university about the deal. 

    Miyares — who fired UVA’s longtime legal counsel upon taking office in 2022 — is up for reelection in November with Trump’s endorsement, a backing Lucas and Surovell cast as an “inherent conflict of interest.” 

    It is unclear, they said, if Virginia’s top lawyer is “competent and capable of providing truly independent legal advice to Virginia’s public universities in this area of the law.”

    Virginia public colleges “need legal counsel who will zealously defend state sovereignty and institutional autonomy — not counsel whose political fortunes are tied to the very administration applying the pressure,” they said.

    The two lawmakers, along with Democratic state Sen. Mamie Locke, previously threatened UVA’s state funding if the university agreed to the Trump administration’s separate higher education compact, which offered preferential access to grant funding in exchange for unprecedented federal oversight. UVA turned it down five days before announcing its deal with the DOJ.

    Lucas and Surovell aren’t the only Virginia legislators to question the integrity of the UVA-DOJ deal. State Del. Katrina Callsen and Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, Democrats who represent UVA’s district, condemned it as subjecting the university “to unprecedented federal control.”

    In an Oct. 23 letter, the pair told Mahoney and the board that their approval of the agreement calls “into grave question your ability to adequately protect the interests and resources entrusted to you by the Virginia General Assembly.”

    “Your actions fail to leave the University free and unafraid to combat that which is untrue or in error,” they said. “By agreeing to these terms, UVA risks betraying the very principles you espouse in your letter: academic freedom, ideological diversity, and free expression.”

    Callsen and Deeds called on UVA leadership to reverse the deal and “reject further federal interference.”

    When asked on Thursday if Mahoney or the board had responded, Deed’s office referred to a story published by The Cavalier Daily, the university’s independent student newspaper.

    In a letter shared with The Daily, Mahoney and Sheridan said that they “respectfully disagree” with Deeds and Callsen’s assessment, adding that the deal is the “culmination of months of engagement” with the DOJ and other federal agencies over multiple civil rights investigations.

    They also said the institution’s deal with the federal government differs significantly from the “lengthy lists of specific obligations” agreed to by Columbia and Brown universities.

    “Our agreement is different — if the United States believes we are not in compliance, its only remedy is to terminate the agreement,” they said.

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  • UVA Settles With Justice Department

    UVA Settles With Justice Department

    The University of Virginia is the fourth university, and the first public one, to agree to a settlement with the Trump administration over allegations of discrimination.

    Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    The University of Virginia has reached a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice that will pause pending investigations in exchange for assurances from the public flagship that it will not engage in unlawful practices around admissions, hiring, programming and more.

    The DOJ announced the settlement in a Wednesday afternoon news release.

    As part of the deal, UVA agreed to follow a July memo from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that bars the use of race in hiring and admissions practices as well as scholarship programs. UVA will be required to provide “relevant information and data” to the DOJ, according to the news release.

    While the recent investigations into allegedly illegal diversity, equity and inclusion programs have been paused, that doesn’t mean those probes have been altogether closed. However, the DOJ will close the investigation “if UVA completes its planned reforms prohibiting DEI,” officials said.

    “This notable agreement with the University of Virginia will protect students and faculty from unlawful discrimination, ensuring that equal opportunity and fairness are restored,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and a UVA alum, said in a statement. “We appreciate the progress that the university has made in combatting antisemitism and racial bias, and other American universities should be on alert that the Justice Department will ensure that our federal civil rights laws are enforced for every American, without exception.”

    The settlement comes nearly four months after former UVA president James Ryan stepped down abruptly, reportedly under DOJ pressure to resign as part of an effort to resolve investigations.

    UVA officials released a statement as well as the text of the agreement on Wednesday.

    “We intend to continue our thorough review of our practices and policies to ensure that we are complying with all federal laws,” Interim President Paul Mahoney wrote. “We will also redouble our commitment to the principles of academic freedom, ideological diversity, free expression, and the unyielding pursuit of ‘truth, wherever it may lead,’ as Thomas Jefferson put it. Through this process, we will do everything we can to assure our community, our partners in state and federal government, and the public that we are worthy of the trust they place in us and the resources they provide us to advance our education, research, and patient care mission.”

