Tag: News

California State Bar Admits to Using AI for Exam Questions

The State Bar of California sparked outrage after it admitted to using artificial intelligence to help craft some of its multiple-choice exam questions, the Los Angeles Times reported. The Monday announcement came after test takers complained of glitches and irregularities while taking the California bar exam in February.

In a news release, the State Bar of California promised to petition the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took the exam in February. The release detailed that the test’s multiple-choice questions were mostly developed by the test company Kaplan, while some were recycled from the First-Year Law Students’ Exam and others were developed by ACS Ventures, the State Bar’s independent psychometrician, hired to assess questions. ACS Ventures used AI.

But State Bar officials defended the veracity of the exam’s questions.

“We have confidence in the validity of the MCQs to accurately and fairly assess the legal competence of test-takers,” State Bar executive director Leah Wilson said in the release. “Lessons learned are being incorporated into the July exam, and all future tests will include additional levels of independent review and validation.”

Test takers and law school faculty have reacted with shock.

Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation, told the Los Angeles Times that the announcement was a “staggering admission.”

“The State Bar has admitted they employed a company to have a non-lawyer use AI to draft questions that were given on the actual bar exam,” she said. “They then paid that same company to assess and ultimately approve of the questions on the exam, including the questions the company authored.”

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April 25, 2025
White House Partners With Hillsdale for Lecture Series

President Donald Trump is tapping a familiar institution, Hillsdale College, to produce a video lecture series for the U.S. sestercentennial, the administration announced on social media.

“On July 4, 2026, we will celebrate 250 years of American Independence. The White House has partnered with @Hillsdale to tell our story of a rag-tag army defeating the world’s mightiest empire and establishing the greatest republic ever to exist,” the administration posted Tuesday.

The first installment in the series, according to the post, was a seven-and-a-half-minute video featuring patriotic imagery and comments from Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, who emphasized the importance of knowing American history in order to commemorate the 250th anniversary.

In introducing the video series, Arnn cast Trump in the mold of Abraham Lincoln.

“Part of the purpose of this series of lectures is to remember. President Trump does this in part I think—I don’t speak for him—but the word ‘again’ is important to him. He has a famous slogan that I will not repeat here, but everybody knows what it is,” Arnn said. “He wants to do something again. Something [that’s] already been done, he wants to see it happen again.”

Arnn argued that Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, “places him somewhere near the politics of Abraham Lincoln,” who sought to build on the foundation laid by George Washington.

The video focused on the Declaration of Independence and start of the Revolutionary War. The second installment in the series is about the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

A Hillsdale spokesperson told Politico the college did not take “a dime of federal money” for the video lecture series, which it is providing in partnership with the White House and the Department of Education. (Hillsdale, a private, Christian institution in Michigan, does not accept federal financial aid.)

The Trump administration also worked with Hillsdale at the end of the president’s first term. In early 2017, Hillsdale officials were part of a commission, chaired by Arnn, that produced the 1776 Report, a widely ridiculed document that academics dismissed as unserious scholarship. Critics argued the 1776 Report provided a whitewashed view of American history, omitted Native Americans entirely and had multiple citation issues.

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April 25, 2025
NSF Director Panchanathan Resigns

Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the National Science Foundation, resigned Thursday after nearly five years at the helm. His resignation comes less than one week after he issued sweeping priority changes—including terminating funding for projects that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion or combating misinformation—at the independent agency that funds billions of dollars to nonmedical university research each year.

“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” Panchanathan wrote in a resignation letter, first reported by Science. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”

Although it’s not immediately clear what prompted his resignation, Panchanathan is among the latest top federal officials who have resigned since President Trump started his second term in January. The administration has also fired thousands of other federal employees, including dozens at the NSF, and terminated many grants that don’t align with the agency’s new anti-DEI priorities. Additionally, Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas has been targeting the agency for months, calling it a bastion of “a far-left ideology.”

According to Science, even more changes are coming to the NSF. The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly told Panchanathan earlier this month to plan to fire half the NSF’s 1,700-person staff; the Office of Management and Budget reportedly told him that Trump only plans to request 55 percent of the agency’s $9 billion budget for fiscal year 2026.

