Tag: News

Ohio and Kentucky Ban DEI, Reduce Tenure Protections

Republican-controlled legislatures in two bordering states, Ohio and Kentucky, have now passed laws requiring post-tenure review policies at public universities and banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices, along with other DEI activities.

Many faculty and some Democratic leaders say the new laws threaten academic freedom and undermine tenure. In Ohio, lawmakers passed the sweeping higher education legislation, which has been in the works for a few years, over protests from faculty and students. The Ohio Student Association, for instance, said the bill would kill higher education in the state. Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Republican lawmakers rushed legislation through the process in order to successfully override their Democratic governor’s veto and put their higher education changes into law.

Ohio and Kentucky join Arkansas, Utah and Wyoming this year as states where Republicans have passed laws targeting DEI and/or promoting alternative “intellectual diversity.” Even if the Trump administration’s ongoing nationwide attacks on DEI founder, these laws lock in restrictions on DEI in these states, preventing institutions from reversing course on diversity program rollbacks.

Much of the new laws in Ohio and Kentucky echo the DEI bans that the other states have enacted, but Ohio’s legislation goes further than Kentucky’s, allowing immediate “for cause post-tenure reviews,” banning strikes for a large group of faculty and much more.

Ohio governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, signed into law Friday a version of higher education legislation that’s been debated for the last two years but had failed to pass despite Republican majorities in the capitol. Senate Bill 1, the evolution of the failed legislation, combined numerous postsecondary changes that GOP legislators have sought to enact in other states.

Among many other things, the new law bans full-time faculty from striking. It prohibits DEI offices, DEI in job descriptions and DEI in scholarships, without defining what DEI is. It requires institutions to “demonstrate intellectual diversity” in a range of areas, including course approval, general education requirements, common reading programs and faculty annual reviews. It also requires four-year institutions to publicly post online the syllabi for undergraduate courses, including the names of the instructors and “any required or recommended readings.” Community colleges must post more general syllabi.

SB 1 also mandates a version of institutional neutrality, requiring colleges and universities to declare they “will not endorse or oppose, as an institution, any controversial belief or policy, except on matters that directly impact the institution’s funding or mission of discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” The “controversial” beliefs and policies that institutions are required to stay silent on include any that are “the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.” (Ohio colleges and universities do retain the right to endorse Congress when it goes to war.)

The law further requires all institutions to establish post-tenure review policies—which could lead to firing tenured faculty. The legislation bans unions from using their collective bargaining rights to negotiate over these policies. And SB 1 allows certain administrators to launch “an immediate and for cause post-tenure review at any time for a faculty member who has a documented and sustained record of significant underperformance” outside their regular annual performance evaluations.

“This bill eliminates tenure,” said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. “If certain administrators can call for post-tenure review at any time and fire a faculty member without due process, that is not real tenure, that is tenure in name only.”

Pointing to a provision for an appeals process, Republican state senator Jerry Cirino, who filed SB 1, said, “They’re lying about that” and “once again, the AAUP is misrepresenting the facts.”

He added that the bill is “very pro–higher education.”

“I’m not going to fall for these false narratives that the left is trying to put out there mischaracterizing this bill,” Cirino said.

The Ohio governor’s office didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Monday about why DeWine signed this bill into law.

In Kentucky, the Democratic governor didn’t go along with the legislature, vetoing an anti-DEI bill. But Republicans overrode Gov. Andy Beshear.

Bucking Beshear

Kentucky’s House Bill 4 bans what that legislation defines as DEI offices, employees and training in public colleges and universities, as well as the use of affirmative action in hiring and in deciding scholarships and vendor selection. It also affects curricula by barring institutions from requiring courses whose “primary purpose is to indoctrinate participants with a discriminatory concept.”

The new law generally defines a “discriminatory concept” as one that “justifies or promotes differential treatment or benefits” for people based on “religion, race, sex, color or national origin.” It broadly characterizes DEI as promoting a discriminatory concept. And it defines “indoctrinate” as imbuing or attempting to “imbue another individual with an opinion, point of view or principle without consideration of any alternative.”

Additionally, under the new law, the Council on Postsecondary Education, which oversees Kentucky’s public colleges and universities, can’t approve new degrees or certificates that require courses or trainings primarily intended to “indoctrinate” with discriminatory concepts. And it encourages the council to eliminate current academic programs that contain such requirements.

Beshear vetoed House Bill 4 on March 19 and defended diversity programs, adding that the legislation attempts to “control how universities and colleges meet the needs of their students and prepare them for their future.”

“Acting like racism and discrimination no longer exist or that hundreds of years of inequality have been somehow overcome and there is a level playing field is disingenuous,” Beshear added. “History may look at this time and this bill as part of the anti–civil rights or pro-discrimination movement. Kentucky should not be a part of that movement.”

On Thursday, the Kentucky House voted 79 to 19 to override this veto, and the Senate voted 32 to 6.

Beshear also vetoed another bill, House Bill 424, which required institutions to evaluate president and faculty “productivity” at least once every four years using a board-approved process. Presidents or faculty who fail performance and productivity metrics could lose their jobs, under the bill. Beshear wrote in his veto message that the legislation “threatens academic freedom.”

“In a time of increased federal encroachment into the public education, this bill will limit employment protections of our postsecondary institution teachers” and the state’s “ability to hire the best people,” he wrote. Lawmakers overrode him with an 80-to-20 House vote and a 29-to-9 Senate vote.

Amy Reid, Freedom to Learn senior manager at PEN America, a free speech and academic freedom advocacy group, said in an email that the new Ohio and Kentucky laws “are not only significant blows to public higher education, but also reflect a galling disregard for the voters, educators and students in these states.”

