The No. 1 lesson about disaster relief Ryan Cornner would give college presidents is: do scenario training.
The president of Glendale Community College said he and his team were working on emergency preparedness training with new managers when the L.A. wildfires started.
“We were actually planning a tabletop exercise for spring, and boy, did we get a tabletop exercise. It was just real,” Cornner said in the latest episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast.
GCC serves 24,000 students from its campus about five miles from where the Eaton fire burned. Dozens of the college’s students and employees lost their homes, and many more were displaced for more than a week. GCC has expanded its efforts to provide access to basic needs for its students and has recognized that its part-time adjunct faculty need the most support.
While providing food and housing support or giving students laptops has been a general principle of the community college system, Cornner says a new need in this emergency is coming from employees.
“As an employer, we think that the real focus is making sure that the workplace has what it needs and making sure people feel supported in their work. But when someone has just lost their home, it brings an added element of ‘what should we do as a community?’”
Inside Higher Edreported on GCC’s immediate emergency response in January and wanted to reach out to the institution again to check in on its recovery.
Cornner said institutions can support their communities by investing in the future workforce of first responders and by providing a safe campus for secondary school students whose schools were destroyed in the fires.
Listen to this episode of The Key here, and click here to find out more about The Key.
Receiving 15 student inquiries about citations in two weeks drives me to despair.
The technicalities of citation style have emerged for students as a prime concern: Students require reassurance and instruction on where to put a period or a quotation mark, how to cite a quote within an interview within a book, or the amount of margin space appropriate for a heading.
I do not blame them for their concern. I do blame the way we teach style guides, whether MLA or APA or Turabian or otherwise: as a collection of at-times maddeningly opaque rules that, to students, seem solely designed to satisfy the whims of the academy.
But we don’t have to continue in this manner. AI can provide not only a way out, but also an opportunity to reconceptualize the way we teach citation style more generally.
Defined by the Modern Language Association as “a set of standards for writing and documentation used by writers to find and evaluate information,” style guides promise consistency and structure, a coherent orientation to research. Yet as a general rule, students experience style as a practice of bewildering inconsistency.
Consider in-text citations in MLA and American Psychological Association style. MLA citations follow an author-page format; APA follows author-date. Reference pages, headers and even title pages require different formatting between style systems. And even within a single style guide, new editions introduce iterative changes over time.
For students switching citation styles between courses or even trying to remain within one style system, keeping track of the mechanics can prove frustrating. In the introduction to the APA seventh edition in 2019, students were encouraged to contact their institution or professor about which version of the style guide to use, with dual use of the sixth and seventh editions in place from 2019 through 2021. Students using RefWorks to create a bibliography can currently choose from among 15 bewildering versions of APA style and 10 for MLA—almost assuredly without fully understanding the iterative differences between each.
Little wonder that the Purdue Online Writing Lab—that bastion of style sanity both for the beleaguered professoriate and overwhelmed students—remains one of the most-used educational sites in the world, with its citation style pages receiving the most visits. And yet in spite of this resource and a slew of others, including websites like Citation Machine that promise easy style formatting, students continue to struggle.
In this milieu, style guides can begin to seem a bit silly. Inconsequential, even: an exercise in mechanics and parentheticals, or a game in which scholarship, as Aimée Morrison writes in Composition Studies, becomes perceived as nothing more valuable than “an error-free response to a prompt.”
This is dangerous thinking.
Academic integrity matters. Entering the scholarly conversation and attributing work properly matters. Style serves as more than a mechanical exercise. At its best, style facilitates a way of thinking and being in scholarship, supporting scholars to orient themselves within the broader academy.
In a long-ago literature class that I taught at Ohio University, one of my students asked a question that has remained with me ever since: “What even is the MLA?”
Having paid my substantive dues, both literal and figurative, to that organization for the bulk of my professional career, it never occurred to me that students might not know. But the majority of them were astonished to realize the MLA and the APA were actual organizations made of real human beings, with missions and philosophies informing the style rules that governed their essays.
This revelation transformed the students’ relationship to citation style. They stopped focusing on the mechanical trivia and instead peppered me with questions, including one that opened up a week’s worth of class discussions: Why does APA focus on year of research while MLA focuses on author?
That wasn’t the only inquiry. They wanted to know why Chicago used so many footnotes, how citation styles impacted readability, why MLA doesn’t require a title page and what these styles expressed about expectations in their field.
In short: Everyone makes us cite our work, but on what principles do these expectations operate?
The resulting discussions established an unexpected understanding among my students of how citation style should function and how all those seemingly random mechanics of various style systems actually emerge from deep, intentional thinking about research and the scholarly record. The practice of viewing citation style as a matter of scholarly identity and orientation, rather than as a series of mythological labors in the name of Real Scholarship, made a critical difference to their approach.
I was pleased to see that my undergraduate students emerged from that term with far better papers. They cited their research well and with enthusiasm; they evaluated and integrated sources with mastery; their postpaper reflections evidenced a scholarly joy that I see all too rarely in the classroom. I had the sense that, for the first time, many of them understood why they were doing what they were doing.
Yes, I still had to correct the periods in their parentheticals and the lack of italics in bibliographies at the end of the term. But that experience led me to realize that mechanics aren’t the critical aspects of style that students need to understand—and that AI can serve as a great remedy for these errors.