“While NSF has always been an efficient agency,” he wrote in his resignation letter, “we still took [on] the challenge of identifying other possible efficiencies and reducing our commitments to serve the scientific community even better.”

Trump picked Panchanathan, a computer scientist from India who previously worked as a top research administrator at Arizona State University, to run the agency during his first term in office. But soon after Panchanathan started his six-year term in 2020, voters rejected Trump’s bid for re-election, and most of Panchanathan’s work at the NSF happened under former president Joe Biden’s administration.

Under Panchanathan’s leadership, the NSF’s stated priorities have included increasing diversity in the STEM workforce, forming industry partnerships, job creation and broadening research opportunities for smaller universities and community colleges. In 2022, Panchanathan oversaw the creation of the NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, which is focused on “accelerating breakthrough technologies, transitioning these technologies to the market, and preparing Americans for better-quality, higher-wage jobs,” according to the NSF’s website.

Despite the second Trump administration’s quick and radical changes to some of those Biden-era policies, Panchanathan was seemingly adapting—up until his resignation Thursday—while many other scientists sound the alarm that Trump’s policies will hurt research and innovation.

In his statement on the NSF’s reoriented priorities last Friday, he said that any NSF-funded activities in support of “broadening participation” in STEM “must aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere” and “not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”

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April 25, 2025
Cornell Pres. Nixes Kehlani Concert for “Antisemitic” Remarks

Cornell University’s president announced Wednesday that he’s canceling Kehlani’s campus concert, saying the R&B singer has “espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments.”

Kehlani was set to perform May 7 at the annual Slope Day spring festival.

“For decades, student leaders have taken the helm in organizing this event, hiring performers they hope will appeal to the student body,” Cornell president Michael I. Kotlikoff said in a statement. “Unfortunately, although it was not the intention, the selection of Kehlani as this year’s headliner has injected division and discord into Slope Day.”

“In the days since Kehlani was announced, I have heard grave concerns from our community that many are angry, hurt, and confused,” Kotlikoff said, adding that the student Slope Day Programming Board agreed “that this selection has compromised what is meant to be an inclusive event.”

The board didn’t respond to an email Thursday from Inside Higher Ed seeking comment. Kehlani has expressed pro-Palestine views—one of her music videos features the Palestinian flag and the phrase “long live the intifada.” She also said “fuck Israel” and “fuck Zionism” last year.

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April 25, 2025
Florida’s Own DOGE Is Reviewing Faculty Research, Grants

Elon Musk’s days with DOGE appear numbered—the unelected billionaire bureaucrat said Tuesday that his time spent leading the agency-gutting U.S. Department of Government Efficiency will “drop significantly” next month. As Tesla’s profits plummet, the world’s richest man faces opposition from both Trump administration officials and voters.

DOGE’s legacy remains unclear. Lawsuits are challenging its attempted cuts, including at the U.S. Education Department. Musk seems to have scaled back his planned overall budget savings from $1 or $2 trillion to $150 billion, and it’s unclear whether DOGE will achieve even that.

But something may outlive Musk’s DOGE: all the state iterations it has inspired, with legislators and governors borrowing or riffing off the name. Iowa’s Republican governor created the Iowa DOGE Task Force. Missouri’s GOP-controlled Legislature launched Government Efficiency Committees, calling them MODOGE on Musk’s X social media platform. Kansas lost the reference to the original doge meme when it went with COGE, for its Senate Committee on Government Efficiency.

But, as with the federal version, the jokey names for these state offshoots may belie the serious impact they could have on governments and public employees—including state higher education institutions and faculty.

To take perhaps the most glaring example, the sweeping requests from the Florida DOGE team, which is led by a former federal Department of Transportation inspector general, have alarmed scholars.

Earlier this month, the Florida DOGE asked public college and university presidents to provide an account—by the end of last week—of “all research published by staff” over the last six years, including “Papers and drafts made available to the public or in online academic repositories for drafts, preprints, or similar materials.”