“Ohioans were massively organized in their opposition to SB 1, with hundreds of citizens coming to the capital to testify against the bill,” Reid said. “The legislature ignored them and so did Governor DeWine.” She said there was also “strong opposition across Kentucky” to the new laws there.

But Tom Young, chairman of the Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee, said he had heard support for the legislation from students and faculty who were concerned about speaking up. He said DEI had become “a tool for dividing people,” and most opposition to SB 1 that he heard regarded its anti-strike and post-tenure review provisions.

“I don’t believe that any of these professors are concerned about the classroom,” Young said of faculty upset about the new law.

Source link

April 1, 2025
Yes, Academic Job Loss Really Is Different (opinion)

If you’ve been watching the rolling thunderstorm of executive orders affecting higher education and thinking, simultaneously, “what a loss to the world” and “what a loss for those scholars” … you are right.

It is a massive and increasingly uncorrectable loss to the world that life-enriching and life-saving research is being stopped in its tracks. We will now not know things that we might have otherwise learned, and we will not think thoughts that might have otherwise given us joy or revelation. These consequences are now unavoidable.

But societal impacts are not the only consequences to consider. The loss of knowledge that is being widely grieved right now goes hand in hand with immediate or forthcoming loss of livelihood for individual scholars. And even though academics have become adept at mourning these individual losses—we write mike-drop essays, lobby our professional associations and contribute to GoFundMe accounts—we have generally limited ourselves to catharsis and critique.

Our current moment calls for more. What we are now experiencing in American higher education and what we will continue to experience for the foreseeable future is a generational loss. We need to understand why it is this kind of loss. We need to be able to explain this to others in ways that do not trigger fresh complaints about ivory tower academics. And we need to grasp the nature of the obligation on those of us left behind.

Put simply, we need to acknowledge, contextualize and equip. With apologies to Erin Bartram for repurposing her excellent title—without any of the irony—we have to sublimate the grief of the left behind.

Academic Job Loss Is Different

Industries change, businesses close and employers lay off existing employees or fail to hire new ones. While this is never easy, people find new jobs all the time. Why can’t a tenured professor or a recent hire or an eager postdoc do likewise? Why isn’t this just another instance of scholars being snowflakes?

Here are just three reasons why job loss is especially fraught for academics. There are more than three reasons, of course—and I discuss many in my forthcoming book, The War on Tenure. But these three are a good place to start.

Institutionalized Employment

To begin with, academia is a highly institutionalized industry.

What does that mean? It means that if you want to be a professor, you need to find one specific type of employer—a university—that will hire you to be that. Sure, without a university employer, you can still be a scholar, a public intellectual, a researcher, a writer or a teacher. Often you can be two or more of these simultaneously. But you cannot be a professor if you are not employed by a university.

Many of academia’s peer professions are not institutionalized to the same degree. You can be a lawyer, an accountant, an architect or a psychologist—you can even practice many types of medicine—all without being hired by specific types of employers. You can, for example, practice the very specific type of law that I teach, employment law, as a solo practitioner, or in a law firm that’s small, medium or large, or as part of a company’s in-house counsel, or for the government (in which case you are exceptionally busy right now). You are not limited to one type of employer if you want to practice employment law. In other fields—like human resources, information technology, sales or communications—you not only can work for different types of employers, you probably should do so to become a well-rounded practitioner.

But there is only one way to be a professor: get hired (and stay employed) by a university.

Because of this institutionalization, when universities stop hiring, as they are increasingly doing in response to federally induced chaos, it isn’t simply that a difficult job market has become harder: It’s that a difficult job market is ceasing to exist altogether. That’s the first reason why academic job loss—and specifically academic opportunity loss—really is different.

Quasi Monopsony

The institutionalized nature of academic employment makes the academic labor market difficult. But that bad situation is made worse by the fact that the academic market consists of a few geographically dispersed employers seeking highly specialized employees. This makes academia a quasi monopsony.

As of 2020, according to U.S. News, there were around 1,400 accredited nonprofit institutions offering four-year degrees and serving at least 200 students each. That may sound like a wealth of job opportunities for aspiring professors. But having just half a dozen potential employers within driving distance of one another is considered an exceptionally dense job market in academia. In other industries—again, say, law—the same market would be considered exceptionally shallow. (Try comparing the number of law schools in Atlanta, where I currently live, with the number of law firms and companies that maintain in-house counsel.)

Thanks to this shallow, thin and quasi-monopsonistic job market, aspiring professors know that whenever a job does arise, you go where it takes you and whether or not it suits you and your family. Or, particularly if you’re a heterosexual woman, maybe you just forgo having family at all.

(The same job market picture gets worse still when you remember that universities don’t just hire professors or even law professors: They hire, for instance, labor and employment law professors or intellectual property law professors … and they usually only need one or two of each. And that job market keeps getting worse when you factor in the adjunctification that has characterized academia for decades, and that I’m largely bypassing in this essay. Forget driving distance: In many subfields, job candidates are lucky if there are half a dozen jobs available nationwide in a given year.)

Given all these difficult market dynamics, what happens when a job that you already have disappears? What happens when four years into a tenure-track position—or 20 years after tenure—your lab or your department is forced to close?

Well, if you’ve committed to a labor market characterized by “a few geographically dispersed employers seeking highly specialized employees,” either you find a comparable employer within your existing geographic market, or you relocate to a new geographic market, or—if neither of these options is available to you—you exit the industry altogether.

This is a second reason why academic job loss is different. Although I can’t offer statistical evidence of this given the lack of prior data collection (and the unlikelihood of future data collection), the scholarship strongly suggests that institutional exits are likely to coincide with industry exits because academic workers often have no other choice.