If citation style is about more than arbitrary mechanics, if it is about more than jumping through grammatical and technical hoops to prove mastery, then allowing AI to pinch-hit frees students to shift their focus from granular details to the intricacies of evaluating sources, thinking through if and how to cite a work, and embedding their own research and voice in a broader scholarly tradition.
Indeed, students already rely on websites and applications to mechanically format their bibliographic citations. An AI editor can surely serve as a similar supplement to adjust minor mechanics where needed: a period here, a missing parenthesis there, the addition or deletion of italics, indentations.
This neither releases students from the burden of expertise nor opens a Pandora’s box of AI use. Gating AI use in this way emphasizes the value of the writing and revising process, as well as offering students the opportunity to engage AI as thoughtful scholars. As a benefit, students learn in a low-stakes way to engage AI thoughtfully, a critical skill in the workforce.
Most importantly, students and professors with this safety net can breathe a little easier. Freed from the panic of formatting citations, students can focus on the issues that matter the most and polish a final project to a high standard. Revision transforms, too, from “a checklist of corrections that must be taken in” to useful, in-depth prompts that promote writing craft and deep inquiry. And faculty can offer high-quality feedback on content, tone and the scholarly approach rather than spend hours correcting the fine details of a bibliography.
At their best, style guides serve as a reflection of scholarly value. To write in APA style, MLA or Chicago, or even the dreaded “house style” used by some journals or publications, makes a statement about what a discipline or a publication prioritizes: what they deem worthy of inclusion or neglect, what constitutes readability and what matters to the academic record.
To focus only on minutiae runs the risk of dismissing those rich and complex concepts. Better by far to invite students into this academic conversation, elaborating on the distinctions and philosophies of practice inherent in the way we cite literature, than to represent citation style as an arbitrary practice of rote and meaningless work. AI can expedite this process and facilitate this work in a way that is of great value both to students and to faculty.
So please, bookmark the Purdue Owl website. Dog-ear the relevant pages in the necessary handbook or style guide of choice. Feel free to inculcate a style pet peeve, or to long for the earlier style guide edition now lost to time. But if institutional approach permits, take advantage of the relative freedom that AI can offer to break away from the granular focus on details to a broader and more integrated view of how and why citation style matters—even, and especially, when we can’t remember where the period goes.
Brandy Bagar-Fraley is program chair for the master of science in advanced professional studies program and doctoral lead faculty at Franklin University, where she oversees doctoral writing courses. She serves as a member of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession, and her current research seeks to integrate student perceptions of generative AI into AI-focused pedagogy and departmental approaches.
A brief announcement: After 20 years of writing “Intellectual Affairs” for Inside Higher Ed, I am retiring at the end of the month—from the gig, that is, not from writing itself. The final column will run in two weeks.
Going to a play at the height of COVID-19 was effectively impossible, but I managed to see two productions of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning in the fall of 2020. The first performance was via Zoom. The actors did what they could, but the suspension of disbelief was never a viewer option. Heroes was then produced by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater and “captured digitally as a site-specific production, created in a closed quarantine ‘bubble’ at a private location in the Poconos, following strict health guidelines,” as press materials stated at the time.
Set at a small Catholic college in rural Wyoming during the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Heroes centers on four friends (two men, two women) who reunite at a college function, a few years after graduation. They all admire a professor who has been appointed as president of the college. She joins them around two-thirds of the way through the play; one of the four is her daughter.
The audience quickly picks up that Transfiguration College of Wyoming has a curriculum based on the Great Books, with a strong dose of conservative theology—not least on matters of sexual morality. And the lessons have gone deep. None of the four has drifted away from the faith, or skewed to the left, although one is clearly more troubled by punitive rhetoric than the rest.
The play’s title alludes to a pop-sociological theory of history as moving through a cycle of four periods, each about two decades long. Since graduation, one member of the group has become a fairly successful figure in right-wing media (likely she has Steve Bannon on speed dial) and an ardent believer in the apocalypse promised by the fourth turning.
“It’s destruction,” she says. “It’s revolution, it’s war. The nation almost doesn’t survive. Great example is the Civil War, and the economic crisis before that. Or the Great Depression and World War II. And it’s right now. The national identity crisis caused by Obama. Liberals think it’s Trump. It’s the fight to save civilization. People start to collectivize and turn against each other. It seems like everything’s ending—we’re all gonna die. No one trusts each other. But the people who do trust each other form crazy bonds. Somehow we get through it, we rise from the ashes …”
The phoenix that emerges? An era of security, conformity and prosperity. The apocalypse has a happy ending.
When the play premiered off-Broadway in 2019, reviewers often imagined the discomfort it would presumably give New York theatergoers—plunged into a continuous flow of red state ideology, with no character challenging it. But the play did more than that. The figures Arbery puts on stage are characters, not ventriloquist dummies. They have known one another at close proximity for years and formed “crazy bonds” of great intensity.
Their conversation is rooted in that personal history as well as in Transfiguration College’s carefully tended vision of Judeo-Christian Western civilization. The playwright creates a good deal of inner space for the actors to occupy and move around in. When I finally got to see Heroes of the Fourth Turningonstage, in person, there were moments that felt like eavesdropping on real people.
What comes out of a character’s mouth at times echoes well-worn culture-war talking points—many unchanged now, almost eight years after when the play is set. At the same time, the characters clash over points of doctrine and ethical disagreement, and express very mixed feelings about the MAGA crusade. The closest thing to an expression of enthusiasm for the new president (then and now) is when a character calls Trump “a Golem molded from the clay of mass media … Even if he himself is confused, he has the ability to spit out digestible sound bites rooted in decades of the work of the most brilliant conservative think tanks in the country.”