“If not contained therein, author’s name, title, and position at the institution” must be provided, according to the letters the presidents received. The letters didn’t say what this and other requests were for.

The Florida DOGE also requested information on all grants awarded to institutions over the last six years, asking for each institution’s policy on allocating grants “for purposes of indirect cost recovery, including procedures for calculation.” Further, it requested an account of “all filled and vacant positions held by any employee with a non-instructional role.”

By the end of April, Florida’s public institutions must also provide the “Length of research associated” with each research publication, funding sources associated with the research and any “publications about the research” from the researcher or institution. In addition, the state DOGE is requesting funding sources for each institution’s noninstructional positions and the names of the nonstudent employees administering the grants.

And that may not be the end of the DOGE demands. In a March 26 letter, the state DOGE team told college presidents that it will conduct site visits “to ensure full compliance” with the governor’s executive order that created it, “as well as existing Florida law.” It said it may in the future request various other information, including course descriptions, syllabi, “full detail” on campus centers and the required end of diversity, equity and inclusion activities.

The requests so far from the Florida DOGE are the latest in a string of state actions that faculty say threaten to infringe on, or have already reduced, academic freedom. Dan Saunders, lead negotiator for the United Faculty of Florida union at Florida International University and a tenured associate professor of higher education, expressed concerns about what he called a “continuation of a chilling effect on faculty in terms of what we research and publish.”

“The lack of any meaningful articulation as to why they’re looking for this data and what they’re going to do with it just adds to the suspicions that I think the state has earned from the faculty,” Saunders said. “It’s clear that this is part of a broader and multidimensional attack” on areas of scholarship such as women’s and gender studies—part of a “comprehensive assault” on the “independence of the university,” he said.

“If Florida DOGE is following the patterns of the federal DOGE, then I think we can expect some radical oversimplifications of nuanced data and some cherry picking” of texts that an “unsophisticated AI will highlight,” he said. Noting how much research is published over six years, he questioned “how anyone is supposed to engage meaningfully” with that much information.

David Simmons, president of the University of South Florida’s Faculty Senate and a tenured engineering professor, said many faculty are “reasonably” concerned that this request is part of an effort to target “certain ideas that are disfavored by certain politicians.” Simmons—who stressed that he’s not speaking on behalf of the Senate or his institution—said such targeting would be “fundamentally un-American and inconsistent with the mission of a public university.”

“We hope that’s not happening. We hope this is just an inefficient effort to collect data,” Simmons said. He noted that much of the research information that the Florida DOGE is requesting is already publicly available on Google Scholar, an online database with profiles on faculty across the country.

“Universities are being required to reproduce information that’s already freely available in some cases, and to do that they’re using considerable resources and manpower,” Simmons said. The initial two-week data request was “so large as to be nearly impossible” to fulfill, he added.

A State University System of Florida spokesperson deferred comment to the DOGE team, which didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for an interview or provide answers to written questions Thursday. A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, which includes the Florida College System, deferred comment to Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s office, which responded via email but didn’t answer multiple written questions.

“In alignment with previous announcements and correspondence with all 67 counties, 411 municipalities, and 40 academic institutions the Florida DOGE Task Force aims to eliminate wasteful spending and cut government bloat,” a DeSantis spokesperson wrote. “If waste or abuse is identified during our collaborative efforts with partnering agencies and institutions, each case will be handled accordingly.”

‘DOGE Before DOGE Was Cool’

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January and announced DOGE’s creation, he suggested it was an effort to cut the alleged waste his Democratic predecessor had allowed to fester. But DeSantis—who lost to Trump in the GOP presidential primary—launched his own DOGE in a state that he’s been leading for six years.

“Florida was DOGE before DOGE was cool,” DeSantis posted on X Feb. 24. (His actions in higher education have, in many ways, presaged what Trump is now doing nationally.)

So, perhaps not surprisingly, DeSantis’s executive order creating the Florida DOGE that day began by saying the state already has a “strong record of responsible fiscal management.” A list of rosy financial stats followed before DeSantis finally wrote, “Notwithstanding Florida’s history of prudent fiscal management relative to many states in the country, the State should nevertheless endeavor to explore opportunities for even better stewardship.”