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the deal “transformative” in a post on X.

    “The Trump Administration is not backing down in our efforts to root out DEI and illegal race preferencing on our nation’s campuses,” McMahon wrote. “A renewed commitment to merit is a critical step for our institutions to once again become beacons of truth-seeking and excellence.”

    UVA is one of several institutions to reach an agreement with the Trump administration in recent months, but the first public university to do so. Previously Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University all agreed to deals with the federal government after the Trump administration froze federal research funding over alleged civil rights violations.

    While UVA reached a settlement with the federal government, it has rejected other proposals such as the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would have required institutions to agree to tuition freezes, caps on international students and campuswide assessments of viewpoint diversity, among other demands, in order to receive preferential treatment for federal research funding. UVA was one of nine institutions originally asked to join the compact, though none of the original group, nor others invited later, have announced they will sign the proposal.

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  • Rule 56: An Appeal for Justice from the Margins

    Rule 56: An Appeal for Justice from the Margins

    A Personal Victory, A Larger Signal

    Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often reminded us that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ Yet arcs do not bend on their own; people must pull them. For Black women in higher education, that bending is not a metaphor but a lived, exhausting struggle. Justice is not just a concept but a long, arduous climb. We teach. We research. We lead. And sometimes, we must also stand against the very institutions that hired us.

    Dr. Leah P. Hollis By a unanimous 3-0 decision, I recently won a federal appeal in a complex unequal pay case, Hollis v. Morgan State University (No. 24-1476, 4th Cir. 2025), after close to a decade of retaliation and erasure from a prior employer. The Fourth Circuit ruled that the district court wrongly applied Title VII’s timing/exhaustion rules to the Title IX, § 1983 Equal Protection, and Maryland law claims and reversed that mistake.

    More importantly, the panel rejected the lower court’s cramped reliance on the McDonnell-Douglas burden-shifting framework. Since 1973, the Supreme Court’s McDonnell-Douglas case has forced discrimination plaintiffs through a rigid three-step burden-shifting test—one that too often shuts cases down before a jury can ever weigh the evidence.  However, the Fourth Circuit emphasized instead Rule 56’s simple question: could a reasonable jury find discrimination?

    As the court put it, the record contained “circumstantial evidence—including evidence of pretext—that would allow a jury to infer” bias. Judge Quattlebaum went further in a separate concurrence, praising the majority for skipping the rigid McDonnell Douglas steps and instead “pointing out the evidence that creates a genuine dispute of material fact.” He urged the Supreme Court to scrap McDonnell Douglas altogether, calling it “unnecessarily complex” and “more restrictive than Title VII itself.” This appeal and decision chips away at rigid judge-made hurdles that for decades have silenced plaintiffs before a jury could ever hear their stories.

    Why Procedure Matters in Civil Rights

    For discrimination litigants, this decision is more than technical. The old McDonnell-Douglas test forced plaintiffs to meet rigid “prima facie” boxes and disprove every employer excuse, often leading to dismissal at summary judgment. By centering Rule 56, the Fourth Circuit made clear that all the evidence, biased remarks, shifting justifications, policy deviations, comparators, and suspicious timing, belongs in one evidentiary bundle. In turn, this lowers the procedural bar, makes it harder for employers to paper over bias, and gives plaintiffs a fairer chance to be heard.

    My own scars tell the story. I was paid tens of thousands less than men doing the same job, called names behind closed doors, had dossiers suppressed, gaslighted for leadership errors, and was unjustly demoted to “at-will.” Like many women in my department, I scraped for resources while being told to stay quiet, told I was nothing. Silence, they said, was the price of survival. I refused. And when the Fourth Circuit reversed, it was more than a personal win—it was a civil rights intervention that affirmed the importance of truth, insisting that such truths be considered as a whole, the way we live them, not dissected into sterile sound bites.

