University governing boards are the black boxes of higher ed. As with marriages, the only people who know what they’re really like are the ones in the relationship. Sometimes not even them.
Like most faculty members, I knew almost nothing about the Board of Trustees at my regional public university, other than hearing my colleagues rail against their hiring decisions. In my nearly two decades on the faculty, we’ve had six presidents. That should tell you something.
After a no-confidence vote in a previous president, the board held a public Zoom session where faculty, students and community members gave them hell. I watched, embarrassed. At the board’s request for further comment, I wrote a letter explaining from my limited perspective how things had gotten so bad.
The next day, a trustee emailed to thank me and asked if I’d be willing to talk. I was. I knew some of my colleagues had go-out-drinking relationships with board members. I have never been cool, so I was, of course, flattered. (Frailty, thy name is Rachel.)
The trustee asked if there were other faculty members they could contact. I gave names. We kept in touch. Eventually, the board fired the president and hired someone new. The trustee would occasionally reach out. We’d talk about campus issues—but also books and dogs. Our conversations made me feel seen and valued—a rarity for me.
Only when I began writing a weekly newsletter for Inside Higher Ed, having confidential and off-the-record conversations with sitting presidents, did I realize that my friendly back channel might not have been entirely kosher. Recently, I finally looked at our board’s bylaws. They said, essentially, that trustees aren’t supposed to go around the president to make requests of university employees.
Oops.
That rule is there for a good reason. While it is theoretically great for trustees to be more knowledgeable about the institutions on whose boards they serve, their main functions are fiduciary and to hire and (increasingly often) fire the president, who is responsible in turn for educating them. Most faculty and staff will have plenty to say if asked (I sure did) but will have only a limited perspective on the administrative realities (which never stops us from opining). And some board members, like some of us faculty, just like to stir up shit.
That was not the case with the trustee at my university, who loved the institution, was smart and caring, and wanted only to understand and help make things better. But the reason for bylaws is because not everyone acts honorably. Or is even informed. One thing I’ve learned: Many board members (and some presidents) don’t pay much attention to those pesky board documents. And they’re rarely updated. I just heard from a current president that when he came into the job, the bylaws stated that documents were to be sent electronically. By telegram!
In the last two years, I’ve heard plenty of stories about good relationships between presidents and helpful boards working together to lead all sorts of different types of institutions. Those tales are happily dull.
Frequently, though, I’ve heard horror stories about board behavior. Trustees reliving their frat years, getting hammered and passing out on the president’s couch. Grabbing butts and commenting on legs. Weighing in on clothing and jewelry choices. But not all offenses are so blatant. More often, presidents tell me about covert alliances between trustees and executive team members who want to undermine the president—and get away with it because of personal relationships. Or the board members who go around the president to talk to faculty (um, right).
I have come to believe that many of the problems in higher ed are a result of the fact that there’s no real oversight of trustees, and often not even a shared understanding of what they’re supposed to be doing. There are associations and consultants, but the institutions that seek them out are the ones who already know they need help, and only because things are seriously messed up. Most “training” happens after everything goes pear-shaped and someone with a title and willingness to spend some coin brings in the consultants.
You’d think leaders would recognize a dysfunctional board. But as one of those consultants likes to say, when you’ve seen one board, you’ve seen one board. Many presidents don’t realize they are in an abusive relationship until they move on (by their own choice, or not) and realize that the next board isn’t like the last. That’s when it hits: Oh. That wasn’t normal.
Boards sometimes bring in a president to shake things up or solve a big problem (there’s no money in the budget). But when a place is used to doing things a certain way—especially if there’s been a long-serving president—the new person often ends up being blamed for making everyone feel uncomfortable. When trustees start hearing complaints from their golf buddies about how their alma mater is “changing too much” or faculty vote no confidence, guess who takes the hit?
Some say big boards are better—fewer people means fewer checks on the loudest voices. Most trustees are used to being in charge and seeing quick results. Higher ed doesn’t work that way. And we haven’t even started talking about shared governance. (That’s a whole other can of night crawlers.)
Presidents have to walk a fine line: Give the board enough information to fulfill their duties without overwhelming them. Some create board books of many hundreds of pages and hope no one reads too closely. Others spoon-feed just what’s needed so they can take advantage of the real expertise and wisdom of the board members. Good trustees are curious and thoughtful. But not all of them got the memo that this is a governing role, not a management one. (Same is true for shared governance.)
As with faculty development, those who are eager to get better at their jobs attend learning sessions and those who most need training rarely show up. The bullies call themselves “critical thinkers.” A former president–turned–consultant told me that in the old days, other board members would call out bad behavior. Now, she says, when the flamethrowers show up, everyone else suddenly finds their phones fascinating.
Good trustees know their role. One I’ve spoken to told his president, “If I ever feel like I’m running the place, I know it’s time to find a new president.” That’s what a good marriage sounds like—mutual trust, healthy boundaries, a sense of being on the same team without Monday-morning quarterbacking.
But like all relationships, presidencies can sour. Many presidents have had great relationships with strong, supportive board chairs. But then the chair rotates. Or a new crop of trustees arrives. Suddenly, everything changes. And there’s no way to explain what happened—only that it did.
That’s when we see the press release that says the president “resigned abruptly.” The board thanks them for their service, announces an interim and closes the door behind them. In a few recent cases, the interim is the board chair, who then takes over as president.
Which is why seasoned presidents negotiate their contracts like they’re signing a prenup. Because as with any marriage, you want to believe it’s forever—but you’d be wise to plan for the day one of you decides to walk away.
Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed, where she writes and edits the Insider membership newsletter The Sandbox.