“The State of Florida should leverage cutting edge technology to identify further spending reductions and reforms in state agencies, university bureaucracies, and local governments,” DeSantis wrote, echoing, at least in language, the tech-focused approach of the federal DOGE.

He established the DOGE team within the Executive Office of the Governor, tasking it in part to work with the statewide higher education agencies to “identify and eliminate unnecessary spending, programs, courses, staff, and any other inefficiencies,” including “identifying and returning unnecessary federal grant funding.” The executive order says state agencies must set up their own DOGE teams, which will identify grants “that are inconsistent with the policies of this State and should be returned to the American taxpayer in furtherance of the President’s DOGE efforts.”

This executive order expires about a year from now. In an emailed statement, Teresa M. Hodge, the statewide United Faculty of Florida union president, said the request for faculty publication records “is not about transparency or accountability; it is about control.”

“Our members should not be forced to defend their scholarship, or their silence, in a political witch hunt,” Hodge said. “We stand united in ensuring that Florida’s faculty are free to teach, conduct research, and to speak without fear of retaliation.”

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April 25, 2025
Education Department’s Anti-DEI Guidance Blocked

The Education Department won’t be able to enforce its guidance that declared all race-based programming and activities illegal following two court orders Thursday.

Federal judges in New Hampshire and Maryland handed down the rulings after finding plaintiffs in the two separate lawsuits were likely to succeed in proving that the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter violated procedural standards and the First Amendment. Prior to the orders, colleges and K-12 schools that failed to comply with the letter risked their federal funding.

“Although the 2025 letter does not make clear what exactly it prohibits, it makes at least one thing clear: schools should not come close to anything that could be considered ‘DEI,’ lest they be deemed to have guessed wrong,” the New Hampshire judge wrote. And since loss of federal grants could cripple institutions, “it is predictable—if not obvious—that [they] will eliminate all vestiges of DEI to avoid even the possibility of funding termination,” regardless of whether it is an example of executive overreach.

The New Hampshire court’s preliminary injunction, which was issued first, was limited to institutions that are members of the plaintiff association, leaving many colleges and universities vulnerable. But just hours later, a Maryland judge filed her opinion that prevented the letter from taking effect until the case is resolved, which essentially serves as a nationwide injunction.

The injunctions do not, however, block all of Trump’s attacks on DEI. The Dear Colleague letter was just one aspect of the president’s multipronged strategy.

In a separate lawsuit from the NAACP challenging the department’s guidance and actions related to DEI, a District of Columbia judge blocked the department from requiring that K-12 schools certify that they don’t have any DEI programs. Thursday, April 24, was the deadline to comply. The department threatened to withhold federal funding from K-12 schools that didn’t meet the certification requirement. The judge ruled that “because the certification requirement conditions serious financial and other penalties on insufficiently defined conduct,” the plaintiffs were likely to succeed.

Since its release, the Dear Colleague letter has sent K-12 and higher education advocates across the country into an uproar as lawyers and others argued that the document was a prime example of Trump abusing presidential power.

The Education Department said in the guidance that the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned race-conscious admissions, also made any race-based programming, resources and financial aid illegal. The department gave colleges two weeks to comply. A few weeks after the letter took effect, the Office for Civil Rights opened dozens of investigations into colleges, accusing them of violating the guidance in the letter.

Some colleges and universities, in an effort to comply with the letter, began to retract, or at least rebrand, their DEI activities, resources and scholarships. Some institutions, including the Universities of Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Alaska, responded by scrubbing their websites of words like “diversity” and “inclusion.” Others, including Ohio State University, shuttered DEI offices and changed the eligibility requirements for certain programs entirely. (Those changes were made despite the advice of some academic associations to avoid pre-emptive compliance.)

On March 3, the Education Department released an FAQ that watered down and provided clarity on some of the letter’s bold orders. But still, higher education groups continued to push back, and by the end of the week, both lawsuits had been filed.