This is cynical, but also naïve. When the president of the college appears before her adoring former students, she recites some points they have undoubtedly heard from her many times:
“Progressivism moves too fast and forces change and constricts liberty. Gridlock is beautiful. In the delay is deliberation and true consensus. If you just railroad something through because you want it done, that’s the passion of the mob. Delaying is the structure of the [republic], which is structured differently in order to offset the dangers of democracy. I believe in slowness, gridlock.”
She’s a fictional character, but I still wonder what she’s made of the last few weeks.
Not long after Heroes opened in 2019, Elizabeth Redden wrote an in-depth article for Inside Higher Ed about Wyoming Catholic College, the not-so-veiled original for the play’s Transfiguration College. Arbery’s father was the college’s president at the time. All of which goes some ways toward explaining how a one-act play can evoke so palpably a college that is also a counterculture.
Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.
A May 2024 Student Voice survey found 28 percent of college students say they have “not much trust” in their president and other executive-level officials, which was 18 percentage points higher than students’ distrust in professors and 13 percentage points higher than their trust in academic department leaders.
An additional 19 percent of students said they were not sure if they trust their president, for a total of 52 percent of students indicating they have at least some trust in their campus executives.
Students at private nonprofit institutions were mostly likely to say they did not have much trust in their president (48 percent) compared to their public four-year peers (30 percent) or those at two-year institutions (18 percent).
“Trust is in very short supply on campuses. We do not see deeply trusting environments on campus very quickly,” said Emma Jones, executive vice president and owner of higher education consulting group Credo, in a Jan. 29 webinar by the Constructive Dialogue Institute. “By and large, I find campus leaders to have incredibly trustworthy behavior … but they are not trusted in their environments.”
Institutional leaders can employ a variety of strategies and tactics to gain greater trust.
Creating a foundation: A 2024 report from the American Council on Education found presidents are in agreement that trust building is a key competency for being a campus leader. Presidents told researchers they need to be present with their constituents, create opportunities for various stakeholders to share their views on issues related to the institution and surround themselves with diverse voices, according to the report.
In the webinar, experts shared what they believe helps build trust between executive-level administrators and the students they serve.
Demonstrate care. Humanity is a key factor in trust, in which a person recognizes the uniqueness of each person and builds relationships with them, Jones explained. During this present age, it is particularly important for campus leaders to see and acknowledge people for their humanity.
Watch your tone. Generic or trite messages that convey a lack of empathy do not build trust among community members, said Darrell P. Wheeler, president of the State University of New York at New Paltz. Instead, having transparent and authentic communication, even when the answer is “I don’t know,” can help build trust in a nebulous period of time, Jones said.
Engage in listening. “People want you to be compassionate, but they really want to have their own space at times to be able to express where they are [and] not for you to overshadow it by talking about yourself in that moment,” Wheeler said during the webinar.
Create space to speak with students. Attending events to listen to students’ concerns or having opportunities for students to engage in meetings can show attentive care, Victoria Nguyen, a teaching fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told Inside Higher Ed.
Foster healthy discourse. While presidents should strive to be trusted among their community members, too much trust can be just as destructive as too much distrust, Hiram Chodosh, president of Claremont McKenna College in California, said in the webinar.
Trust yourself. Earning trust requires self-trust, Chodosh said, so presidents should also seek to cultivate their own trustworthiness.
Presidential Engagement: College presidents can step outside their offices and better engage with learners. Here are three paths they are taking.
Being visible on campus. Creating opportunities for informal conversation can address students’ perceptions of the president and assist in trust building. Some presidents navigate campus in a golf cart to allow for less structured interactions with students. The University of South Alabama president participates in recruitment trips with high schoolers, introducing himself early.
Hosting office hours. Wheeler of SUNY New Paltz hosts presidential office hours for students once a month in which they can sit down for coffee and chat with him. Students can sign up with a QR code and discuss whatever they feel called to share. At King’s University in Ontario, the dean of students hosts drop-in visits across campus, as well.
Give students a peek behind the curtain. Often, colleges will invite students to participate as a trustee or a board member, giving them a voice and seat at the table. Hood College allows one student to be president for a day and engage in ceremonial duties and meetings the president would typically hold.
Most researchers are interested in using artificial intelligence in their work, and 69 percent believe AI skills will be critical within two years. However, more than 60 percent say a lack of guidelines and training present a barrier to their increased use of AI, according to a study the publishing giant Wiley released last week.
The study asked nearly 5,000 researchers worldwide about how they currently use AI, and the findings revealed variations by geography, discipline and career phase.
It found that 70 percent of researchers want clearer guidelines from publishers about acceptable uses of AI, and 69 percent want publishers to help them avoid potential pitfalls, errors and biases.
Although the vast majority of researchers had either heard of or used Open AI’s ChatGPT, only about a third had heard of other popular tools, such as Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, and even fewer used them.
And among those who do use AI, fewer than half use it for its top five uses, which include help with translation (40 percent), proofreading and editing scholarly papers for publication (38 percent), brainstorming/ideation (26 percent), reviewing large amounts of information (24 percent), and discovering the latest relevant research (24 percent).
The study also found geographic variations in AI use.