Shalini Randeria, president and rector of the Central European University, has warned that the Trump administration is working from the “playbook” of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, describing the legal uncertainty faced by U.S. universities as the government’s “intended outcome.”
Now based in Vienna, CEU was forced out of Budapest after Orbán’s Fidesz government implemented a series of legal measures in 2017, which the European Court of Justice later ruled were “incompatible with E.U. law.”
The 2020 ruling came too late for CEU, however, which had relocated to Austria the previous year. “That’s one of the problems of using law courts to stop the machinations of soft authoritarian regimes,” Randeria told Times Higher Education. “Courts are slow and unpredictable, even though we had a very strong case.”
“There was a lot of legal uncertainty created by Orbán, and this is exactly the same playbook which is being used by the Trump administration,” she said, pointing to the court battle between Harvard University and the government as an example.
“They introduce a flurry of laws and administrative measures that universities can then go to court against. It’s unclear what will happen at the end, and this chaos and unpredictability is really the intended outcome.”
Randeria described legal uncertainty as particularly problematic for organizations that work on “long-term cycles,” such as universities. “It makes any rational decision-making, any financial planning or academic planning, impossible,” she said.
“When we admit students now, we admit them to complete a four-year degree, or a two-year master’s, or a doctoral degree in five or six years. We are thinking and planning way ahead,” she said. “If you don’t know what the legal status of your institution will be in two years, you cannot in good faith advertise to and recruit students.”
Attracting faculty, too, requires long-term certainty, Randeria continued: “When you have this sword of Damocles hanging over your head, not knowing whether you’ll be able to run the university efficiently and fairly on a consistent basis, it’s very, very difficult to recruit faculty.”
After the “traumatic period” of forced relocation, CEU has “performed really well academically,” Randeria said, securing “competitive research funding both within Austria and, as usual, within Europe.”
Obtaining consortium grants, such as those awarded by the Austrian Science Fund, has “allowed us to anchor ourselves in Austria, not in competition with the very vibrant academic scene here and its research institutions and universities, but in partnership with them.” The university did not lose any faculty in the move, she noted, and “recruitment and admission numbers didn’t fall.”
Nevertheless, Orbán’s pursuit of the CEU—part of a larger campaign against its philanthropist founder, George Soros—has yet to run its course, Randeria said. Fidesz’s proposed “national sovereignty” law, which would allow the government to penalize or shut down organizations receiving “foreign funding,” “could be used against CEU’s continuing activities” in Budapest, she warned, namely, research conducted at the CEU Democracy Institute.
U.S. vice president JD Vance has expressed explicit admiration for Orbán’s higher education policy, calling his approach, which has also seen control of state universities transferred to government-aligned foundations, “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities.”
“What right-wing populists all over have done is stamp universities as ivory towers of elite privilege, and this is not true,” Randeria said. In response, “we need to mobilize public support on a very large scale.”
“As institutions, we need to put a lot more focus on outreach and communication,” she told THE, with the goal of ensuring the public “really understand what universities do, and why they are the backbone of a functioning liberal democracy.”
U.S. universities must “not let themselves be divided one against the other,” Randeria advised. “I don’t think you can protect yourself as an institution on your own. It has to be a collective resistance against this kind of intervention into university autonomy and academic freedom.”
“One should be prepared for some very, very strong institutional solidarity of universities across the board.”
Before a federal judge blocked its plans, the Education Department reached a deal with the Department of Labor to hand over some of its career, technical and adult education grants, according to court records.
Under the agreement, reached May 21, the Labor Department would administer about $2.7 billion in grants, including the Perkins Grant program, which funds career and technical education at K–12 schools and community colleges, Politicofirst reported. But that plan is now on hold, as is an agreement with the Treasury Department regarding student loan collections, according to a status update in New York’s lawsuit challenging mass layoffs at the agency and President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the department.
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court’s injunction so officials can proceed with the layoffs and other plans.
The department didn’t publicly announce the handover, which appears to be a first step toward Trump’s endgame of shutting down the agency. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has acknowledgedrepeatedly that only Congress can legally shutter the department, but she’s also made clear that she can transfer some responsibilities to other agencies. In addition to administering the funds, Labor officials agreed to oversee the implementation of career education programs and to monitor grant recipients for compliance.
Advance CTE and the Association for Career and Technical Education criticized the plan, saying the agreement “directly circumvents existing statutory requirements” related to the Perkins program and would cause confusion.
“We strongly oppose any efforts to move CTE administration away from the U.S. Department of Education given the disruption this would cause to the legislation’s implementation and services to students in schools across the country,” they said in a statement released Wednesday evening.
A judge released a Harvard Medical School research associate and Russian native Thursday. She had been held in federal detention for nearly four months after she tried to re-enter the U.S.
Kseniia Petrova still faces a criminal charge for allegedly trying to smuggle frog embryos into the country through Boston’s Logan International Airport, where Customs and Border Protection detained her, but she’s been freed for now.
“I hear it’s sunny. Goodbye,” U.S. magistrate judge Judith G. Dein said after approving Petrova’s release, the Associated Press reported.
The AP wrote that Petrova, standing outside the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston, thanked her supporters, saying, “I never really felt alone any minute when I was in custody, and it’s really helped me very much.”
The court set a probable cause hearing in the case for next Wednesday.
Despite being detained Feb. 16 and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Louisiana, it wasn’t until mid-May that prosecutors announced the smuggling charge. One of her lawyers, Gregory Romanovsky, has said that Petrova “was suddenly transferred from ICE to criminal custody” less than two hours after a judge set a hearing on her release.