The one in New Hampshire was led by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest K-12 union, and the other in Maryland was from the American Federation of Teachers, a union that includes many higher education faculty.

The unions argued that the letter and its threat to cut federal funding violated the First and Fifth Amendments, using vague language that exceeded the Education Department’s statutory authority. They also alleged that the scrubbing of DEI programs as well as the potential funding cuts would weaken schools’ and universities’ ability to act as tools of socioeconomic mobility.

“This letter is an unlawful attempt by the department to impose this administration’s particular views of how schools should operate as if it were the law. But it is not,” the AFT complaint stated. “Title VI’s requirements have not changed, nor has the meaning of the SFFA decision, despite the Department’s views on the matter.” (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.)

At a recent hearing in the Maryland case, the Department of Education argued that its letter was merely a reminder that existing civil rights laws protect white children from discrimination just as much as children from a minority group, Maryland Matters reported.

“It’s highly unlikely that they’re going to go after a school because they taught a certain book,” U.S. attorney Abhishek Kambli said. “All this letter does is just clarify what the existing obligations are under Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act].”

But the Maryland judge didn’t buy that argument, and she sided with the plaintiffs, as did the New Hampshire judge.

The New Hampshire judge said the policies outlined in the letter failed to appropriately define DEI and therefore threatened to erode the “foundational principles” of free speech and academic freedom.

The Maryland judge, on the other hand, approached her case from a perspective of “substantive and procedural legality,” saying the Trump administration’s letter failed to hold its own on that front as well.

“Plaintiffs have shown that the government likely did not follow the procedures it should have, and those procedural failures have tangibly and concretely harmed the Plaintiffs,” Gallagher wrote. “This case, especially, underscores why following the proper procedures, even when it is burdensome, is so important.”

And though the orders are just temporary holds and litigation will continue, education stakeholders consider it a win.

“The nationwide injunction will pause at least part of the chaos the Trump administration is unleashing in classrooms and learning communities throughout the country, and it will provide the time for our clients to demonstrate clearly in court how these attacks on public education are unconstitutional and should be permanently stopped,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a pro bono legal group that is representing AFT in Maryland.

AFT president Randi Weingarten added in a statement that “the court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself.”

For the NEA, the New Hampshire decision was “a victory for students, parents, and educators” that blocked an “unprecedented and unlawful” effort to control American schools.

“Across the country educators do everything in their power to support every student, ensuring each feels safe, seen, and is prepared for the future,” NEA president Becky Pringle said in a news release. “Today’s ruling allows educators and schools to continue to be guided by what’s best for students, not by the threat of illegal restrictions and punishment.”

The Department of Education did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment prior to the publishing of this story.

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April 25, 2025
Searches Were About Vandalism of Michigan Leaders’ Homes

The Michigan attorney general’s office revealed Thursday that the police searches Wednesday in Ann Arbor, Canton and Ypsilanti were part of a yearlong investigation into “evidently coordinated” vandalism, including pro-Palestine graffiti and in some cases shattered glass at the homes of the University of Michigan’s president, provost, chief investment officer and one regent, Jordan Acker.

In a news release, the office of Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said there were many “related criminal acts.” It listed 12 locations where incidents—spanning February 2024 to last month—are under investigation, including the four university leaders’ homes.

“It is currently estimated that the total damage from these incidents is approximately $100,000,” the release said. “In all cases, the crimes were committed in the middle of the night and in one case upon a residence wherein children were sleeping and awoken. In multiple instances windows were smashed, and twice noxious chemical substances were propelled into homes. At every site, political slogans or messages were left behind.”

No arrests have been made yet.

Police—including local, state and the FBI—raided five homes connected to university pro-Palestinian activists Wednesday, according to Lavinia Dunagan, a Ph.D. student who is a co-chair of the university graduate student union’s communications committee. She said at least seven people, including at least one union member, were detained but not arrested. All are students, save for one employee of Michigan Medicine, she said.

The union—the Graduate Employees’ Organization, or GEO—said in a news release Wednesday that “officers also confiscated personal belongings from multiple residences and at least two cars.”

The state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a release Wednesday that “property damage at residences took place, and individuals were handcuffed without charges during the aggressive raids.”

The attorney general’s office did say Thursday that “in one instance, an entryway was forcibly breached following more than an hour of police efforts to negotiate entry to satisfy the court-authorized search warrant.”

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April 24, 2025
How to Lead Through Uncertainty (opinion)
Uncertainty is unavoidable. Whether it relates to relatively minor topics such as today’s traffic and weather or potentially life-altering issues such as our health and employment, coping with an unknown future is part of our daily lives. At the same time, we are living in a moment of extraordinary uncertainty, with numerous changes to the landscape of higher education and increasing economic instability.

If you are in a leadership role—whether that means leading an academic unit or leading a research lab or classroom—you may be feeling the weight not only of managing uncertainty for yourself, but also of guiding those you lead through uncertain terrain. In doing so, you are likely to encounter situations where those you lead are looking for definitive information around questions that you are not able to answer.

How do you lead in these situations? I’m a firm believer that leaders can always do something even when it is not the specific thing that people are hoping for. In this case, I propose that even when we can’t provide answers or predict what the future will hold, we can offer something that might be even more valuable—the skills needed to manage uncertainty.

Empowering others in the face of uncertainty is a complex and nuanced process, and your approach will differ depending on each individual and context. However, some steps that are likely to be helpful are:
- Acknowledge the challenge. As a leader, you may feel an urge to avoid talking about issues that you’re not able to solve. However, this does not make those issues any less real for those you lead. Start by validating what is at stake for an individual, whether this is job stability, research funding or admission to graduate school. You can also acknowledge the broader challenge that uncertainty brings and how it taxes us mentally and emotionally. Acknowledging challenges does not mean that you are taking the blame for their existence or that you will not advocate to uphold the rights of individuals and shared values of your institution. However, openly recognizing the reality of a situation can go a long way in building trust with those you lead.
- Reflect on past resilience. Every person you lead is a unique individual with their own way of managing adversity. You can offer some general strategies, such as focusing on purpose and impact and leaning on community for support. Even more helpful is to empower each person by encouraging them to reflect on challenges they have faced in the past and think about what strategies and supports enabled them to manage those situations. Helping someone remember that they have overcome difficult situations in the past provides guidance as to how they can do so again and builds their self-confidence to do exactly that.
- Focus on what you can control. One of the many things that uncertainty robs us of is our sense of self-determination. A natural response is to place the greatest focus on the areas where we have the least amount of control. Effectively managing uncertainty or adversity can require that we do the opposite. Importantly, our domain of control includes both what we do and how we do it. You can offer guidance to an individual on how to create a plan and take actions that are within their domain of control, while also reinforcing that they are the one in control of the values and ethics that will guide the choice and implementation of those actions.
- Create space for self-care. When the challenges we face may stretch over weeks, months or even years, self-care is more critical than ever in sustaining ourselves for what is to come. Just as you can help each person you lead reflect on their unique coping strategies, you can help them make a plan for self-care activities that will provide the greatest benefit to their mental health. This might include time spent doing activities they enjoy alongside people they care about. It can also mean checking out for a set time and playing video games or streaming a show where the only value is entertainment.
Depending on your leadership role, simply managing your current responsibilities may already feel overwhelming. Adding in the task of helping others manage uncertainty may seem impossible. You may also feel unprepared to navigate a topic for which you haven’t received specific training. Those are very real challenges, but they do not have to prevent you from taking action.

The principles outlined above can be woven into everyday meetings and email discussions and thus reap benefit without increasing workload. You can also lean on existing resources and expertise to disseminate helpful ideas in a time-efficient manner. For example, consider sharing an article or podcast on resilience, uncertainty or self-care with your team and setting aside 15 to 20 minutes at your next meeting to discuss the advice offered by experts. Or for a deeper dive, you can choose a book and work through each chapter together over a monthly sack lunch.

As a leader, there is always something that you can do. And even when you don’t have all of the answers, you can have a powerful positive impact by mindfully guiding yourself and others through uncertainty.

Jen Heemstra is the Charles Allen Thomas Professor of Chemistry and chair of the Department of Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research is focused on harnessing biomolecules for applications in medicine and the environment, and she is the author of the forthcoming book Labwork to Leadership (Harvard University Press, August 2025)
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April 24, 2025
Where Is Higher Ed Now and Where Is It Going? The Key

In the latest episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast, two economists highlight opportunities that college and universities can grab to improve engagement with their local communities, create greater access for first-generation students and increase transparency around pricing.

David Hummels, professor of economics and dean emeritus, and Jay Akridge, trustee chair in teaching and learning excellence, professor of agricultural economics and former provost, both at Purdue University, are co-authors of a Substack newsletter on higher education, Finding Equilibrium.

They join Sara Custer, editor in chief of Inside Higher Ed, and this episode’s host, Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed’s editor for special content, to analyze the findings from the Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research 2025 Survey of College and University Presidents.

In response to two-thirds of presidents having some serious doubts about the value of tenure, Hummels cautions that not offering faculty tenure means institutions are “going to have to pay faculty the way they’re paid in industry or you won’t be able to attract anyone.”

Tenure is similar to executive stock options in the private sector, he argues: “It causes faculty to invest far more than they otherwise would in critical functions—like developing curriculum, hiring, developing and evaluating other faculty—because their tenure is going to be a lot more valuable if they’re part of a thriving institution,” he says.

Akridge agrees with the 50 percent of survey respondents who say higher ed has a real affordability problem, even if his research shows that the value of college remains high and the debt students take on is overblown.

“The sticker price and the debt they take on becomes how they think about cost. And that’s real,” he says. “Part of the fear for us is, who hears that message? Students with means and whose parents went to college are going to go to college. The evidence is quite clear that lifetime earnings, wage premiums, quality of life, even life span are better for those that go to college, and these families know that. Students that are first generation, that are maybe lower income, maybe underserved—I think they’re quite susceptible to that message and may write off college as perhaps their ticket to a better life, and that’s concerning from an equity standpoint.”

A mere 3 percent of surveyed presidents said that higher ed has been very or extremely effective at responding to the diploma divide that is increasingly predictive of voter behavior. In response, Custer encourages colleges and universities to take accountability for, and be responsive to, valid critiques of higher education as a sector, while building on the confidence that many communities retain in their local institutions. She shared an example of a messaging campaign by one regional college that highlighted how graduates are contributing to the local area in everyday but fundamental ways. “‘We are putting really valuable people back into the community who are supporting you and your families and making it possible for you to live here,’” she summarizes.

Hummels also stresses the importance of making the case for academic research, currently under threat. “Science broadly is essential to the competitiveness of the economy, to our firms and to the success of our students. It’s not just this cute thing faculty do in their spare time. We do it because it is central to who we want to be as a country and what our firms want to become. And I think we have been neglectful about maintaining awareness of how important this is.”

Listen to the full episode.

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April 24, 2025
Demands of Harvard Are Blueprint for Repression (opinion)

Harvard University’s courageous refusal to obey the demands of the Trump administration—and its subsequent filing of a lawsuit this week seeking restoration of its federal funding—has inspired praise across academia. But there has been less attention to just how terrible those demands were. No government entity in the United States has ever proposed such repressive measures against a college. By making outrageous demands a condition of federal funding—and freezing $2.2 billion in funds because Harvard refused to obey—the Trump administration is setting a precedent for threatening the same authoritarian measures against every college in America.

The April 11 letter to Harvard from Trump administration officials proposed a staggering level of control over a private college. Although at least one of the authors reported that the letter was sent in error while negotiations were still ongoing, this mistake didn’t stop the Trump administration from punishing Harvard for refusing to accept its dictates.

After Harvard rejected the demands, Trump himself posted further threats to Harvard’s tax-exempt status on social media, even though federal law bars presidents from directly or indirectly requesting Internal Revenue Service investigations against specific targets: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Of course, if Harvard obeyed the Trump regime’s orders to silence political speech, it would be pushing a right-wing ideological agenda.