Researchers in China and Germany were most likely to have used AI to support their work—59 percent and 57 percent, respectively—compared to a global average of 45 percent. In the Americas, which includes the United States, only 40 percent of researchers surveyed said they have already used AI to conduct or write up research.
Researchers also expressed differences in enthusiasm for adopting the tools now, depending on field and career phase.
Among the early adopters of AI were researchers in computer science (44 percent), medicine (38 percent), corporate (42 percent) and health care (38 percent), as well as early-career researchers (39 percent). Business, economics and finance researchers (42 percent), and those in the academic sector (36 percent), wanted to keep pace with the average rate of use and adoption.
Finally, researchers in the life sciences (38 percent), physical sciences (34 percent) and government sector (34 percent), as well as late-career researchers (34 percent), were more likely to take a more cautious approach and favor later adoption of AI.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Hundreds of higher ed leaders packed into the Kennedy Center for the annual American Council on Education conference this week, snapping photos of the large bust of the cultural center’s namesake, President John F. Kennedy, in the foyer. Some joked that it would soon be replaced by Donald Trump’s likeness, given the current president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center board, a move announced Wednesday.
But it was Trump’s attempted takeover of higher education that was foremost on the minds of attendees.
The Republican president, now in his second nonconsecutive term, dominated conference discussions as speakers grappled with how to interpret and respond to a vision for higher education that has been marked by cuts to research funding and personnel; the decimation of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
“We’re under attack,” ACE president Ted Mitchell said in his opening remarks.
He pointed to a flurry of executive orders and other recent actions that have caused “confusion and dismay” across the sector, as the Trump administration attempted to freeze federal funding and change research reimbursements, creating financial uncertainty for colleges.
“These executive orders are an assault on American opportunity and leadership,” Mitchell said.
He warned that such changes could destabilize higher education by undermining research, innovation, intellectual independence and autonomy.
“The flurry of these threats [is] designed to cower us into silence,” he said.
Mitchell also noted that ACE, along with other associations and several research universities, filed a lawsuit Monday against the National Institutes of Health for attempting to cap reimbursements for indirect research costs. While that lawsuit is pending, a federal judge has already prevented the cap, at least temporarily, in response to other litigation.
In the face of such chaos and instability, Mitchell emphasized the importance of unity, urging conference goers to beware of attempts to sow discord among institutions. “We will only succeed if we stick together,” he said.
He also pushed back on Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which have already led some colleges and universities to scrub DEI language from websites, shutter offices and cancel events.
“We can’t be apologetic of diversity. We just can’t,” Mitchell said.
But even as he blasted some of Trump’s recent actions, he noted that ACE is also seeking common ground with the administration.
“I continue to believe that there are important areas of policy where we can and must work with this administration. We will work to find those openings wherever we can,” Mitchell said.
His remarks came a day after dozens of college presidents attended ACE’s inaugural Hill Day, where they met with congressional staff to learn and advocate for policy priorities.
The Policy Outlook
The notion of higher education being under siege was prevalent across numerous sessions, including in a Thursday policy update from Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at ACE, who broke down recent actions and Republican priorities.
Fansmith noted that Trump has sought to reshape higher education through a series of executive orders, investigations and attempts to defund and destabilize the sector.
“We are not used to the wheels of government moving this quickly and impactfully,” he said.
Despite the sense of alarm roiling the sector, Fansmith said “growing opposition” has emerged. In some cases, it’s been bipartisan, with congressional Republicans joining Democrats in expressing concern over how changes to federal funding or research dollars may harm their local institutions and employers.
Additionally, Fansmith pointed out that the Trump administration has been sued repeatedly—at least 58 times, by his count—and that successful lawsuits have slowed the president’s rapid-fire attacks.
Fansmith also noted that Trump’s nominees to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon as secretary and Nicholas Kent as under secretary, are more seasoned operators than other Trump World figures. McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearing took place Thursday.
“She is not a firebrand; she is not the person who is going to blow things up,” Fansmith said, noting McMahon’s background as a longtime professional wrestling executive and prior head of the Small Business Association during Trump’s first term. But given Trump’s desire to dismantle or diminish the Education Department, McMahon “may be ordered to blow things up,” he said.
Of Kent, a former for-profit college advocate and past staffer for Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, Fansmith said he was “very passionate, deeply informed and highly intelligent.”
Hope Amid the Challenges
The conference also touched on a range of challenges beyond the turbulence of the Trump administration, including free speech, campus antisemitism, demographic changes and more.
In a discussion Wednesday, Wesleyan University president Michael Roth weighed in on the state of free speech in higher education and questioned recent efforts by Trump to go after universities for alleged antisemitism, including threats of investigations and financial penalties.
Roth, who is Jewish, acknowledged the existence of some antisemitism on college campuses, but argued that Trump’s efforts to address it were “disingenuous”—more of a cover for going after pro-Palestinian protesters who expressed concern about the bloodshed in Gaza.
While he noted that college leaders need to be cautious, he advised them not to cower.
“Not standing up for your mission in the long run won’t help your institution,” Roth said.
In a panel Thursday on the challenge that shrinking demographics pose to higher education, experts noted enrollment pressures will continue as the number of high school graduates continues to decline. But rather than a demographic cliff, higher education will likely see a gentler slide, they said.
Nathan Grawe, an economics professor at Carleton College, argued that the enrollment decline “won’t hit us all at once” but rather “little by little,” with incremental challenges year over year.
Other panelists noted that workforce challenges won’t diminish along with the number of high school graduates, meaning that colleges will need to focus on enrolling and retaining more adult learners.