On May 28, a U.S. District Court of Vermont judge said that Petrova’s immigration detention was unjustified and granted bail, but that didn’t immediately lead to her release, NBC News reported.
“It’s difficult to understand why someone like Kseniia needed to be jailed for four months,” Romanovsky said. “She poses no danger and has deep ties to her community. Her case is a reminder that immigration enforcement should be guided by law and common sense—and not deportation quotas.”
President Trump said that Chinese international students would be welcome in the U.S. in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday announcing the terms of a pending trade agreement with China.
In exchange for shipments of rare earth metals, the U.S. “WILL PROVIDE TO CHINA WHAT WAS AGREED TO, INCLUDING CHINESE STUDENTS USING OUR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES (WHICH HAS ALWAYS BEEN GOOD WITH ME!),” Trump posted (capital letters his).
The about-face comes less than two weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to “aggressively revoke” Chinese students’ visas and implement a much stricter review process for nonimmigrant visa applications from the country.
That announcement, an escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign to decrease the number of foreign students at American universities, threw higher education into a panic. International enrollment has become a financial lifeline for many institutions, and Chinese students make up nearly a quarter of all international students in the U.S.—around 280,000 in 2023–24, according to the Institute of International Education, more than students from any other country. They make up 16 percent of graduate STEM programs and 2 percent of undergraduate programs.
Rubio’s visa-revocation announcement also led to distress among Chinese families, whose hopes of sending their children to a prestigious American university seemed to be fading. In May, the Chinese foreign minister called the policy “politically discriminatory” and “irrational.”
Students will soon have to show a government-approved ID either in person or online in order to receive federal aid.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | michaeljung and robas/iStock/Getty Images
College financial aid offices and students’ advocates say that a Trump administration plan to crack down on fraud in the federal aid system could burden university staff and hinder access to college programs.
Although they support fighting fraud as a concept, they particularly worry that real, eligible Pell Grant recipients will get caught up in the detection system and won’t be able to jump through the extra hoops to verify their identity.
“In general, verification is a little bit of threading the needle between making sure that the right dollars are going to the right students, but also not putting up an inordinate number of barriers, particularly to low-income students, that are insurmountable,” said Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “You have to walk a fine line between those two things.”
Department of Education officials, however, say their plan, announced June 9, is necessary to protect American taxpayers from theft and won’t become a burden for colleges. They aren’t worried about students losing access, either.
Ultimately, the Trump administration plans to verify the identity of each financial aid applicant with the help of a new system that should be up and running “this fall,” according to the department’s announcement. Before then, the department is planning to screen more first-time applicants for verification—a process that could affect 125,000 students this summer and will be handled by financial aid offices. (About 40,000 students were checked last year, according to a department spokesperson.)
McCarthy, however, is concerned that if the new system isn’t ready by the fall, “institutions will be assuming this larger burden for a longer, indeterminate amount of time.” The department’s botched launch of the 2024–25 Free Application for Federal Student Aid showed the challenges of standing up new systems quickly, she noted.
A senior official at the Department of Education told Inside Higher Ed that the Office of Federal Student Aid and the department procurement team are in the process of purchasing an identity-validation product similar to the ones used by financial services companies like banks. The product would be incorporated into the online FAFSA portal.
If an individual is flagged for potential fraud at any point while filling out the form, a pop-up box would appear with a live staff member on the other side, the official explained. The applicant would then be asked to display a government-issued ID. If that ID is deemed valid, the person could then continue.
“Once that’s done, the process is over,” the official said. “That’s really as simple as that effort is. I believe rental car companies are using it, too.”
The official was optimistic that the department could have the system up and running by early September, though that won’t be soon enough to get aid disbursed in time for the fall semester. The official also acknowledged that the timeline means that colleges may have to do some verification in person even in the fall, but that process should not be too much of a burden for the college or the student. Similar to the online process, a student would just need to show a valid ID to a college financial aid administrator, either in person or over a video call. Previously, when identity verifications were conducted, students had to present a Statement of Educational Purpose and submit a notarized copy of their identification document.
But advocacy groups that work with low-income students worry that even requiring a government-issued ID could give some students a leg up over others when it comes to accessing financial aid and affording to enroll in college.
“We want to see fraud eliminated as much as anyone else … We just need to make sure that gets balanced with a reasonable process for students,” said MorraLee Keller, a senior consultant for the National College Attainment Network. “A lot of low-economic kids may not have secured, for example, a driver’s license. If they don’t drive, they may not have a driver’s license, and that is probably the primary form of a government-issued valid ID that most people would be able to present.”
Keller noted that some states may have alternate IDs available for those who do not drive, but even that may take time to obtain if a student doesn’t already possess it.
“We want to make sure that timing doesn’t interrupt the aid getting credited to their account to pay their bills on time so that they could start classes, get refunds to go get their books and all those kinds of things,” she said. “So one of the questions that we still need answered is, what else would be considered a valid ID?”
The California Community College system, which has grappled with increasing financial aid fraud, recently considered an application fee to help screen legitimate students from fraudsters. A spokesperson for the system said they are waiting on additional guidance from the department before they can know how big a deal this shift will be.
“We wouldn’t be able to speculate on the level of concern among students and institutions until the federal guidance is known,” she wrote. But “financial aid fraud is a nationwide trend and additional identification verification processes will help in the fight against it.”
An environmental researcher at Tulane University resigned Wednesday after accusing campus officials, reportedly under pressure from Gov. Jeff Landry, of issuing a “gag order” that prevented her from publicly discussing her work, which focused on racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce.