Autodepreciation

In the influential essay whose title I’ve borrowed, Erin Bertram notes that we avoid grappling with the loss of colleagues who have been forced out of academia by “reminding the departing scholar about all the amazing skills they have.” We tell the departing scholar, “You can use those skills in finance! Insurance! Nonprofits! All sorts of regular jobs that your concerned parents will recognize!” But as Bartram and other commentators observe, you could probably have won those jobs just as easily without the Ph.D. at all.

What even these critics often overlook is that you could actually have won many of those jobs more easily without the Ph.D.

I’m not talking about the mountain of debt and the lost decade or so of earning capacity that come with many Ph.D.s. I’m not even talking about the way in which academic training leaves you with valuable but fairly generic skills (“critical reading”) as well as specific skills that won’t help you in the general labor market (e.g., assembling a syllabus that students find interesting, that strikes the right balance between challenging and feasible assignments, and that accounts for institutional resources, for different learning styles and for applicable accommodations, all without relying on an overly pricey set of books). These things matter, but they are still only some of the ways in which competing to enter and succeed in academia harms the people who do it.

Instead, what I’m referring to here is a phenomenon that many commentators implicitly understand but few explicitly articulate: Academic training, expectations and norms force you to unlearn or forgo skills you might have otherwise had that could have served you well in the general labor market. Put differently, academic training forces you to engage in a kind of autodepreciation.

In my book, I use the example of Judith Butler’s famously critiqued and parodied writing to illustrate this. Butler’s writing is notoriously difficult—characterizing it as such is probably one of the few things their supporters and critics can agree on—but it’s just an extreme example of how scholars are often required to write and speak in ways that won’t serve them well outside academia. Phrases like “Althusserian theory” and “homologous ways,” both taken from Butler’s award-winning “bad sentence,” can be efficient shorthand for people who must contribute to complex debates that have evolved over decades or centuries. It’s not always possible to communicate complicated ideas via relatively short sentences written in the standard American English that I’m using right now. I certainly don’t write this way when I’m discussing worker classification doctrine or theories of democratic sovereignty.

To stand a chance of succeeding in academia, you need to regularly use that type of expert vocabulary and complex sentence structure. You need to write in it to publish scholarship, you need to speak in it to present research and teach students, and this means you must also learn to think in it. But once you’ve had to think, speak and write using expert shorthand for decades—for up to nine years of graduate school, a year or three of postdoctoral fellowships, not to mention any time spent as a full-fledged professor—you will understandably struggle to sound … not like Judith Butler.

What happens, then, if an acute financial shock prompts most universities to stop hiring new professors just as you’re finishing your degree? Or, supposing you’ve already scrambled into a full-time job, what if the same shock forces your department or program to be eliminated? Where does that leave you?

Where it leaves you, in many fields, is holding a too-fancy degree, a handful of irrelevant publications, skills that are either widely possessed (critical reading) or overly specialized (syllabus writing), and a tendency to speak and write in ways that nonacademics find unappealing or confusing, or unappealing because they’re confusing. Where it leaves you, in other words, is having depreciated your own generally valuable skills in order to become competitive for the highly specialized job you tried to get—or actually got—but that no longer exists. This is a third reason why academic job loss really is different.

Whither Now?

What I’ve just said is not uplifting. There is no uplifting way to spin the individual effects of the current assault on higher education. My goal in discussing dynamics like institutionalized employment, quasi monopsony and auto-depreciation was not to set the stage for a happy ending: It was to provide an explanation and a language for the trauma of job loss in academia. It’s not just you. It really is different.

But it’s not enough for us to understand and name these dynamics. If we believe that knowledge is power (and I’m assuming that if you are reading this article, you subscribe to that view on some level), then there must be some way to derive power from this knowledge. Here are a few possibilities.

First, having understood the nature of this loss and some reasons why it is so profound, acknowledge both publicly. Explain the dynamics that make academic job loss different. Explain them to your uncle, your cousin, your neighbor, your college friend. Learn to say them partially, and therefore inadequately, instead of either keeping silent or holding forth in the grocery aisle. It’s true that many nonacademics do not understand why our industry is so difficult and so seemingly distinct from the industries that are familiar to them. But that’s at least partly because we do not explain things to nonacademics nearly as often as we explain—and decry—them to each other. Hand-wringing illuminates nothing and helps no one.

Second, don’t be afraid to encourage early-career researchers to develop Plan B’s and Plan C’s (which they should already have, but that’s a different and well-trodden path). In fact, don’t be afraid to encourage them to pursue those alternative plans right now and even if it comes at some expense to their academic progress. Obviously, the A.B.D. who is one chapter away from finishing should probably finish that chapter given her sunk costs. But discuss with her whether she should postpone graduating until she can develop an alternative income stream.

Third, when academic hiring thaws—whether that is six months from now or several years into the future—give serious consideration to candidates with CV gaps dating to this period, the person who worked in a retail job or in an industry research position for which she was grossly overqualified needed to buy food and pay rent. If she is still qualified for the position you are later lucky enough to offer, do plan to consider her for it—and do plan on indicating that you will do so in the job advertisement so that she knows to apply.

And, fourth, don’t be afraid to ask colleagues who are forced out of academia whether they would like to stay involved somehow. Maybe they would like to work in journal operations (and maybe they would appreciate the small income this kind of work occasionally generates). Maybe they would like to participate in free virtual reading groups or brown-bag lunches. Maybe they would even like to join a mentorship circle, whether as mentor or mentee. Regardless of the nature of the opportunity, don’t be afraid to ask—and don’t take it personally if they decline. Bearing the discomfort of a curt no (or even a verbose one) is something those of us who are left behind can and should do.