For all the doom and gloom surrounding the policy discussions, the conference concluded on a high note. In his closing remarks, Freeman Hrabowski, an ACE Fellow and president emeritus of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, emphasized the importance of hope.
He encouraged attendees to “use our heads and our hearts” to meet the moment, reflecting on his experience in 1963, when at the age of 12 he was jailed for participating in a civil rights march in Birmingham, Ala. Looking back more than 60 years later, Hrabowski said it was his faith and determination that helped him know then that “we would be OK.”
He encouraged others to channel their own optimism amid turbulent times.
“Don’t you dare allow the toxicity of some people to leave you hopeless,” Hrabowski said.
The U.S. Department of Education laid off some civil servants on Wednesday, Politico reported, citing multiple people familiar with the matter.
It’s not yet clear how many employees were affected, but they worked for a range of offices within the department, from civil rights to federal student aid. Earlier that day, a federal judge approved the Trump administration’s plan to offer buyouts to vast swaths of the federal workforce.
The move is the latest personnel disruption at the agency. Earlier this month, dozens of employees were put on administrative leave after attending a diversity, equity and inclusion training during the first Trump administration.
Many of the terminated department employees were still in their probationary period, according to Politico, meaning they’d been on the job for less than a year and lacked full civil service protections, though nonprobationary employees were also affected. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration had ordered all federal agencies to terminate their probationary employees, part of a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce.
Linda McMahon told senators Thursday that she won’t shut down the Education Department without their approval, quelling any doubt that the majority Republicans may have had about whether she deserved to be appointed to President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
But that doesn’t mean that McMahon and the Trump administration aren’t still looking to make considerable changes to the agency’s programs and potentially dismantle it from the inside out. She said at her confirmation hearing that the department has to go, or at the very least is in need of a major makeover, because it’s rife with bureaucracy that fails to serve students well.
The goal, the former wrestling CEO told the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, is to “reorient” the federal agency and ensure it “operate[s] more efficiently”—not defund education, as some critics have suggested.
“We’d like to do this right,” she said. “We’d like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with, and our Congress to get on board with.”
Questions about the department’s future and whether McMahon would stand up to President Trump if he tries to break the law dominated the nearly three-hour hearing. McMahon, a Trump loyalist and veteran of the first administration, weathered the hearing just fine and will likely be confirmed by the Senate. The committee will vote Feb. 20 on her nomination.
McMahon largely stuck by Trump and defended his actions so far. She also pledged to comply with and uphold the law, respecting Congress’s power over the purse strings by disbursing funds as lawmakers order. “The president will not ask me to do anything that’s against the law,” she later added.
McMahon’s comments break slightly from the president’s record so far. In the first three weeks alone, Trump and Elon Musk have entirely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, cut countless contracts and attempted to freeze all federal grants. The president has said he wants to get rid of the Education Department entirely, suggesting he didn’t need congressional action to do so.
During and after the hearing, the majority of Republicans praised McMahon as the right person for the job.
“It is clear that our current education system isn’t working. We have the status quo and that’s actually failing our kids,” Senator Katie Britt of Alabama said in her opening remarks. “Linda McMahon is someone who knows how to reform our education system.”
But for Democrats and Senator Susan Collins, a more centrist Republican from Maine, McMahon’s comments left quite a few questions still lingering and seemed to be, at times, self-contradictory.
“The whole hearing right now feels kind of surreal to me,” said Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire. “It’s almost like we’re being subjected to a very eloquent gaslighting here.”
While many of the senators’ questions focused on special education, K-12, the separation of powers and getting rid of the Education Department, colleges and universities did come up a few times, offering some insight into McMahon’s plans as secretary.
Here are five key higher ed takeaways from the hearing:
Commitments but Few Specifics
Prior to the hearing, Trump’s comments suggested his Education Department would prioritize cutting red tape, returning education to the states, cracking down on campus antisemitism and banning what he calls “gender ideology,” among other things. But speculation swirled about what McMahon would put at the top of her agenda.
On Thursday she made it clear that she’s in lockstep with the president, saying in her opening remarks that “Trump has shared his vision and I’m ready to enact it.” She failed to provide much detail beyond that.
The business mogul, who has limited experience in education, indicated she’ll have some studying to do if she gets confirmed. When asked about topics like diversity, equity and inclusion programs or accreditation, she said, “I’ll have to learn more” or “I’d like to look into it further and get back to you on that.”
For example, when it came to addressing civil rights complaints filed by Jewish students, McMahon was quick to assure Republican lawmakers that colleges will “face defunding” if they don’t comply with the law. She also said that international students who participate in protests Trump deems antisemitic should have their visas revoked. But she didn’t provide further detail on how exactly either repercussion would be enforced.
Additionally, when asked about how she would address a backlog of cases at the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates complaints of discrimination, she said, “I would like to be confirmed and get into the department and understand that backlog.”
‘Pretty Chilling’ Approach to DEI
McMahon declined to say what specific programs or classes might violate Trump’s recent executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion during a tense exchange with Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut.
Policy experts said Trump’s executive order should have had little immediate impact on higher ed, as most of its provisions require agency action, but several colleges and universities moved quickly to comply after the order was signed Jan. 21, canceling events and scrubbing websites of DEI mentions.
Murphy highlighted one of those examples, telling McMahon that the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., had shut down a number of its student affinity groups and clubs like the Society of Black Engineers.