    The 300,000 Who Couldn’t Stay

    Between April and June 2025 alone, nearly 300,000 Black women exited the U.S. labor force because they felt unsafe, not by choice but by structural neglect. As of September, unemployment for Black women hovers near 6 percent—twice that of their white counterparts. These departures are not accidents; they are ruptures in equity and dignity, the consequence of harassment, unequal pay, bullying, and institutional betrayal.

    Each exit letter echoes the same civil rights path: Harriet Tubman walking 4,500 miles to free enslaved people, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. jailed 29 times, Colin Kaepernick forfeiting his NFL career. Several times on my journey, I was told, “you’re ruining your life” or “ be grateful to have a job.”  But what if Harriet turned back? What if Martin stopped dreaming? What if Colin stood up and stayed quiet? Their resistance was costly; so too is the exodus of Black women from today’s workplaces. Justice does not bloom in surrender.

    Intersectional Betrayal in the Academy

    In higher education, Black women are showcased on websites and brochures yet undermined in daily practice. Research confirms we are disproportionately bullied, mobbed, and harassed. We remain the only group that required the Crown Act to affirm that our natural hair is lawful. Too often, the hostility comes not only from men but also from women—including women of color—who proclaim solidarity in public but dismantle it in private. These wounds, born of silence and duplicity, are institutional betrayals as old as the academy itself. That is why social justice must be more than a logo or slogan. When institutions use taglines as a façade, people make life-changing decisions based on those promises—only to discover too late that the commitments were hollow, leaving their careers and families in jeopardy. Zora Neale Hurston said it plainly: “The Black woman is the mule of the world.” That weight remains. And yet, even when battered, we persist. Because if we do not disrupt silence, the record calcifies into precedent.

    Truth Telling as a Contact Sport

    Writing in my personal capacity and researcher in this area, I still serve as a professor, still honor my students, and still respect the office I hold. This appeal shows that justice doesn’t clock out, the fight for equality yawns on despite the fatigue of its warriors; yet we walk on, dream on of a day when  one should not have to fight for the dignity they were born with. Whistleblowers and resisters are often isolated, mischaracterized, and told to take the “high road.” Yet if we as educators do not teach justice by living it, the next generation inherits our silence as permission.

    I prevailed because the record mattered, and because the Georgetown Civil Rights and  Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic believed in my case and had the determination to fight for justice. What we do not correct becomes precedent. The appellate court saw what those in power at my prior institution chose to ignore—the pretext, the contradictions, the lies. With support from family, counsel, and ancestors, I stood. And now, with Hollis v. Morgan State joining Ames v. Ohio in questioning the stranglehold of McDonnell-Douglas, the judiciary too has taken a step toward clearing the road.

    The Unending Path Forward

    This is not the end. My case now returns to the district court where it will either go to trial or may yet be resolved through mediation. My forthcoming book, Disrupt the Not Telling, by Oxford University Press, will continue excavating the silences and erasures imposed on Black women scholars. As Audre Lorde reminds us: “Your silence will not protect you.” Some of us cannot speak loudly, constrained by family, caregiving, or survival—but presence, prayer, and quiet resistance are also forms of disruption.

    The fight for equity is cyclical, echoing Reconstruction, the Red Summer of 1920s, and the civil rights movement 1960s. Each time, the nation tries to turn us back. Yet like Harriet, Martin, and Colin, those of us who set out on the trail of justice cannot turn back.

    The exodus of 300,000 Black women from the workforce is not just a labor statistic—it is the latest reminder that civil rights remain unfinished, and that silence cannot be its price.

    _______

    Dr. Leah P. Hollis is Associate Dean and Professor at Penn State University. 