“Scholarly publications, not gag orders, are the currency of academia,” Kimberly Terrell, the now-former director of community engagement at Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic, wrote in her resignation letter. “There is always room for informed debate. But Tulane leaders have chosen to abandon the principles of knowledge, education, and the greater good in pursuit of their own narrow agenda.”
Terrell’s resignation comes amid wider efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to control the types of research—including projects related to environmental justice—academics are permitted to pursue and punish campus protesters for espousing messages the president and other public officials disagree with.
“It started with the pro-Palestinian activism on our campus and others across the country. It’s emboldened a lot of political leaders to feel they can make inroads by silencing faculty in other areas,” Michelle Lacey, a math professor and president of Tulane’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Inside Higher Ed. “That was the catalyst for creating a climate where university administrators are very nervous, especially now as we see the government pulling funding for areas of research they don’t like.”
Last spring, Landry praised Tulane president Michael Fitts and university police for removing students who were protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Soon after, the Legislature passed a provision creating harsher punishments for protesters who disrupt traffic, which Landry later signed into law.
Landry, a Republican aligned with Trump, has a history of trying to exert control over the state’s public higher education institutions.
Last summer, he enacted a law that allows him to directly appoint board chairs at the state’s public colleges and universities. And in November, following Trump’s election, Landry publicly called on officials at Louisiana State University to punish a law professor who allegedly made brief comments in class about students who voted for the president.
Landry’s office denied to the Associated Press (which first reported on Terrell’s resignation) that it pressured Tulane to silence research from the law clinic. Michael Strecker, a Tulane spokesperson, also told the outlet that the university “is fully committed to academic freedom and the strong pedagogical value of law clinics” and declined to comment on “personnel matters.”
Strecker added in a statement that Tulane administrators have been working with the law school’s leadership on how the law clinics could better support the university’s education mission.
“Debates about how best to operate law clinics’ teaching mission have occurred nationally and at Tulane for years—this is nothing new,” Strecker said. “This effort includes most recently input from an independent, third-party review.”
But Terrell’s account of the events that led to her resignation call the universities’ academic freedom commitments into question, while also implying that Landry—and powerful industry groups—wield some influence over private higher education institutions in the state.
And it’s not something Tulane, a private university in New Orleans, should tolerate, Lacey said.
Kimberly Terrell
“The academic freedom of all university researchers must be unequivocally defended at both public and private institutions,” Lacey wrote in a statement. “This includes the right to conduct and disseminate research that may be unfavorably viewed by government officials or corporate entities. Political demands to stifle controversial research are an affront to the advancement of knowledge and open exchange of ideas, as is the voluntary compliance with such requests by university leadership.”
The latest controversy at Tulane stems from a paper Terrell published April 9 in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Economics. Her research found that while Black people in Louisiana are underrepresented in the state’s petrochemical workforce, they are overexposed to toxic pollutants the industry releases into an area of the state between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley.”
But according to emails obtained by Inside Higher Ed and other outlets, Fitts worried that publicizing Terrell’s research and the clinic’s other work, which includes legal advocacy, could jeopardize funding for the university’s $600 million plan to redevelop New Orleans’ historic Charity Hospital into residential and commercial spaces as part of a broader downtown expansion plan.
As Terrell explained in her resignation letter, Fitts and other top Tulane executives were at Louisiana’s state capitol on April 16 lobbying for the project when “someone accused the university of being anti–chemical industry” and cited her study, which was receiving media attention after it was published the week prior. According to Terrell, “the story that came down to me through the chain of command was that Governor Landry threatened to veto any bill with funding for Tulane’s Charity project unless Fitts did something about the Environmental Law Clinic.”
‘Complete Gag Order’
After that, Terrell says, she was “placed under a complete gag order,” which the emails appear to confirm.
“Effective immediately all external communications that are not client-based—that is, directly related to representation—must be pre-approved by me,” Marcilynn Burke, dean of Tulane’s law school, wrote in an April 25 email to law clinic staff. “Such communications include press releases, interviews, videos, social media postings, etc. Please err on the side of over-inclusion as we work to define the boundaries through experience.”
A week later, on May 4, Burke wrote another email to clinic staff explaining that “elected officials and major donors have cited the clinic as an impediment to them lending their support to the university generally and this project specifically,” referring to Fitts’s plans to redevelop the old hospital. Terrell wrote that when she pleaded her case to Provost Robin Forman, “he refused to acknowledge my right to freely conduct and disseminate research” and also “let slip that my job description was likely going to be rewritten.”
Terrell described the entire law clinic as being “under siege” and said she would rather leave her position “than have my work used as an excuse for President Fitts to dismantle the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.”
Other academics, free speech experts and environmental justice advocates also believe Tulane’s moves to silence Terrell’s work amounts to an attack on academic freedom with implications beyond the campus.
“The administration of Tulane University, far from standing up for academic freedom, is participating in the effort to suppress free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge by scientific methods,” Michael Ash, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Any effort to reduce academic freedom for Dr. Terrell either by changing her job classification or by redefining whether the protection applies is a blatant and un-American attempt to suppress the type of free inquiry that has made this country great.”
Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of the Descendants Project, a community organization that works in Cancer Alley, added that the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic is a vital public health resource.
Without the clinic, “it would be far more difficult to show the racially discriminatory practices of the industry, from preferential hiring practices to a pattern of concentrating pollution in majority Black neighborhoods,” she said in a statement. “President Fitts must commit to protecting it at all costs.”
Two years after its Supreme Court victory against Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, Students for Fair Admissions has a new target in its sights: Hispanic-serving institutions. On Wednesday, the advocacy group joined the state of Tennessee in suing the U.S. Department of Education, arguing that the criteria to become an HSI are unconstitutional and discriminatory. The move is distressing HSI advocates, who hoped to see the institutions left out of the political fray.