He then went on to ask her, “Would public schools be in violation of this order, would they risk funding if they had clubs that students could belong to based on their racial or ethnic identity?” To which McMahon responded, “Well, I certainly today don’t want to address hypothetical situations.”
Murphy said that should be “a pretty easy question,” adding that her lack of response was “pretty chilling.”
“I think you’re going to have a lot of teachers and administrators scrambling right now,” he said.
McMahon did note, however, that all schools can and should celebrate Black History Month and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. She suggested that in saying individuals should be judged by “content of their character,” King was supporting a colorblind approach to policy and looking at all populations as the same, rather than addressing systemic inequities.
Dems Take Issue With DOGE
Several lawmakers had questions for McMahon about Trump’s efforts to cut spending via the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency, but she didn’t have many answers.
Democrats, in particular, took issue with recent reports that DOGE staffers have access to sensitive student data and recently canceled $881 million in contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences. The Education Department is just one of several agencies under DOGE’s microscope. The Trump administration is also laying off employees at the agency or putting them on administrative leave as part of a broader plan to shrink the federal workforce.
McMahon said she didn’t know “about all the administrative people who have been put on leave,” adding she would look into that. She also didn’t have more information about the IES cuts. But she defended DOGE’s work as an audit.
“I do think it’s worthwhile to take a look at the programs before money goes out the door,” she said.
But Democrats countered that Congress, not the executive branch, has the authority to direct where federal funds should go.
“When Congress appropriates money, it is the administration’s responsibility to put that out as directed by Congress, who has the power of the purse,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat. “If you have input, if you have programs you have looked at that you believe are not effective, then it is your job to come to us, explain why and get the support for that.”
Brief Mention of Accreditation
Despite Trump’s promise to fire accreditors, the accreditation system and the federal policies that govern it received little attention during the hearing—aside from one round of questions.
Senator Ashley Moody, a Florida Republican, said she thinks the current system is unconstitutional, echoing claims that she made as Florida attorney general. The state argued in a 2023 lawsuit that Congress ceded power to private accrediting agencies, violating the U.S. Constitution. A federal judge rejected those claims and threw out the lawsuit in October.
Currently, federal law requires that colleges and universities be accredited by an Education Department–recognized accreditor in order to receive federal student aid such as Pell Grants. But in recent years, Republican-led states—most notably Florida—have bristled at what they see as undue interference from the accreditors and their power to potentially take away federal aid. State lawmakers in Florida now require public colleges to change accreditors regularly. But that process has been sluggish, and officials blame the Education Department.
Moody asked McMahon to commit to review regulations and guidance related to colleges changing accreditors.
“I look forward to working with you on that,” McMahon said. “And there’s been a lot of issues raised about these five to seven accreditors … I think that needs to have a broad overview and review.” (McMahon didn’t specify, but she seemed to refer to the seven institutional accreditors.)
Support for Short-Term Pell
Throughout the hearing, McMahon also reiterated her support for expanding the Pell Grant to short-term workforce training programs that run between eight and 15 weeks, and bolstering other nontraditional means of higher education like apprenticeships.
The nominee noted multiple times that though “college isn’t for everyone,” there should be opportunities for socioeconomic mobility and career development for all. She believes promoting programs like short-term Pell “could stimulate our economy” by providing new routes to pursue skills-based learning and promote trade careers. This mindset could likely lead to less restriction on for-profit technical institutions like cosmetology schools.
One thing neither McMahon nor the Senate panel spent much time on, however, was the Office of Federal Student Aid, its botched rollout of a new application portal or how she would manage the government’s $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio. One of the few mentions of the student debt crisis came up in committee chair Dr. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana’s opening remarks.
“Too many students leave college woefully unprepared for the workforce while being saddled with overwhelming debt that they cannot pay off,” he said. “Your previous experience overseeing [Small Business Administration] loans will be a great asset as the department looks to reform its student loan program.”
Indirect cost recovery (ICR) seems like a boring, technical budget subject. In reality, it is a major source of the long-running budget crises at public research universities. Misinformation about ICR has also confused everyone about the university’s public benefits.
These paired problems—concealed budget shortfalls and misinformation—didn’t cause the ICR cuts being implemented by the NIH acting director, one Matthew J. Memoli, M.D. But they are the basis of Memoli’s rationale.
Trump’s people will sustain these cuts unless academics can create an honest counternarrative that inspires wider opposition. I’ll sketch a counternarrative below.
The sudden policy change is that the NIH is to cap indirect cost recovery at 15 percent of the direct costs of a grant, regardless of the existing negotiated rate. Multiple lawsuits have been filed challenging the legality of the change, and courts have temporarily blocked it from going into effect.
Memoli’s notice of the cap, issued Friday, has a narrative that is wrong but internally coherent and plausible.
It starts with three claims about the $9 billion of the overall $35 billion research funding budget that goes to indirect costs:
Indirect cost allocations are in zero-sum competition with direct costs, therefore reducing the total amount of research.
Indirect costs are “difficult for NIH to oversee” because they aren’t entirely entailed by a specific grant.
“Private foundations” cap overhead charges at 10 to 15 percent of direct costs and all but a handful of universities accept those grants.
Memoli offers a solution: Define a “market rate” for indirect costs as that allowed by private foundations (Gates, Chan Zuckerberg, some others). The implication is the foundations’ rate captures real indirect costs rather than inflated or wishful costs that universities skim to pad out bloated administrations. On this analytical basis, currently wasted indirect costs will be reallocated to useful direct costs, thus increasing rather than decreasing scientific research.