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  • The urgent need to facilitate environmental justice learning in HE institutions

    The urgent need to facilitate environmental justice learning in HE institutions

    by Sally Beckenham

    The crises we are facing globally, from climate change and climate change dispossession to drought and food insecurity, are intersecting social and environmental issues, which need to be recognized and addressed accordingly through integrated and holistic measures. This can only be achieved by eschewing the tendency of existing governance and economic systems to silo social and environmental problems, as if they are separate concerns that can be managed – and prioritised – hierarchically. Much of this requires a better understanding of environmental injustice – the ways in which poor, racialised, indigenous and other marginalized communities are overlooked and/or othered in this power hierarchy, such that they must face a disproportionate burden of environmental harm.

    This is happening with disconcerting regularity around the world, often going under the radar but sometimes making headlines, as for example in May this year, when institutionalised environmental racism in the U.S. manifested in the placement of a copper mine on land inhabited by and sacred to the Apache indigenous group (Sherman, 2025). With limited political power to challenge it they are left to face dispossession, loss of livelihood and physical and mental health ill-effects (Morton-Ninomiya et al, 2023). We have seen this making headlines closer to home recently too, with evidence suggesting that toxic air in the UK is killing 500 people a week and most affecting those in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas (Gregory, 2025). An environmental problem (such as air pollution) cannot be disentangled from its social causes and effects. Or to put it another way, violence done to the environment is violence done to a particular group of people.

    A transformative response to our global challenges that re-centres environmental justice will require a paradigm shift in the ways that we govern, construct our societies, build our communities, run our economies, design our technologies and engage with the non-human world. The role of higher education will be critical to even a modest move in this direction. This is because, as they are probably tired of hearing, this generation of students will shape our collective futures, so it matters that they are literate in the deep entanglement of environmental and social justice challenges. Moreover, as Stickney and Skilbeck caution, “it is inconceivable that we will meet drastic carbon reduction targets without massive coordinated efforts, involving policymakers and educators working in concert at all levels of our governments and education systems (Stickney and Skilbeck, 2020).

    In Ruth Irwin’s article ‘Climate Change and Education’ she alerts us to Heidegger’s treatise in Being and Time (1962) that the effectiveness of a tool’s readiness is ‘hidden’ – only revealed when it ceases to function. Climate might be viewed as a heretofore ‘hidden’ tool, in that it affords opportunities for human action; it has “smoothly enabled our existence without conscious consideration” (Irwin, 2019). Yet its dynamic quality is now an overt, striking, looming spectre threatening the existence of all life on earth; the ‘environment’ writ large is revealing itself through ecological and social breakdown, surfacing our essential reliance upon it as natural beings. Thus unless higher education is competent in dealing with the issues of environmental crisis at all of its registers – social, environmental, political and ecological – the institution of education will be unable to fulfil its fundamental task of knowledge transfer for what is a clear public good (Irwin, 2019). Put another way, “HEIs have a responsibility to develop their educational provision in ways that will support the social transformation needed to mitigate the worst effects of the environmental crisis.” (Owens et al, 2023).

    Indeed, HE requires a paradigm shift in itself given that these realities are unfolding alongside widespread scrutiny of higher education institutions; including about decolonising the academy (Jivraj, 2020; Mintz, 2021), free speech on university campuses and how they are preparing students to meet these pressing issues (Woodgates, 2025). To keep pace with these changes and meet such challenges, educators from across disciplines will need to commit to embedding environmental justice education more widely across programme curricula, session design and teaching practices. It must be recognised as a vital – rather than token – component of environmental education. Doing so fully and effectively also requires us to recognise that environmental justice education encompasses not only subject matter but pedagogical practice. This is the case for all academic disciplines – including those that might seem peripheral to the teaching of environmental issues.

    EJE in HE is a developing area of scholarship and field of study that has gathered pace only over the last decade. Much of the research to date has been focused on the US, where studies have shown that environmental justice remains marginal to or excluded from the curricular offerings of most environmental studies programmes – let alone those not directly related to environmental education (Garibay et al, 2016). A report by the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE), which studied the policies of 230 public U.S. HE institutions and 36 state boards of higher education, found that only 6% of institutions with climate change content in their policies referred to climate justice issues and indigenous knowledge practices (MECCE Project & NAAEE, 2023). Other work has shown that STEM education has tended to frame questions around exploitation of natural resources or technological development as disconnected from social and economic inequalities, though this is starting to be challenged (Greenberg et al, 2024).

    Emerging research into EJ in HE encompasses pedagogical approaches (Rabe, 2024; Moore, 2024); classroom and teaching practices (Walsh et al, 2022; Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022; D’Arcangelis & Sarathy, 2015), the relationship between sustainability and climate justice education (Haluza-DeLay, 2013; Kinol et al, 2023) and curriculum development (Garibay et al, 2016). In identifying what EJE looks like these studies foreground the importance of community-engaged learning (CEL), providing students with the opportunity to learn about a socio-environmental problem from those with lived experience; critical thinking with regards to positionality, power structures and (especially indigenous) knowledge systems, and a deep concern with place. These critical components are crucial because tackling an act or acts of environmental injustice against marginalised populations often cannot be achieved without addressing systemic power imbalances.

    What also links these studies is an acknowledgement of the complexity of EJE. It is a difficult subject and practice to grapple with for several reasons. Firstly, it means exposing students (and educators) to “an onslaught of bad news,” (Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022) which can elicit feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, so it is little wonder that expressions of anxiety and alarm are growing within these cohorts (Wallace, Greenburg & Clark, 2020) and that needs to be borne in mind. Secondly EJE requires us to find a way to meaningfully connect with philosophical, discursive, historical and practical questions about power, ethics and the relationship between human beings and the natural environment, within the disciplinary parameters of a specific curricula. This means doing difficult work not only to change current systems and processes (Forsythe et al, 2023) but also to make transformative rather than piecemeal efforts. For example, this might mean actively absorbing students into a community partner’s work in an engaged rather than service-learning model, or moving beyond a simple ‘guest lecture’ format to invite more in-depth input into modules or programmes from a community partner.

    This is a challenge that we shouldn’t understate for many academics and institutions already coping with high workloads (Smith, 2023), stress (Kinman et al, 2019) and job insecurity across a beleaguered sector (The Independent, 2024; The Guardian, 2025). Through this emerging EJE scholarship literature, we are starting to see that, “promoting opportunities for HE educators to develop and enact critical and transformative environmental pedagogy… is a complex business mediated by a variety of (personal, material and social) factors. It involves negotiating conflict, and understanding and confronting entrenched structures of power, from the local and institutional to the national and global.” (Owens et al, 2023). 

    A third (though by no means final) challenge in teaching and learning EJ in higher education is in finding and making space for it in a landscape that is strongly oriented towards sustainability education. Although there is certainly overlap – for example to the extent that the liberal logic underpinning the latter also informs distributive justice – sustainability education has different intellectual and ideological origins to EJ scholarship. Both are valuable, but we should be questioning whether we can justify a lack of explicit EJ practice and framing simply because we are already having sustainability conversations, and instead find space for both. It can be easy to (inadvertently) depoliticise environmental education by avoiding the perceived messiness and complexity of justice in favour of the more technocratic and measurable ‘sustainability’ (Haluza-DeLay, 2013).

    My research seeks to develop a better understanding of the state of environmental justice education in the HE landscape, beginning by mapping its development in the UK. This will reveal the extent and means by which EJE is being incorporated across programme curricula, session design and teaching practices in the UK HE context. In doing so we can identify the intersections of EJE with other dominant pedagogies, including sustainability education and solutions-focused approaches. To pursue a provincialising agenda and avoid the parochial perspective that EJE is the preserve of HEIs in the global North, there is also much value in exploring what EJE looks like in HEIs in the global South, and where cross-cultural lessons can be shared. The questions we need to be asking are:

    • How is environmental justice being taught and learnt and where do we go from here?
    • How are educators overcoming the challenges involved in engaging with EJE?
    • What best practices could we champion?

    Sharing methods, strategies and pedagogical approaches for EJE cross-institutionally and cross-culturally will be a step towards helping us build a better collective, collaborative response to the urgency of our intersecting socio-environmental crises.

    Dr Sally Beckenham is Lecturer in Human Geography and Programme Lead and Admissions Tutor for the BA Human Geography & Environment in the Department of Environment & Geography, University of York. She is also Chair of the Teaching Development Pool and member of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC). She is an interdisciplinary political geographer with degrees in Modern History, International Politics and International Relations, and welcomes collaboration. Email: [email protected] Bluesky: @sallybeckenham.bsky.social.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • Justice Department targets ‘unlawful’ DEI in hiring, training

    Justice Department targets ‘unlawful’ DEI in hiring, training

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    The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday released a sweeping guidance document that could impact school district hiring and training practices, as well as the programming available to students. 

    In some situations, districts could be exposed to legal liability by asking job applicants how their “cultural background informs their teaching,” using recruitment strategies targeting candidates from specific geographic areas or racial backgrounds, and asking job candidates to describe how they overcame obstacles, according to the memo from U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi. 

    Such diversity, equity and inclusion practices could amount to “illegal discrimination,” said Bondi in a statement on Wednesday. “This guidance will ensure we are serving the American people and not ideological agendas.” 

    The DOJ memo contains examples of practices it lists as “unlawful” and says could lead to federal funding being revoked, as well as a list of recommendations, which it says are not mandatory, to avoid “legal pitfalls.”

    The guidance issued to all federal agencies also says the following actions could expose federally funded institutions, including school districts,to legal liability based on race, ethnicity or sex-based discrimination: 

    • Providing teacher training that “all white people are inherently privileged” or training on “toxic masculinity.” 
    • Providing areas, such as lounges, that are primarily meant to provide “safe spaces” for traditionally underserved groups. 
    • Using demographically driven criteria “to increase participation by specific racial or sex-based groups” in programs and opportunities. 
    • Asking employees, including teachers, during training sessions to “confess” to personal biases or privileges based on a protected characteristic.

    Instead, school districts and other federally funded institutions should provide opportunities to all races and sex-based groups without regard to their protected characteristics or demographic goals, instead focusing on “universally applicable criteria” such as academic merit or financial hardship, the Justice Department memo said. 

    The guidance could impact districts’ efforts to make education more equitable, such as by diversifying the teacher pool through Black educator pipelines, training teachers on implicit and explicit biases, and creating academic or enrichment programs to increase engagement from minority student groups. 

    The directive is in line with the Trump administration’s push to pare back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, including through the U.S. Department of Education. In recent months, the Education Department has increasingly collaborated with the Department of Justice to enforce civil rights laws, often seeking to protect Asian and White students. 

    The guidance from the Justice Department illustrates the major shift in how both agencies under President Donald Trump approach enforcement of civil rights laws, with officials now targeting programs that were often launched to fight systemic discrimination.

    In April, the Education Department announced a Title VI investigation into Chicago Public Schools over allegations from the conservative group Defending Education that the district’s “Black Students Success Plan” implemented in 2023-24 discriminated against students based on race. 

    In May, the department announced another Title VI investigation into Fairfax County Public Schools over a 2020 revision to the admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. That policy dropped standardized testing requirements and instead used a holistic review process, which the Education Department said harms Asian American students. 

    In 2024-25, the highly selective magnet school was 61% Asian and 21% White, with Black and Hispanic students making up less than 10% of the student population each.

    The guidance from the Trump administration and the Education Department investigations come after concerns from civil rights groups that recent federal policy changes, along with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, would set back educational equity efforts even outside of race-conscious admissions. 

    Scholarship availability, teacher pipelines and student affinity groups were among the top areas beyond college access that advocates were concerned could be impacted in the wake of that ruling.

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  • Justice Department threatens federal funding for colleges over DEI policies

    Justice Department threatens federal funding for colleges over DEI policies

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    Dive Brief: 

    • The U.S. Department of Justice released guidance Wednesday that threatens to strip grant funding from colleges and other federally funded institutions over what the agency deems unlawful diversity, equity and inclusion practices. 
    • The agency’s memo targets a sweeping set of practices, including offering race-based scholarship programs, allowing transgender women to access bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity and having identity-based lounges or study spaces on campus — even if they are open to all. 
    • But the nine-page memo goes a step further, saying even neutral criteria — such as recruitment strategies targeting certain regions — could be deemed unlawful if the Justice Department determines they are chosen because of their demographic composition.

    Dive Insight: 

    The Justice Department’s memo comes after a federal judge temporarily blocked similar guidance from the U.S. Department of Education that broadly targeted diversity, equity and inclusion programs at federally funded colleges and K-12 schools. The order came in response to a lawsuit that alleged the guidance “radically upends” federal antidiscrimination laws. 

    The guidance from the Justice Department illustrates the major shift in how the agency under President Donald Trump approaches enforcement of civil rights laws, with officials now targeting programs that were often actually launched to fight systemic discrimination. 

    Earlier this month, the National Urban League declared a “state of emergency” for antidiscrimination policies, calling the Trump administration’s overhaul of the Justice Department’s enforcement priorities “an existential threat” to civil rights laws, according to The Associated Press. 

    Like the Education Department’s blocked guidance, the Justice Department’s new memo warns that government officials could pull federal funding from institutions that don’t comply. That threat comes at the same time the agency has ramped up investigations into colleges over their diversity initiatives and their responses to antisemitism on campus. 

    The DOJ memo contains examples of practices it lists as “unlawful” and says could lead to federal funding being revoked, as well as a list of recommendations, which it says are not mandatory, to avoid “legal pitfalls.”

    “This Department of Justice will not stand by while recipients of federal funds engage in illegal discrimination,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a Wednesday statement. “This guidance will ensure we are serving the American people and not ideological agendas.”

    As examples of unlawful practices, the agency highlighted race-based scholarships or programs, including mentorship programs or leadership initiatives reserved for members of certain racial groups. 

    The memo could upend admissions. It recommends colleges end programs “designed to achieve discriminatory outcomes” even if they have “facially neutral” criteria, such as targeting scholarships to certain regions to increase enrollment or participation among certain racial groups. 

    “Instead, use universally applicable criteria, such as academic merit or financial hardship, applied without regard to protected characteristics or demographic goals,” the memo said. 

    The memo also takes aim at what it describes as “unlawful proxies” for race and sex. As an example, the memo calls out universities that ask job applicants “to demonstrate ‘cultural competence,’ ‘lived experience,’ or ‘cross-cultural skills’ in ways that effectively evaluate candidates’ racial or ethnic backgrounds rather than objective qualifications.”

    The Justice Department also flagged diversity statements — which typically ask job or graduate student candidates to explain their experience and commitment to diversity and inclusion initiatives — as potentially unlawful if they advantage “those who discuss experiences intrinsically tied to protected characteristics.” The memo said the same of asking for statements from applicants about “obstacles they have overcome,” a common essay prompt for college applications. 

    State lawmakers have likewise targeted diversity statements, with many outlawing public colleges from requiring them in job or admission applications. 

    The memo also said failing to “maintain sex-separated athletic competitions and intimate spaces” could violate federal law. The Justice Department’s examples of those violations include allowing transgender women to use bathrooms, showers, locker rooms and dormitories designated for women, as well as allowing them to compete in women’s athletic events. 

    And it mentions college lounges or other spaces designated for specific groups, such as a “BIPOC-only study lounge.” 

    “Even if access is technically open to all, the identity-based focus creates a perception of segregation and may foster a hostile environment,” the memo stated. “This extends to any resource allocation — such as study spaces, computer labs, or event venues — that segregates access based on protected characteristics, even if intended to create ‘safe spaces.’”