Job loss is difficult in all industries, but it is not equally difficult. For the most part, we can’t avoid or undo the job loss that is now unfolding in academia. But we can understand it, name it and explain it to our nonacademic friends and family so that they better understand our grief. And we can work to mitigate the effects of job loss and opportunity loss for our colleagues in whatever small ways are open to us. It is time for academics to hunker down and try to keep each other warm, because winter, as they say, is coming.

Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and associate professor of law at Emory University. Her book, The War on Tenure, is forthcoming this fall from Cambridge University Press.

Source link

April 1, 2025
FBI Raids Indiana U Cybersecurity Professor’s Homes

Federal investigators spent hours last Friday raiding two homes belonging to a cybersecurity professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, multiple local news outlets reported.

It’s unclear what investigators were looking for, but Chris Bavender, an FBI spokesperson, confirmed to The Herald-Times that the raid was “court authorized law enforcement activity,” and that the agency had “no further comment.”

Xiaofeng Wang, a tenured computer science professor and director of IU’s Center for Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, has worked at the university for more than 20 years. But after numerous government agents began removing boxes from the Bloomington home Wang shares with his wife, Nianli Ma—who also worked for IU’s library as a systems analyst and programmer—neighbors told The Herald-Times they knew little about the couple, including their names.

Law enforcement also arrived Friday morning at a home belonging to the couple in Carmel, about an hour and 15 minutes north of Bloomington. A video taken by a neighbor and published by local NBC affiliate, WTHR, shows FBI agents shouting, “FBI, come out!” through a megaphone pointed toward the residence.

An unidentified woman then exits the home holding a phone, which agents confiscated before questioning her and later removing evidence from the home. The woman left the scene and returned hours later with her lawyer, who later told WTHR “they’re not sure yet what the investigation is about.”

According to The Bloomingtonian, Wang was fired from IU in early March. Both his and Ma’s employee profiles have been scrubbed from the university’s websites.

Source link

April 1, 2025
Former Harvard President Looks Back on Decades of Protests

In 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Harvard University English professor Neil Rudenstine intervened in a protest on campus, where a recruiter from Dow Chemical Company, which made napalm, had been surrounded by students upset about U.S. attacks on Vietnamese civilians. He helped defuse the tension by negotiating with students to release the recruiter.

That foray into conflict resolution prompted an unexpected shift from a budding literary career to academic administration. Rudenstine would then go on to serve as dean of students at Princeton University and in other roles before making his way back to Harvard as president, a job he held from 1991 to 2001.

Now 90, Rudenstine released a book last month titled Our Contentious Universities: A Personal History (The American Philosophical Society Press) that is partly a memoir and partly an exploration of campus protests movements across multiple decades and causes.

Rudenstine discussed the book with Inside Higher Ed, sharing his personal experiences of protests in years past and his thoughts on the latest wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Excerpts of the conversation have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What motivated you to write this book?

A: From my point of view, increasing student protests starting in the ’90s seemed to be different from those of the ’60s, and more complicated to deal with. So I began to try to find out what the differences were and what the results might be of the new movement, so to speak. That got me immersed to look again at the 1960s, and after that, events began to take over.

Q: What differences do you see in protests of the past versus today?

A: In the ’60s, student protests were quite violent at times, but they were all mainly concerned with the Vietnam War. Of course, there were other things, like student protests over apartheid in South Africa [in the 1980s]. But the main issue in the 1960s was the war, and students were essentially united in their feelings against the war. There was virtually no sense of students in any way protesting against one another, or student groups disagreeing with other student groups. It was a united feeling.

It was also a feeling that if the war were to come to an end, the protests would probably also come to an end. In the ’90s and afterward, students were far more diverse. There were more Black students, Jewish students, Asian American students, first-generation students and so on. These groups did not necessarily agree with one another in terms of what was important to protest against, and they sometimes protested against one another. So the situation was very different; there was no single overriding issue like the war.

Q: Tell me about your own protest experiences, starting when you were a professor at Harvard in 1967 and helped bring an end to a protest organized by Students for a Democratic Society.

A: I was, at the time, an assistant professor of English literature, and totally absorbed by that job at Harvard. One day I was walking across campus outside of Harvard Yard, and I heard shouting and cheering going on around [Mallinckrodt Laboratory], which was a chemistry building. It turned out that Students for a Democratic Society had organized a protest that imprisoned a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Company who wanted to interview students for jobs. And since Dow was making some products [such as napalm] that were used in the war, the SDS students decided to imprison this recruiter.

Purely by chance, I stopped by, and I thought it was not proper of the university to imprison a recruiter who’d come to interview students and told the students that by using their megaphone. After several hours of discussion and debate, the students released the recruiter and gave up the protest. I was somehow identified as the person who had helped to bring this about, and that led to me being asked to be dean of students at Princeton University to help with their protest movements. A very considerable accident got in the way of my literary career and deflected me from literature to student protests in a way that I had never imagined. It was purely the result of chance and serendipity.

Q: Near the end of your career, students staged a sit-in to demand a living wage at Harvard. How were you able to wind that protest down without police intervention?

A: That was a very complicated situation. Students sat in my office building, Massachusetts Hall, because they wanted to change the way in which many people at the university were reimbursed for their services. The living wage protest was not very rational. If they had wanted a minimum wage change, we might have been able to discuss it, but the method they chose was not rational, and they sat in the building for more than two weeks. So we had a very complicated and delicate situation.

I decided at the beginning that whatever we would do, we would not call the police, because calling the police in earlier days at Columbia, Harvard, Kent State and other places had led to terrible situations of riots and police beating students. So the question was, how can we not call the police but also bring the situation to a conclusion? It took many, many days of discussion and waiting in order to try to find this conclusion.