There’s a false logic here that needs to be confronted.
The strategy so far to resist these cuts seems to focus on outcomes rather than on the actual claims or the underlying budgetary reality of STEM research in the United States. Scientific groups have called the ICR rate cap an attack on U.S. scientific leadership and on public benefits to U.S. taxpayers (childhood cancer treatments that will save lives, etc.). This is all important to talk about. And yet these claims don’t refute the NIH logic. Nor do they get at the hidden budget reality of academic science.
On the logic: Indirect costs aren’t in competition with direct costs because direct and indirect costs pay for different categories of research ingredients.
Direct costs apply to the individual grant: costs for chemicals, graduate student labor, equipment, etc., that are only consumed by that particular grant.
Indirect costs, also called facilities and administrative (F&A) costs, support infrastructure used by everybody in a department, discipline, division, school or university. Infrastructure is the library that spends tens of thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to just one important journal that is consulted by hundreds or thousands of members of that campus community annually. Infrastructure is the accounting staff that writes budgets for dozens and dozens of grant applications across departments or schools. Infrastructure is the building, new or old, that houses multiple laboratories: If it’s new, the campus is still paying it off; if it’s old, the campus is spending lots of money keeping it running. These things are the tip of the iceberg of the indirect costs of contemporary STEM research.
In response to the NIH’s social media announcement of its indirect costs rate cut, Bertha Madras had a good starter list of what indirects involve.
Screenshot via Christopher Newfield
And there are also people who track all these materials, reorder them, run the daily accounting, etc.—honestly, people who aren’t directly involved in STEM research have a very hard time grasping its size and complexity, and therefore its cost.
As part of refuting the claim that NIH can just not pay for all this and therefore pay for more research, the black box of research needs to be opened up, Bertha Madras–style, and properly narrated as a collaborative (and exciting) activity.
This matter of human activity gets us to the second NIH-Memoli claim, which involves toting up the processes, structures, systems and people that make up research infrastructure and adding up their costs. The alleged problem is that it is “difficult to oversee.”
Very true, but difficult things can and often must be done, and that is what happens with indirect costs. Every university compiles indirect costs as a condition of receiving research grants. Specialized staff (more indirect costs!) use a large amount of accounting data to sum up these costs, and they use expensive information technology to do this to the correct standard. University staff then negotiate with federal agencies for a rate that addresses their particular university’s actual indirect costs. These rates are set for a time, then renegotiated at regular intervals to reflect changing costs or infrastructural needs.
The fact that this process is “difficult” doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it. This claim shouldn’t stand—unless and until NIH convincingly identifies specific flaws.
As stated, the NIH-Memoli claim that decreasing funding for overhead cuts will increase science is easily falsifiable. (And we can say this while still advocating for reducing overhead costs, including ever-rising compliance costs imposed by federal research agencies. But we would do this by reducing the mandated costs, not the cap.)
The third statement—that private foundations allow only 10 to 15 percent rates of indirect cost recovery—doesn’t mean anything in itself. Perhaps Gates et al. have the definitive analysis of true indirect costs that they have yet to share with humanity. Perhaps Gates et al. believe that the federal taxpayer should fund the university infrastructure that they are entitled to use at a massive discount. Perhaps Gates et al. use their wealth and prestige to leverage a better deal for themselves at the expense of the university just because they can. Which of these interpretations is correct? NIH-Memoli assume the first but don’t actually show that the private foundation rate is the true rate. (In reality, the second explanation is the best.)
This kind of critique is worth doing, and it can be expanded. The NIH view reflects right-wing public-choice economics that treat teachers, scientists et al. as simple gain maximizers producing private, not public goods. This means that their negotiations with federal agencies will reflect their self-interest, while in contrast the “market rate” is objectively valid. We do need to address these false premises and bad conclusions again and again, whenever they arise.
However, this critique is only half the story. The other half is the budget reality of large losses on sponsored research, all incurred as a public service to knowledge and society.
Take that NIH image above. It makes no logical sense to put the endowments of three very untypical universities next to their ICR rates: They aren’t connected. It makes political narrative sense, however: The narrative is that fat-cat universities are making a profit on research at regular taxpayers’ expense, and getting even fatter.
The only way to deal with this very effective, very entrenched Republican story is to come clean on the losses that universities incur. The reality is that existing rates of indirect cost recovery do not cover actual indirect costs, but require subsidy from the university that performs the research. ICR is not icing on the budget cake that universities can do without. ICR buys only a portion of the indirect costs cake, and the rest is purchased by each university’s own institutional funds.
For example, here are the top 16 university recipients of federal research funds. One of the largest in terms of NIH funding (through the Department of Health and Human Services) is the University of California, San Francisco, winning $795.6 million in grants in fiscal year 2023. (The National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey tables for fiscal year 2023 are here.)
UCSF’s negotiated indirect cost recovery rate is 64 percent. This means that it has shown HHS and other agencies detailed evidence that it has real indirect costs in something like this amount (more on “something like” in a minute). It means that HHS et al. have accepted UCSF’s evidence of their real indirect costs as valid.
If the total of UCSF’s HHS $795.6 million is received with a 64 percent ICR rate, this means that every $1.64 of grant funds has $0.64 in indirect funds and one dollar in direct. The math estimates that UCSF receives about $310 million of its HHS funds in the form of ICR.