    It also takes aim at diversity training, giving the example of requiring teachers at K-12 schools to complete a DEI training that includes statements such as “all white people are inherently privileged” or touching on “toxic masculinity.” 

    The memo says such trainings could violate civil rights laws “if they create a hostile environment or impose penalties for dissent in ways that result in discriminatory treatment.”

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  • UCLA violated civil rights law, Justice Department alleges

    UCLA violated civil rights law, Justice Department alleges

    Dive Brief: 

    • The U.S. Department of Justice alleged Tuesday that the University of California, Los Angeles violated civil rights law by failing to do enough to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment. 
    • The findings stem from UCLA’s approach to a pro-Palestinian encampment that students erected on the university’s campus in the spring 2024 term. UCLA officials declined to disband the encampment for nearly a week, citing the need to balance free speech protections with student and employee safety. 
    • In a letter to Michael Drake, president of the University of California system, Justice Department officials said they would seek to enter a voluntary resolution with UCLA to “ensure that the hostile environment is eliminated.”

    Dive Insight: 

    The Justice Department is also investigating the entire University of California system over similar allegations. That systemwide probe found “concerning evidence of systemic anti-Semitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a Tuesday statement. 

    “DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system,” Bondi said. 

    Justice Department officials gave UCLA leaders until Aug. 5 to reach out about entering a voluntary resolution. They threatened the university with a lawsuit by Sept. 2 if they don’t believe they can strike an agreement with the institution. 

    The Justice Department investigation focused on the pro-Palestinian encampment erected on UCLA’s campus on April 25, 2024. Encampment demonstrators demanded that the university divest from companies with ties to Israel’s military. 

    On the same day it was erected, a university spokesperson told the campus community that officials were monitoring the situation to balance the “right to free expression while minimizing disruption” to the institution’s teaching and learning mission. 

    However, several days into the protest, some demonstrators formed human blockades to prevent some people on campus from moving freely throughout Royce Quad, including students wearing a Star of David or those who refused to denounce Zionism, according to an internal report from a university task force released last October. 

    The task force also found the encampment violated university rules and that the blockades disparately impacted Jewish people. 

    The Justice Department’s letter to UCLA heavily cited the university’s own task force report, as well as 11 complaints the university received alleging that encampment protesters discriminated against them based on their race, religion or national origin. 

    “UCLA’s documentation established that it did not outright ignore these complaints; however, the University took no meaningful action to eliminate the hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students caused by the encampment until it was disbanded,” the letter states. 

    Violence broke out at the site on the night of April 30, 2024, when counterprotesters attempted to dismantle the encampment’s barricade, The New York Times reported. 

    The counterprotesters attacked those within the encampment, including by launching fireworks into the encampment and hitting the pro-Palestinian protesters with sticks, according to the publication. Some of the pro-Palestinian protesters also fought back.

    Police arrived hours later, though they did not immediately break up the violence. The next day, UCLA officials made the call to have police break up the encampment, resulting in over 200 arrests. 

    “In the end, the encampment on Royce Quad was both unlawful and a breach of policy,” then-UC Chancellor Gene Block said in a statement. “It led to unsafe conditions on our campus and it damaged our ability to carry out our mission. It needed to come to an end.”

    In their letter, Justice Department officials criticized university leaders, alleging they knew that protesters were “engaging in non-expressive conduct unprotected by the First Amendment” and were denying “Jewish and Israeli students access to campus resources” days before they moved to disband the encampment. 

    UCLA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

    The Justice Department findings come the same day the university settled a lawsuit from Jewish students and a Jewish professor, who alleged their civil rights were violated because UCLA allowed protesters to block their campus access. 

    The agency’s letter mentioned the lawsuit’s filings, though it did not refer to the settlement. 

    As part of that agreement, UCLA agreed to pay about $6 million, with the funds going directly toward the plaintiffs and their legal fees, as well as to Jewish groups and a campus initiative to combat antisemitism.

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