What happened was that the next president [Larry Summers] said, “Why don’t you put together a committee to look into the issue, and that will give the students a way out, and it’ll give you a way out? It’s not likely that this committee will embrace the solution that the students have chosen at all, but it’ll bring an end to the protests.” And that’s what happened. We appointed a committee, the students were able to claim the victory and walk out of the building, and we were able go back into our offices and basically say that we were happy nobody had been hurt, and that we would trust the new committee to make very good recommendations about what should be done in the future.

Q: You wrote that you were “taken aback” by how quickly presidents brought in police to break up protest encampments last spring. What other tactics do you believe they should have considered first?

A: Obviously, every situation is different, so there’s no one general thing you can do. But there is a way which you can call for the judiciary to step in. If students are identified as being in the protest, if the [judiciary] tells them to evacuate whatever building they happen to be occupying or whatever they’re doing wrong, they can be held in contempt of court if they don’t obey those admonitions. That’s a very good substitute for bringing in the police; if you’re held in contempt of court, it’s a very serious crime, and very few students want to do that, so they tend to leave right away. We had tried that at Princeton, and that seemed to be a good substitute for actually calling the police, which led, of course, to terrible things at Columbia and elsewhere, when the police tended to just brutalize the students when they were called in.

Another alternative, of course, is to wait out the students in the hope that sooner or later, their academic needs will force them to go back out and get to their studies. That was a tactic we also used at Princeton.

Q: What do you think about the institutional neutrality movement?

A: I’m a little bit skeptical about the conception and certainly the term of neutrality. I understand why people would embrace the idea at the University of Chicago, for example, and other places. I think that’s a very interesting point of view, and I think at times it’s definitely the thing to do. You don’t want to go around commenting all the time on what has happened internationally or nationally. At the same time, it’s a very difficult row to hoe, because there simply are some events that require, if not an actual stance by the university, certainly some kind of an analysis with a possible outcome. I do think that there are times when it’s important for a leader to speak out, and it has to be done very thoughtfully, and one has to choose those moments carefully.

Q: Any advice for today’s college presidents on how to handle campus protests?

A: That’s a tough one. I think what they’re doing is about as good as can be done, and that’s clarifying what is legitimate as a protest or what is not legitimate and being willing to discipline students if they really cross the line of what’s permissible in an obstructive way that harms other people’s capacity to do their jobs. I hope the universities are open to discussing in a more collaborative way things that need to be ironed out, other than simply responding with police force. The more they can discuss and analyze and find ways to reason with the students and even some faculty … the more they are able to possibly defuse protest or the threat of protest.

Source link

April 1, 2025
Rosemont College to Merge With Villanova

Rosemont College will merge with its much larger neighbor, Villanova University, joining two private, Catholic institutions in the Philadelphia area, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The small college, located less than a mile from Villanova, will be renamed Villanova University, Rosemont Campus, in a move that seems more akin to an acquisition than a merger. Tenured and tenure-track faculty at Rosemont will reportedly be offered teaching contacts.

Like many small colleges, Rosemont has faced financial and enrollment challenges recently.

Rosemont’s enrollment stood at 777 students in fall 2023, according to recent federal data. While that number was higher than the two preceding years, it fell short of the 902 students Rosemont enrolled in 2019, or in previous years when the college typically surpassed the 1,000 mark.

Public financial records show that Rosemont operated at a loss in the last four fiscal years. Amid the financial struggles, Rosemont has borrowed $7 million from its endowment—recently valued at $23 million—since 2020. A recent audit indicated “substantial doubt” that Rosemont would be able to remain open if its financial struggles persisted.

During the merger process—which is expected to be completed in 2028, pending regulatory approvals—Rosemont will stay open and operate independently, with financial support from Villanova. But officials told the Inquirer they will stop accepting new students in October.

The Rosemont merger comes after Cabrini University, another small private college in the Philadelphia region, closed in May 2024. Villanova purchased Cabrini’s campus soon afterward.

Financial challenges have battered colleges in the Keystone State in recent years, with three institutions announcing closures last year. Another, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, ended its degree programs but remains open as a museum. More closures are on the horizon as Pennsylvania State University considers a plan to shutter up to 12 of its campuses.

Source link

April 1, 2025
Survey: Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.

Survey: Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.

kathryn.palmer…

Tue, 04/01/2025 – 03:00 AM

Byline(s)

Kathryn Palmer

Source link

April 1, 2025
Tribal Colleges Fear for Their Federal Funding

Leaders of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College were thrilled to find out two years ago that they won a nearly $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to promote Indigenous food and agriculture practices. That five-year grant, which is roughly the same amount as the college’s endowment, funded student internships and several staff positions.

But just as the college was gearing up to work on the project after putting in place the initial pieces, like selecting interns, funds for the program ceased when the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture froze the grant in February.

The college has already spent about half a million dollars on the project, expecting those funds would be reimbursed, like other government grants, said Twyla Baker, president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College. Now, six students have lost their internships, and the college is scrambling to reassign staff to other projects to avoid having to let anyone go.

“We don’t have a timeline or any type of information as to when or if that [funding] will be restored to us,” Baker said.

She and other tribal college leaders across the country are scrambling to make contingency plans as the Trump administration continues to review, freeze and slash federal grants in a massive effort to downsize government and roll back federal programs they perceive as related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Some have already seen grants disappear, while others are preparing just in case. Meanwhile, staff cuts to the Bureau of Indian Education and the Department of Education—not to mention plans to dismantle the department—are exacerbating fears and uncertainty on campuses.

Tribal college leaders watched nervously as the two tribal colleges administered by the bureau, Haskell Indian Nation University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, experienced major layoffs in February, spurring a lawsuit from tribes and students. The cuts sent the two institutions into what some worried was a death spiral, with professor-less classes and mounting infrastructure problems, until those layoffs were reversed in recent weeks.

We’re survivors, and we’ll be here, but it’s going to be a rough couple years, that’s for sure.”

—Dan King, president of Red Lake Nation College

The country’s 37 tribal colleges already live a precarious existence. They tend to serve small, disproportionately first-generation and low-income student populations in remote areas on or near reservations and operate on lean budgets. They depend heavily on federal dollars, and many campuses are struggling with crumbling infrastructure thanks to chronic underfunding from Congress. Some tribal college presidents fear even small changes to federal funding or staffing could mean losing critical student supports, services and academic programs or risk the most vulnerable institutions closing altogether.

“It takes so many different tiny little grant programs and resources woven all across the federal government just to keep the doors open and the lights on,” said Moriah O’Brien, vice president of congressional and federal relations at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. “Any interruption or disruption or pausing of federal funding and resources or the federal employees that support those programs … could have very disruptive impacts.”

‘Sitting and Waiting’

Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College isn’t the only tribal college waiting on frozen USDA funds. College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin, for example, found out that a grant covering 20 student scholarships was suspended, putting those students’ continued enrollment in jeopardy, ProPublica reported.

Baker worries other federal funding sources could be next. At this time of the year, she normally would have received a request for proposals for Title III grants from the Department of Education by now. (Title III funds help to support infrastructure improvements at tribal colleges as well as other minority-serving institutions.)

“We’re sitting and waiting,” she said. “And if those dollars go away, it’s another colossal loss.” Tribal colleges received roughly $82 million in discretionary and mandatory Title III funds last year.

Amid the uncertainty, tribal colleges are tightening their belts. Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College is considering a travel moratorium and looking into ways to strengthen partnerships with foundations and state lawmakers in hopes of diversifying its funding. Although Red Lake Nation College in Minnesota hasn’t had its grants suspended, the college has frozen hiring, pay increases and nonessential travel. Red Lake Nation is aiming to cut spending by 20 to 25 percent to prepare for any future funding losses.

Dan King, president of Red Lake Nation, said he’s been trying to stress to others, “We’re going to make it through this … We’re survivors, and we’ll be here, but it’s going to be a rough couple years, that’s for sure.”

O’Brien said that AIHEC is working to assess how many institutions have had grants suspended and how colleges are responding to this moment of uncertainty. In the meantime, the group is working to educate federal policymakers about tribal colleges—namely that the federal government is obligated to support them by treaty and that funding for tribal colleges is unrelated to DEI.

“The federal government’s unique responsibilities to tribal nations have been repeatedly reaffirmed by the Supreme Court, legislation, executive orders and regulations … and this legal duty and trust responsibility applies across all branches of the federal government,” she said. As a result, the “conversation about tribal sovereignty and the federal trust and treaty obligations is entirely separate and distinct from the conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Uncertainty at ED

Tribal college leaders are also anxiously waiting to see what comes of the Education Department after mass layoffs and President Donald Trump’s order to close it down “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law” and “return authority over education to the States.”

O’Brien noted that not only do many funding sources for institutions flow out of the department, but 75 percent of tribal college students are also eligible for the Pell Grant, a federal financial aid program for low-income students.

American Indian communities are incredibly resilient, because we have to be, but [there’s] not an unlimited supply of resources to be resilient with. And so, there’s a breaking point.”

—Sandra Boham, chief operating officer at Native Forward

“We want to make sure that there’s no interruption to the resources that are going to TCUs as institutions and to individual tribal citizens who are students,” she said.

O’Brien also wants to ensure that any funding set aside for tribal colleges, through tribal college–specific or broader federal programs, goes directly to them, rather than being administered by states.

“It’s not clear that those funds would ever get to TCUs,” she said. Plus, “the trust and treaty obligations are between tribal nations and the federal government,” not the states.

Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, said it’s hard to know what will happen to department programs, so tribal colleges are preparing for all kinds of scenarios, including programs possibly coming under the auspices of other federal agencies.

“We don’t want the Department of Ed to be dismantled,” she said. “At the same time, if it’s going to be dismantled, what strategies need to be used in order to ensure continued funding?”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said that shutting down the department won’t mean funding cuts and said that core functions will continue.

But major reductions in force at the Department of Education and other federal agencies have made it difficult for tribal colleges to find out which of their funding streams may be at risk.

Tribal college leaders stressed that getting through to the right people at the Education Department, the USDA, the Department of the Interior or other federal agencies to ask questions is a challenge in and of itself, let alone budgeting for an uncertain landscape.

Not being able to even “get ahold of” the people who administer grant programs “causes a lot of worries for people, too,” said King at Red Lake Nation. “It’s very stressful. It’s chaotic and it’s unpredictable right now.”

What’s at Stake

Tribal college advocates worry some of these institutions wouldn’t survive federal funding losses.

While some tribal colleges have managed to scrape together meager endowments, many operate on low reserves. Some have as little as 90 days’ worth of operating funds on hand at any given time, said Sandra Boham, chief operating officer at Native Forward, a Native American scholarship provider, and a former president of Salish Kootenai College.

“American Indian communities are incredibly resilient, because we have to be, but [there’s] not an unlimited supply of resources to be resilient with,” she said. “And so, there’s a breaking point.”

Tribal college leaders are also concerned about the ripple effects if colleges are forced to cut down on student supports and services.

“You don’t have the big travel budgets to trim,” Boham said. “You don’t have the big athletic budgets to trim. You’re talking support and instructional staff and shuttering buildings or those kinds of things, and that is not a pleasant conversation to have.”

O’Brien described tribal colleges as “anchors of their community,” as well, that provide “not just individual classes, but often [serve] as a hub for the community, providing all kinds of different [services] from GED classes to certificate programs to community space to having their libraries open to the community.”

Baker said the value of tribal colleges “is not a difficult story to tell,” but “just the fact that we’re having to tell it is pretty frustrating.”

Some of these institutions “function on the brink,” Baker said, and they serve “some of the poorest parts of our nation. If it weren’t for tribal colleges, some of these students wouldn’t access higher education at all.”

Source link

April 1, 2025
Historians Defend Smithsonian After Trump’s Order

The American Historical Association says that President Trump’s executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution “egregiously misrepresents the work” of the organization and “completely misconstrues the nature of historical work.”

In the executive order issued late last week, Trump criticized what he saw as “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” that replaces “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

The order cites an exhibit at the American Art Museum that examines the “role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States,” according to the museum’s website. The order also notes that the “National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’”

The order, titled “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History,” puts Vice President JD Vance in charge of ensuring that Smithsonian museums, research centers and the National Zoo don’t put on exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race.”

The AHA defended the work of historians in the statement released Monday, adding that “historians explore the past to understand how our nation has evolved.”

“Our goal is neither criticism nor celebration; it is to understand—to increase our knowledge of—the past in ways that can help Americans to shape the future,” said the statement, which has been signed by 16 other organizations. “By providing a history with the integrity necessary to enable all Americans to be all they can possibly be, the Smithsonian is fulfilling its duty to all of us.”

Source link

April 1, 2025
Trump Investigates Harvard’s Federal Funding

Harvard is the second Ivy League institution to be targeted by the Trump administration for how it handled alleged instances of antisemitism on campus.

Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Harvard University is the latest higher education institution to be investigated by the Trump administration in response to its alleged mishandling of antisemitic harassment on campus. The institution will undergo a “comprehensive” analysis of nearly $9 billion in federal grants and contracts, according to a multi-agency news release.

The review, announced Monday afternoon, is part of ongoing efforts by the Justice Department’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to tackle alleged antisemitic harassment on college campuses. The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration will carry out the investigation to “ensure the university is in compliance with federal regulations, including its civil rights responsibilities,” the news release said.

The task force said its review process for Harvard will be similar to the one it is currently carrying out at Columbia University.

“This initiative strengthens enforcement of President Trump’s Executive Order titled ‘Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,’” which “ensures that federally funded institutions uphold their legal and ethical responsibilities to prevent anti-Semitic harassment,” the news release said.

In a matter of weeks, the task force’s investigation into Columbia has upended the institution. It received a notification in early March that the government had launched a review into $54.1 million in federal contracts. Then, on March 7, the department retracted $400 million in grants and contracts, and on March 13 it sent the university a sweeping list of demands, calling for immediate compliance in order to regain the funding. Columbia agreed to nearly all of the demands a week later, but the administration has not reinstated the funds.

Shortly after announcing the decision to comply, the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, resigned.

The administration has said it will now review more than $255.6 million in federal contracts and $8.7 billion in multiyear grant commitments at Harvard.

As with Columbia, the agencies will consider stop-work orders for any contracts the review identifies. But Harvard has also been ordered to submit a list of all federal contracts—both direct and through affiliates—that were not identified in the task force’s initial investigation.

Addressing the review in a letter to the Harvard community, President Alan M. Garber acknowledged that nearly $9 billion in research funding is at risk: “If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation.”

He said the institution had “devoted considerable effort” to addressing antisemitism on campus for the past 15 months, but added, “We still have work to do” and committed to working with the task force.

“We resolve to take the measures that will move Harvard and its vital mission forward while protecting our community and its academic freedom,” he said.

Critics have broadly opposed the Trump administration’s tactics, saying they are prime examples of using claims of antisemitism to justify “aggressive” executive overreach.

“What we’re seeing is an attempt to weaponize federal funding to punish schools that don’t align with their political views,” said Wesley Whistle, a project director at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “That kind of pressure stifles the free exchange of ideas—and that’s the whole point of higher education.”

Meanwhile, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the university’s “failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination—all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry—has put its reputation in serious jeopardy.

“Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus,” she said.

Source link

March 31, 2025
A Timeline for Job Search Success (opinion)
One of the most common questions I get from Ph.D. students and postdocs is “When should I begin my job search?” Most of the time, they are referring only to the application process—they are asking when they should start actually applying for jobs. While I generally recommend applying three to four months before you are available to start, the job search itself should begin much earlier. There is a lot of information and data that you need to gather in advance so that you are well positioned to recognize that a job is a good fit and make an informed decision with confidence.

I see a lot of similarities between the job search and the way you might approach committing to a large purchase such as that of a car or home: The more research and preparation you do, the more confident and informed you’ll be when the right opportunity comes along.

Like a house, a job needs to align with your values, interests and goals. However, compromise is inevitable. Just as home buyers must balance their wish list with budget constraints and market realities, job seekers must consider factors such as location, salary, job stability and growth potential. A strategic, long-term approach ensures that when the ideal opportunity presents itself, you can recognize it and act decisively.

That said, it’s important to recognize that in both job searching and home buying, there are many variables we can’t control. Many Ph.D. students and postdocs I speak with are understandably concerned about the uncertainty of the job market they’ll be entering into in light of federal employee layoffs and university hiring freezes. This is unfortunate but makes long-term, careful planning all the more important.

The House-Hunting Approach to Job Searching

When I was a postdoc, my husband and I wanted to buy our first home. Initially, I had a long list of must-haves: a safe neighborhood close to work, hardwood floors, a spacious updated kitchen, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a fireplace, a deck, a two-car garage and a lush yard for gardening. We determined our budget and began our search.

For six months, we attended open houses and scoured online listings, refining our expectations along the way. We learned what features were common in our price range and which ones were unrealistic. We adjusted our priorities, and when we finally found the right home, even though it wasn’t exactly what we had first envisioned, we were confident in our decision because of the knowledge we had gained along the way.

The job search follows a similar process. The more job descriptions you analyze and the more people you talk to, the more attuned you become to industry norms, required skills and job value. This preparation allows you to confidently apply and evaluate offers, just as a seasoned home buyer recognizes a great deal when they see one.

To best position yourself for success, your job search should start long before you submit applications. Here’s a suggested timeline.

More Than One Year Out: Laying the Foundation
- Identify your career interests: Before house hunting, you need a vision for your ideal home. Likewise, before applying for jobs, you need a clear sense of your desired career path. If you’re unsure, conduct informational interviews to learn from professionals in different fields. Ideally, these conversations would be taking place throughout your graduate and postdoctoral training. More about informational interviewing can be found at Live Career. Resources such as MyIDP (for the sciences) and ImaginePhD (for humanities and social sciences) can help you explore career options. Vanderbilt University’s “Beyond the Lab” video and podcast interview series explores a variety of biomedical career paths, and InterSECT Job Simulations offers job simulation exercises to help Ph.D.-level scientists and humanists learn about various career options. Finally, the Propelling Careers podcast is another resource I would recommend that provides valuable insights into career exploration topics and the entire job search process.
- Build your professional presence: Just as no one starts house hunting without securing their financing and mortgage pre-approval, you shouldn’t enter the job market without your professional documents ready. A strong, polished application package is like a solid financial foundation—it ensures you’re taken seriously and can move quickly when the right opportunity appears.
Prepare your CV or résumé well in advance, tailoring it to the roles you’re considering. The National Institutes of Health Office of Intramural Training and Education has a great resource for these on their website. For jobs outside of academia, you will need a résumé, and this can take time to do well. Seek feedback from colleagues and career advisers to refine it. An up-to-date and well-crafted résumé also can be extremely valuable when you are conducting informational interviews to share with the professionals you meet; they will understand your background better, can provide feedback and may pass your document along to hiring managers.

Updating your LinkedIn profile is equally important—it serves as both your online résumé and a networking and research tool. A polished LinkedIn profile increases your visibility and credibility within your target industry.

One Year Out: Researching the Market
- Track job postings: A year before you plan to transition, start monitoring job postings, just as you would start researching and looking at houses online and driving through neighborhoods. Save descriptions of roles that interest you and analyze them for common themes. This practice helps refine your job search keywords and informs the skills you should highlight on your résumé.
- Identify skill gaps: By analyzing job descriptions early, you may discover missing skills that are crucial for your target roles. By recognizing this in advance, you can take online courses, join organizations or gain hands-on experience to strengthen your qualifications before applying.
- Prepare for additional requirements: Depending on the field, you may be asked to share a writing sample or coding project. If you’ve been preparing throughout the year, you won’t be caught off guard.
- Experiment with AI assistance: AI tools like ChatGPT can help analyze job descriptions to identify key themes and skills. They can also provide feedback on your résumé and help tailor application materials to specific roles.
- Be open to exceptional opportunities: Occasionally, a job posting might appear that is a perfect fit—what I call a “Cinderella’s slipper” job. Even if it’s earlier than your planned timeline, consider applying or reaching out to someone in the organization. Expressing interest might open doors for a future opportunity.
Three to Four Months Out: Start Applying
- Start submitting applications: At this stage, it’s time to actively apply for jobs while continuing to network. Informational interviews remain valuable, as many jobs are never publicly posted. Take this time to reach back out to the contacts you have made over the past year or so to let them know you are on the market.
- Tailor your application materials: Customize your résumé and cover letter for each application, incorporating language from the job description to highlight your fit. If the application allows an optional cover letter, always include one—it may be the deciding factor between you and another equally qualified candidate.
- Leverage networking for hidden opportunities: Identify organizations of interest and connect with employees to learn more. This proactive approach often leads to learning about openings before they’re publicly listed. We’ve all heard stories of people reaching out to homeowners with letters expressing interest in a house—even if it’s not for sale—hoping the owners might consider selling in the future.
- Secure references: Consider who can provide strong recommendations. Reach out in advance to confirm their willingness to serve as references and keep them updated on your search.
- Keep a job search log: Maintain a spreadsheet to track applications, including submission dates, job descriptions and tailored résumé and cover letter versions. This record will be invaluable when preparing for interviews and following up with employers.
Conclusion: Finding Your Dream Job

Job searching is a complex and important decision-making process, one that also has to remain flexible in light of changing market conditions and unique personal constraints. Just as home buyers don’t purchase the first house they see, job seekers shouldn’t rush into the first opportunity that arises. A strategic job search, like a well-planned home-buying journey, requires research, patience and flexibility. By starting early, refining your criteria, and actively engaging with your field, you’ll be well prepared when the right job—your “dream home” in the professional world—becomes available. With knowledge and preparation, you can confidently apply, interview and accept an offer, knowing you’ve found the right fit for this stage of your career.

Ashley Brady is assistant dean of biomedical career engagement and strategic partnerships and associate professor of medical education and administration at Vanderbilt University in the School of Medicine’s Biomedical Research, Education and Training Office of Career Development ASPIRE Program. She is also a member of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing a national voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.
Source link
March 31, 2025