Among the stipulations in the April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded the power to compel hiring based on political views to, in effect, give almost complete preference to political conservatives: “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” Since most people who enter academia are liberal, as are most current academics, this demand for ideological balance would effectively ban the hiring of liberal professors in virtually all departments for many years.

Decisions on how to measure the presence or lack of viewpoint diversity would be made by “an external party” hired by Harvard with the approval of the federal government (meaning Trump). Government-imposed discrimination based on viewpoint would also apply to students, since the letter requires the “external party … to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” If every department “must be individually viewpoint diverse,” then students with underrepresented viewpoints (Nazis, perhaps?) must receive special preferences in admissions. This concept that every department’s students, faculty and staff must match the distribution of viewpoints of the general population is both repressive and crazy to imagine.

The Trump administration letter also ordered Harvard to commission a Trump-approved consultant to report on “individual faculty members” who “incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7”—and asserted that Harvard must “cooperate” with the federal government to “determine appropriate sanctions” for these professors. Retroactively punishing professors who violated no rules for allegedly encouraging student protesters is an extraordinary abuse of government power.

Not to stop there, the Trump administration letter seeks to suppress the right to protest: “Discipline at Harvard must include immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions … including by the Harvard police when necessary to stop a disruption.” Since the Trump administration seems to regard every protest as a “disruption” (and Harvard itself has wrongly banned silent protests), this could require immediate police intervention to stop a broad range of actions.

The Trump administration also demanded unprecedented control over Harvard’s disciplinary system to order punishments of student protesters without due process. Among other specific steps, the Trump administration ordered Harvard to ban five specific student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and the National Lawyers Guild, and “discipline” all “active members of those student organizations,” including by banning them from serving as officers in any other student groups. And Harvard would be compelled to implement government-imposed punishments by “permanently expelling the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student and suspending students involved in occupying university buildings.”

Shared governance is another target of Trump and his minions. The Trump administration’s demands for Harvard included “reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty” and “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” It’s bizarre to imagine that a university could be forced by the government to determine whether a professor is committed to “activism” before banning them from any position of power such as a department chair or committee member. The letter also demands “removing or reforming institutional bodies and practices that delay and obstruct enforcement [of campus rules governing protests], including the relevant Administrative Boards and FAS Faculty Council.”

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration’s letter also demands a complete ban on diversity programs: “The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name.” This repression not only interferes with the ability of universities to run their own operations, but it is also designed to suppress speech on a massive scale by banning all programs anywhere in the university that address issues of diversity and equity, with no exceptions for academic programs.

There’s more. Harvard would be forced to share “all hiring and related data” to permit endless ideological “audits.” A requirement that “all existing and prospective faculty shall be reviewed for plagiarism” could be used to purge controversial faculty. Perhaps the most ironic part of the letter to Harvard is its command for ideological control over foreign students: “the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.” Trump’s regime is undermining the Constitution and shredding the Bill of Rights, while demanding that foreign students prove their devotion to the very documents that the Trump administration is destroying.

The Trump administration’s letter to Harvard should shock and appall even those conservatives who previously expressed some sympathy with the desire to punish elite universities by any means necessary. This is fascism, pure and simple. It portends an effort to assert total government control over all public and private universities to compel them to obey orders about their hiring, admissions, discipline and other policies. It is an attempt to control virtually every aspect of colleges to suppress free expression, ban protests and impose a far-right agenda.

It’s tempting to hope that the Trump administration merely wanted to target Harvard alone and freeze its funding by proposing a long series of absurdly evil demands, knowing that no college could possibly agree to obey.

But the reality is that the letter to Harvard is a fascist blueprint for total control of all colleges in America, public and private. The demand for authoritarian control by the Trump administration is an assault on higher education and free speech in general. If Trump officials can impose repression on any college they target, then private corporations (as the assaults on private law firms have indicated) and state and local governments will soon follow.

The government repression that began with Columbia University will not end with Harvard or the Ivy League institutions. These are the first volleys in a war against academic freedom, with the clear aim of suppressing free expression on campus or destroying colleges in the battle.

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April 24, 2025