To qualify as an HSI, a college or university needs to have a student body comprised of at least 25 percent Hispanic students and enroll at least 50 percent low-income students, or more than other comparable institutions, among other criteria. No Tennessee institutions operated by the state meet the threshold and are thus prohibited from applying for HSI-specific grants—even though they serve Hispanic and low-income students, according to the Tennessee attorney general and SFFA. As a result, the federal designation criteria amounts to discrimination, and Tennessee universities and students suffer as a result, the plaintiffs argue.
They also say Tennessee institutions find themselves in an “unconstitutional dilemma”: Even if they wanted to, they argue, they can’t use affirmative action to up their Hispanic student enrollments since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against using race as a factor in college admissions. That 2023 decision resulted from lawsuits SFFA brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The HSI program is particularly egregious in terms of how it treats students based on immutable characteristics,” Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti, who’s representing the state in the suit, told Inside Higher Ed. “It is just manifestly unfair that a needy student in Tennessee does not have access to this pool of funds because they go to a school that doesn’t have the right ethnic makeup.”
The lawsuit calls for “a declaratory judgement that the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements are unconstitutional” and “a permanent injunction prohibiting the [Education] Secretary from enforcing or applying the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements when making decisions whether to award or maintain grants to Tennessee’s institutions of higher education.”
HSI proponents may be jarred by the legal challenge, but they aren’t entirely surprised. Conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the American Civil Rights Project have previously proposed abolishing enrollment-based minority-serving institutions (MSIs), including HSIs and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–serving institutions, which are defined as enrolling 10 percent of students from these groups.
“It was only a matter of time before the anti-DEI movement hit the enrollment-based MSIs,” said Gina Ann Garcia, a professor who studies MSIs in the school of education at the University of California, Berkeley. “It still was a punch to the gut.”
2 Sides At Odds
Congress established the HSI program in the 1990s to improve the quality of education at colleges and universities that disproportionately serve Latino students, who were concentrated at colleges with relatively fewer financial resources. They’ve historically enjoyed bipartisan support. Last year, the federal government appropriated about $229 million for the country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions; $28 million of that funding went to 49 of the HSIs that applied for the competitive grants.
Deborah Santiago, co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, an organization that promotes Latino student success, believes the lawsuit mischaracterizes the program and its role in the national higher education landscape. She said it’s in the country’s “self-interest” to invest in colleges and universities with limited resources that serve a growing student population with stubborn degree-attainment gaps.
“If a disproportionate number of students of any background are at an institution that has a high enrollment of needy students, low educational core expenditures and serves a high proportion of students that that could benefit from that [funding] to serve the country, I don’t think that’s discriminating,” she said.
She also stressed that the grant program “doesn’t explicitly require any resources to go to a specific population” but funds capacity-building efforts, like building new laboratories and facilities, that benefit all students at the institution.
The HSI program is a way “to target limited federal resources and meet the federal mandate of access for low-income students,” she said. “We know that it costs more to educate Hispanic students, because they’re more likely to be low income and first gen, so college knowledge, student support services—all of that takes institutional investment.”
But opponents of HSIs don’t buy it.
Wenyuan Wu, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a think tank and watchdog organization focused on promoting “equal rights and merit,” firmly believes enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are discriminatory and applauded the lawsuit as a step in the right direction.
She argued that HSI funding has gone to efforts specifically to support Latino students, including some she sees as “ideological.” For example, the University of Connecticut at Stamford proposed using the funding to start a program called Sueño Scholars, to “recruit, support and mentor undergraduate Hispanic, other minority, low-income, and high-need students” to enter teaching graduate programs and included a goal of “developing and sustaining antiracist orientations towards teaching and learning,” according to the department’s list of project abstracts.
Wu asserted that putting federal money toward efforts like these is a problem. She’d rather see the funds designated for HSIs channeled into Pell Grants or other supports for low-income students.
“Taxpayer funds should not be used to engage in racial balancing, and that’s exactly the kind of behavior that has been incentivized by MSIs,” said Wu, who is also chair of the Georgia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Possible Outcomes
Robert Kelchen, head of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, believes the lawsuit has “a possibility of success.” It was filed in a conservative-leaning federal district court in Knoxville, and Tennessee seems to have shown it has legal standing, he said.
Even “if the court here in Knoxville doesn’t agree, another state could choose to file a similar lawsuit in their district court as well,” he said. Ultimately, “the question is, can they find one court that agrees with the plaintiffs’ interpretation.”
The move by Tennessee comes just a week after the federal government successfully sued Texas to eliminate in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy Republican state lawmakers had tried but failed to end. The Texas attorney general celebrated the challenge, siding with the U.S. Department of Justice in a matter of hours, and a judge promptly quashed the two-decade-old state law. (Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, called the episode “transparently collusive.”)
Kelchen believes the Tennessee lawsuit is following a similar playbook. He expects to see more red states and conservative organizations sue the Education Department on issues where they align “to get rid of things that neither of [them] like,” he said—though in Tennessee’s case, it’s unclear how the department will respond.
Skrmetti told Inside Higher Ed that “from Tennessee’s perspective, this is not part of a broader strategy to influence education policy. This is about discrimination against Tennessee schools because of the ethnic makeup of their student bodies.”
If the plaintiffs win, it’s unclear whether that would mean changing the federal definition of an HSI to eliminate a Hispanic enrollment threshold or axing the HSI program altogether. The implications for other types of enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are also hazy.
Skrmetti is open to multiple options.
“At the end of the day, there’s [HSI] money out there to help needy students, and we want to make sure that needy students can access it regardless of the ethnic makeup of the schools they’re at,” he said. “There are a couple different avenues I think that could successfully achieve the goal operationally. We need to just get a declaration that the current situation does violate the Constitution.”
Santiago, of Excelencia in Education, said there’s room for “thoughtful discussion” about reforming or expanding requirements for HSI grant funding, but she believes “it needs to come from the community.”
She also pointed out that the lawsuit is against the Department of Education, which administers HSI funding but doesn’t control it—Congress does. So the department doesn’t have the power to end the funding.
Nonetheless, “it would be foolish to not take it seriously,” she said.
Garcia, the Berkeley education professor, said that while she’s not a lawyer, she believes there are legal questions worth raising about the lawsuit, particularly the way it leans on the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in admissions.
She pointed out that HSIs tend to be broad-access or open-access institutions that admit most applicants, rather than selective institutions explicitly recruiting Latino students; only about two dozen of the 600 HSIs are highly selective, she said. So, the assertion that HSIs have any connection to the affirmative action ruling is up for debate, she said.
Skrmetti believes it’s a cut-and-dried case.
“You can’t make determinations about the allocation of resources based on ancestry or skin color or anything like that without inherent discrimination,” he said. “We need to help all needy students. And the HSI designation is an obstacle to that.”
Garcia believes that regardless of whether the lawsuit is successful, it’s already done damage to HSIs by dragging them—and enrollment-based MSIs in general—into the country’s political skirmishes over diversity, equity and inclusion.
“I’ve been just watching HSIs fly a little bit under the radar,” she said. “They don’t come up a lot” in national conversations about DEI. But the lawsuit “brings HSIs into the light, and it brings them into the attack.”
She worries that students are the ones who will suffer if HSIs no longer receive dedicated funding.
HSIs “are often underresourced institutions,” she said. “They’re institutions that are struggling to serve a large population of minoritized students, of students of color, of low-income students, of first-gen students. We’re not talking about the Harvards and the Columbias.”
The state of Tennessee filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday seeking to nix traditional requirements for Hispanic-serving institutions’ federal designation and grant funding. The state is joined by Students for Fair Admissions, the advocacy group whose lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in college admissions.
The plaintiffs argue it’s unconstitutional and discriminatory for the Education Department to designate grants for Hispanic-serving institutions, defined as colleges and universities where at least a quarter of students are Hispanic. Today, about 600 colleges and universities meet the criteria for the federal designation, established by Congress in the 1990s.
The lawsuit laments that Tennessee higher ed institutions serve Hispanic and low-income students but don’t receive grants intended for HSIs because they don’t meet the enrollment threshold. As a result,the plaintiffs argue, Tennessee institutions find themselves in an “unconstitutional dilemma”—they want to enroll more Hispanic students to earn HSI status, but using race as a factor in admissions would be illegal.
“Funds should help needy students regardless of their immutable traits, and the denial of those funds harms students of all races,” the lawsuit reads.
The plaintiffs seek “a declaratory judgment that the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements are unconstitutional” and “a permanent injunction prohibiting the [Education] Secretary from enforcing or applying the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements when making decisions whether to award or maintain grants to Tennessee’s institutions of higher education.”
As climate disasters become more frequent and severe, more institutions are investing in programs to address environmental changes and prepare students to engage in green careers.
Clark University plans to launch its School of Climate, Environment and Society this fall, institutionalizing the university’s commitment to climate action and investing in interdisciplinary learning for students interested in the work of sustainability.
In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Lou Leonard, the inaugural dean of Clark’s School of Climate, Environment and Society, about the need for this new school and how such education can tackle climate anxiety in young people.
An edited version of the podcast transcript appears below.
Inside Higher Ed: Can you talk a little bit about the new school? How does it tie into institutional priorities?
Lou Leonard, Clark University’s inaugural D. J. A. Spencer Dean of the School of Climate, Environment and Society
Leo Leonard: The school officially launches next fall. We’ll have our first incoming cohorts for some new degree programs that are specifically linked to the starting of the school, and so we’ll have an undergraduate major in climate, environment [and] society, and a new professionally oriented master’s degree in climate, environment and society.
But the school really is coming together from a place of long-standing commitment and expertise within Clark on these topics. The school will include a core set of departments that have existed for a long time. In fact, one of them is the geography department at Clark, which has been around for over 100 years. And then a department called Sustainability and Social Justice, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary next year.
The Economics Department for the university will also be housed in the new school, which I think is exciting, because it’s one of these fields that is so significant and important for the way we think about, address, understand and really create climate solutions. But it’s a department that, in many universities, would say, “Oh, well, that can’t be in a school of climate, environment and society, because economics is bigger than that.” I think [Clark’s] decision is emblematic of a bigger decision by the university, which is to really go all in on climate action and on the issues that are under this umbrella of climate, environment and society, the way climate change and environmental degradation intersect with human society.
In that sense, it’s not just the launching of a new school. It’s the university saying, “This is one of the things that Clark already does really well. We want to do better, and we want to be known for it in the world.” I think having a school like this demonstrates that the university is making a real, serious commitment to these issues.
Q: I think sometimes sustainability or climate action can be seen as something new or trendy with young people, or a response to things that have happened in the past 20 years. But, as you allude to, some of these departments and majors have existed for 20-plus years. I wonder if you can speak to that element of, not everything within the school is new, but it’s a rehousing and reorganization of programs and majors that are already important to the university.
A: I think that your question applies to this school and the way higher education can think of its role in climate, but it actually also points at the larger question of climate change itself, right?
A lot of times, we think of climate change as something that’s a separate issue. But really what the climate crisis represents, and what issues related to climate impacts—the energy transition, biodiversity conservation—all of these topics existed since before there were humans on this planet, some of them, anyway.
What the layer of climate change brings to these things is often an acceleration of challenges or a way in which we need to think across traditional disciplines when we’re trying to figure out how to respond to some of the challenges that climate change presents for us. Climate is not a wholly new thing in the world or in higher education.
Q: I’m even thinking, like, food systems is something that we traditionally house in a school of agriculture, but there’s definitely climate implications when it comes to that. Or we talked about economics and how business and society functions are completely dependent on climate and the external circumstances that drive those factors.
I also really appreciate the fact that the school includes the “and society,” because there’s that human implication as well, where it’s not just “we’re trying to fix the planet,” but also “we’re trying to impact the world in a more positive way.”
A: That’s right. In some ways, the planet is going to be fine. The planet is a set of geophysical, geochemical processes. And the real question is whether the conditions for stable, predictable human life are going to continue in the same ways that have allowed humans to prosper and to be thinking about leading better and more fulfilling lives.
It’s those conditions that—we’ve been lucky—for the last 20,000 years have been pretty stable, and basically, we’re leaving that period. We’re leaving that period of Goldilocks, stable climate conditions that have allowed human society to focus on other things, including their own prosperity. Now we don’t have the luxury anymore; we have to understand the intersection between human society and what’s changing around us in order to maintain a future where we can prosper and we can live lives of purpose.
Q: Absolutely. That is very scary, though, especially for our young people, who are growing up in a world where this is the reality that they’re facing in their future.
I pulled a few stats. Inside Higher Ed did a survey in 2022 and we found that 81 percent of college students said they were at least somewhat worried about climate change. And then, more recently, Sacred Heart University found more than half of U.S. youth report eco-anxiety, and 74 percent said they agree with the statement “I’m personally worried about climate change.”
When we think about climate, higher education obviously has a role when it comes to resources and research, and helping people understand solutions and the implications of climate change, but also educating young people and helping them prepare for their future and understanding the world around them. I wonder if you can talk about that mission of the school as well as helping students engage in this sort of work.
A: I’m hearing two things here. One is the understandable—and it’s not just something that younger folks are experiencing, but a lot of folks are experiencing—sense of uncertainty, anxiety and fear about what it means to live in a world that’s not as stable in some fundamental ways as what we’re used to.
And the other is “How do we still find purpose, agency and careers that are meaningful for us in that kind of world?”
So if we take the first part of that, I think it is fundamental that we understand and provide students with the tools to address the kind of social, emotional dimensions of the climate crisis present to us. And if you’re going to have a school that focuses on these topics and brings an interdisciplinary perspective to it—which is what the school aspires to do—then that has to include ways for students to name, hold and manage the emotional sides of this.
I think Clark’s really lucky. Clark University is very well-known for its psychology program—Sigmund Freud gave his only lectures in the United States at Clark … Bringing that sort of perspective to the Clark education is something we’ve done forever, and I think a really important part of what the school does going forward is being intentional about that.
But I think the second part of your question is related to the first, which is, can we find a sense of purpose, a sense of agency, a sense of “I have a way to contribute to this”? You know, action metabolizes anxiety, and a sense of purpose allows us to have a ballast during times that are shaky around us—and, quite frankly, the world is shaky right now. So for those people that particularly—and you said, the number is pretty high—care about these issues, building a set of skills competencies, confidence that you can be part of the response going forward … I think that is critical to your emotional well-being in these changing times.
Q: I’ve been reading [Jonathan Haidt’s] The Anxious Generation, and it talks a lot about how social media can be a portal to too much information, where students are always seeing each other and always hearing from each other.
I think, in the same way, climate information can be really overwhelming, where it’s like, “Oh my gosh, the polar bears are dying; what am I supposed to do about it in my dorm room at Clark University?” But there’s also an element of “OK, now I know about it and I get to be equipped with that information.”
I think helping students understand the problems and contribute to solving them, but also like you said, making sure that they are mentally well and capable of handling what that looks like and having that sense of advocacy for themselves and the world around them—that’s a really tough tension for students to live between.
A: The difference between going on to the virtual world, whether it’s social media or the internet more broadly, it’s like you’re putting yourself in front of a fire hose or this waterfall that feels uncontrollable related to the information that’s flying at you.
Those places—social media, the internet in general—do not provide you a way to manage that information flow. But a good education, one that’s grounded in different ways to understand and make sense of the complexity of the world, that is the role a good education, particularly the role that an undergraduate education, has traditionally played. That’s what we do.
So if that’s true, and if the liberal arts education was always supposed to provide that equipment for students to then enter the world with more confidence in understanding it and therefore being able to navigate it in all of its complexity, then, in some ways, the degrees and the programs under the School of Climate, Environment and Society at Clark being interdisciplinary, being experiential, are a kind of a new liberal arts in a way.
It’s a specialized set of equipment that allows you to understand that torrent of information, particularly about climate, environment and its relationship to society. I think it’s in some ways the opposite of just going on social media. It’s being intentional about creating those filters, that equipment, that way to understand and see the world that you need to avoid feeling overwhelmed. It’s not that we’re never going to— We’re still going to feel overwhelmed at times, right? I’ve been in this work my entire life. I’m now in my 50s. I still feel overwhelmed by it at times. That part doesn’t go away. It’s not that it goes away; we just become more able to manage it while we’re contributing to the change that needs to happen.
Q: You’ve mentioned a few times now the interdisciplinary lens of the world. Can you talk about that and the experiential elements, both getting students that hands-on experience but also transcending the traditional majors and disciplines to help students be able to grapple with this issue from a lot of different angles?
A: I’m glad that you paired interdisciplinary with experiential, because those two things need to go together from a pedagogical standpoint, from a learning-how-we-do-the-learning standpoint.
Interdisciplinarity, or transdisciplinarity, says that the world is really complex, and, in fact, some of what has led to the slow and, at best, incomplete—and some would say, woefully inadequate—response to the climate crisis and the even longer biodiversity crisis and the related impacts to communities, environmental justice crisis, is because we haven’t adequately been able to look across those different ways in which to understand the world. Whether it’s economic, physical sciences … policy and governance, the role that the private sector plays, or technology and the issues there.
That’s why, five years ago now, the National Academies of Sciences did a review of education related to sustainability and said, “What is the right formula for pulling together programs that meet this complex need, give students equipment to deal with this complexity and to then contribute to new ways of developing solutions or working across these traditional aspects of society, so we can see new ways to unlock progress on climate change?”
That combination [of interdisciplinary and experiential] is important, because transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary work can be conceptual until you actually get into an applied setting, until you actually start doing projects. Either research projects that are especially designed to be cross- or interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, or you get out into the working world through an internship, through a class project. At Clark we have something called the Global Learning Collaboratives, these places where students can go and engage in projects in other countries, where their work in the classroom starts to make sense, because they’re now doing it in an experiential way, in an applied way.
You need both, otherwise you get lost. It becomes very conceptual. Or if you’re just doing applied work, you don’t have any framework to see how these different aspects or the way the world gets in the way of some of these applied challenges, then you’re not able to do things differently. So you need both.
Q: Another really important facet of climate and society and understanding how sustainability impacts communities is doing community-based learning or service-based learning. How are you considering ways to put students out in the world and engage with communities that are being directly impacted by climate change?
A: There’s a lot that we already have at Clark that’s being brought together under the umbrella of the new school that’s related to this. I spoke a second ago about the Global Learning Collaboratives. This is something that emerged from one of the units that’s going to be part of the new school, and we’re going to build on it going forward. We have projects in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, in Mexico, but also in Worcester [Mass.], in our backyard, in the community that Clark has lived in for almost 150 years.
It is really important that that is what experiential and applied work is: It’s work in communities or with institutions or businesses or others. But I think the community part that you’re pointing out is important to talk about in its own special way, as well as being a part of a broader way to do experiential learning. Because I think, for too long, higher education has—there’s always been exceptions—but I think for too long, too much of the sort of, like, engagement or research that higher ed has done is seeing communities as a subject or a set of data or problems that we in higher education want to understand and bring back into our world and study.
For a long time, we’ve understood that that’s both ethically not appropriate and it doesn’t produce the richest form of learning. The richest form of learning, I think, is co-created. You co-create knowledge. You co-create understanding with communities. When students can be part of that, it actually provides a new way of understanding what it means to be in relationship with communities.
And hopefully that means that students take that forward when they go out into their work, because the same thing could [be applied there]. There’s a similar history within the way nonprofits and advocacy groups engage with communities, or businesses engage with communities. I think if we can model a better way of how to do that within higher ed, then that will have ripple effects into the way students, when they go out into the world, can bring that new approach to their jobs.
Q: I’m glad that you mentioned jobs, because in the same way that students who are interested in federal or research roles right now—which I know there’s an intersection between that and sustainability and climate work—they have a lot of anxiety around this current time and the recent policy changes that we’ve seen, or different priorities from this current administration.
I wonder if you can touch just briefly on how policy is reshaping climate [work] or how policy is reshaping the conversations around climate and the school and the work that you’re all doing helping students think about careers, given the fact that we are seeing a different set of priorities than we did under the previous administration.
A: I’ve been in the environmental sustainability field my whole career. So that’s over 30 years, and I’ve been really working on climate for almost 20. I think sometimes it’s like, “Oh, jeez, old guy,” but there is at least one benefit to being in this work for a long time: You see the peaks and valleys. You see the way these fundamental issues of society transform and change—which is happening no matter what.
The number of people who now say climate change is not happening is much lower than it was 20 years ago, 10 years ago. Politics affects that to some degree, on the margins, but if you look at the trend line, that is less and less the debate, and that was not the case 20 years ago, I’ll tell you that.
In that sense, we’re seeing kind of a positive trend line of understanding that stuff is happening, so society is going to transform, whether we like it or not, because the conditions around us are changing. The question is, how do we respond? I think again, the trend line is, if we step back and look—and I don’t think this is going to change going forward—the need to address this, and the understanding of the need to address this is only going to maintain a positive trend line. Even if, right now, it seems like certain aspects of the climate response have got caught up in the political maw or munching, kind of snarly, world of politics, we shouldn’t be confused and think that that means that these issues are going to go away.
They present a new set of challenges for us, which we should not ignore, either, which is why we need to really think hard about how to create spaces for learning and conversation around these topics that feels less politically charged—not because we want to agree or disagree with a certain political view on these issues, but so that we can bring more people into the conversation. So that we don’t lose time that we desperately need and can’t afford to lose to make progress on these issues.
It’s definitely a challenge for us. It does not, in my view, at all represent a long-term change in the trend. I think that’s why those who care about these issues, whether you’re at the stage of trying to choose an undergraduate program or a grad program, or you’re not in the market for higher ed at all, I would not be discouraged to the point where you change something that feels meaningful to you, that feels like part of your purpose, because we need to listen to that voice, and these issues are goingto have growing amounts of room for people to contribute going forward.
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