Now, the new NIH directive cuts UCSF from 64 percent to 15 percent. That’s a reduction of about 77 percent. Reduce $310 million by that proportion and you have UCSF losing about $238 million in one fell swoop. There’s no mechanism in the directive for shifting that into the direct costs of UCSF grants, so let’s assume a full loss of $238 million.
In Memoli’s narrative, this $238 million is the Reaganite’s “waste, fraud and abuse.” The remaining approximately $71 million is legitimate overhead as measured (wrongly) by what Gates et al. have managed to force universities to accept in exchange for the funding of their researchers’ direct costs.
But the actual situation is even worse than this. It’s not that UCSF now will lose $238 million on their NIH research. In reality, even at (allegedly fat-cat) 64 percent ICR rates, they were already losing tons of money. Here’s another table from the HERD survey.
There’s UCSF in the No. 2 national position, a major research powerhouse. It spends more than $2 billion a year on research. However, moving across the columns from left to right, you see federal government, state and local government, and then this category, “Institution Funds.” As with most of these big research universities, this is a huge number. UCSF reports to the NSF that it spends more than $500 million a year of its own internal funds on research.
The reason? Extramurally sponsored research, almost all in science and engineering, loses massive amounts of money even at current recovery rates, day after day, year in, year out. This is not because anyone is doing anything wrong. It is because the infrastructure of contemporary science is very expensive.
Here’s where we need to build a full counternarrative to the existing one. The existing one, shared by university administrators and Trumpers alike, posits the fiction that universities break even on research. UCSF states, “The University requires full F&A cost recovery.” This is actually a regulative ideal that has never been achieved.
The reality is this:
UCSF spends half a billion dollars of its own funding to support its $2 billion total in research. That money comes from the state, from tuition, from clinical revenues and some—less than you’d think—from private donors and corporate sponsors. If NIH’s cuts go through, UCSF’s internal losses on research—the money it has to make up—suddenly jump from an already-high $505 million to $743 million in the current year. This is a complete disaster for the UCSF budget. It will massively hit research, students, the campuses’ state employees, everything.
The current strategy of chronicling the damage from cuts is good. But it isn’t enough. I’m pleased to see the Association of American Universities, a group of high-end research universities, stating plainly that “colleges and universities pay for 25 percent of total academic R&D expenditures from their own funds. This university contribution amounted to $27.7 billion in FY23, including $6.8 billion in unreimbursed F&A costs.” All university administrations need to shift to this kind of candor.
Unless the new NIH cuts are put in the context of continuous and severe losses on university research, the public, politicians, journalists, et al. cannot possibly understand the severity of the new crisis. And it will get lost in the blizzard of a thousand Trump-created crises, one of which is affecting pretty much every single person in the country.
Finally, our full counternarrative needs a third element: showing that systemic fiscal losses on research are in fact good, marvelous, a true public service. A loss on a public good is not a bad and embarrassing fact. Research is supposed to lose money: The university loses money on science so that society gets long-term gains from it. Science has a negative return on investment for the university that conducts it so that there is a massively positive ROI for society, of both the monetary and nonmonetary kind. Add up the education, the discoveries, the health, social, political and cultural benefits: The university courts its own endless fiscal precarity so that society benefits.
We should also remind everyone that the only people who make money on science are in business. And even there, ROI can take years or decades. Commercial R&D, with a focus on product development and sales, also runs losses. Think of “AI”: Microsoft alone is spending $80 billion on it in 2025, on top of $50 billion in 2024, with no obviously strong revenues yet in sight. This is a huge amount of risky investment—it compares to $60 billion for federal 2023 R&D expenditures on all topics in all disciplines. I’m an AI skeptic but appreciate Microsoft’s reminder that new knowledge means taking losses and plenty of them.
These up-front losses generate much greater future value of nonmonetary as well as monetary kinds. Look at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard University, et al. in Table 22 above. The sector spent nearly $28 billion of its own money generously subsidizing sponsors’ research, including by subsidizing the federal government itself.
There’s much more to say about the long-term social compact behind this—how the actual “private sector” gets 100 percent ICR or significantly more, how state cuts factor into this, how student tuition now subsidizes more of STEM research than is fair, how research losses have been a denied driver of tuition increases. There’s more to say about the long-term decline of public universities as research centers that, when properly funded, allow knowledge creation to be distributed widely in the society.
But my point here is that opening the books on large everyday research losses, especially biomedical research losses of the kind NIH creates, is the only way that journalists, politicians and the wider public will see through the Trumpian lie about these ICR “efficiencies.” It’s also the only way to move toward the full cost recovery that universities deserve and that research needs.
President Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, Linda McMahon, will appear today before a key Senate committee to kick off the confirmation process.
The hearing comes at a tumultuous time for the Education Department and higher education, and questions about the agency’s future will likely dominate the proceedings, which kick off at 10 a.m. The Inside Higher Ed team will have live updates throughout the morning and afternoon, so follow along.
McMahon has been through the wringer of a confirmation hearing before, as she was appointed to lead the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term. But this time around the former wrestling CEO can expect tougher questions, particularly from Democrats, as the Trump administration has already taken a number of unprecedented, controversial and, at times, seemingly unconstitutional actions in just three short weeks.
Our live coverage of the hearing will kick off at 9:15 a.m. In the meantime, you can read more about McMahon, the latest at the department and what to expect below:
