Tag: News

Advocates Defend In-State Tuition for Undocumented Students

Immigrant students and their advocates are working to reopen federal lawsuits that ended in-state tuition benefits for undocumented students in two states and another state where the same outcome seems imminent. Advocates say the judges ruled in favor of the government without a public hearing and the affected students weren’t given the opportunity to defend the policies.

Since the summer, the U.S. Department of Justice challenged in-state tuition policies in Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas, claiming state laws extending in-state tuition prices to undocumented students breach federal law.

In Texas and Oklahoma, attorneys general quickly sided with the DOJ and judges swiftly ruled to end in-state tuition benefits for undocumented students. As a result, tuition tripled for some undocumented students this fall, forcing them to make difficult choices about whether they could afford to stay enrolled.

Kentucky’s undocumented students could soon face the same dilemma. The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education agreed to end in-state tuition benefits for local undocumented students in a settlement filed in September, but a judge has yet to make a ruling. Meanwhile, legal battles in Minnesota and Illinois are ongoing as these states defend their policies.

Since these lawsuits first emerged, civil rights groups and students have sought to intervene or become parties to them. They’re hoping to reopen the quickly closed cases to have their say in court.

A Latino civil rights organization, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was the first to file a motion to intervene on behalf of undocumented students in Texas in June. A month later, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, Democracy Forward and the National Immigration Law Center followed suit. They filed their own emergency motions to intervene on behalf of the activist group La Unión del Pueblo Entero, the Austin Community College District’s Board of Trustees and Oscar Silva, a student at the University of North Texas.

MALDEF filed a similar motion on behalf of a group of undocumented students in Kentucky in August. And last week, the organization moved to intervene for students in Oklahoma, as well.

Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel, said undocumented students in Kentucky, Oklahoma and Texas “were promised regular tuition, and as a result of that promise, made the decision to attend public higher education institutions in those states,” but “that promise was stripped away wrongfully” and without public input.

He stressed that, except for in extreme circumstances, such as cases involving national security, federal courts are meant to do their work in the public eye. But the Texas and Oklahoma laws got the ax without a public hearing. He also argued state lawmakers who dislike these policies can seek to repeal them, like any other state law, but there’s “no basis for legally challenging them.”

“They’re not allowed to close the public out, do things behind closed doors,” Saenz said. “We ought to expect our courts to conduct their work in public. And that did not happen in Texas. It did not happen in Oklahoma.”

A Bumpy Road

Despite students and advocates’ efforts, the motions to intervene have hit a legal setback.

In Texas, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor denied both MALDEF’s and the other groups’ motions to intervene. O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, said in court filings he agreed with the federal government and Texas that the motions were “legally futile” because federal law “pre-empts” the challenged Texas law. All of the groups seeking to intervene appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Saenz pushed back on the judge’s reasoning, saying O’Connor agreed with Texas and the DOJ’s conclusion “without any argument” or a public hearing where he could have heard a defense of the Texas Dream Act, the 24-year-old law that offered in-state tuition to undocumented students.

“No administration of either party in nearly a quarter century has ever challenged the Texas Dream Act, so his conclusion of futility is simply ludicrous,” Saenz said.

The law was never “presented,” according to Saenz. “That’s the way the courts are supposed to work. You’re supposed to have [an] argument presented in an adversarial manner. He simply signed off on a concocted agreement” between the Texas and U.S. attorneys general, he said.

A group of higher ed institutions and organizations have rallied behind MALDEF and other advocacy groups. The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration filed a 43-page amicus brief with the Fifth Circuit last week, defending interveners in Texas. Thirty-seven colleges, universities, higher education and immigrant rights organizations also signed on to the amicus brief, including the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

The district court decision “violates democratic principles by denying all interested parties their right to be heard,” the amicus brief read.

Whether or not intervention efforts succeed, the stakes of these overturned state laws are too high not to try everything possible, said Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance.

“This is about workforce development and supporting our domestic—including immigrant—talent pipeline that colleges and universities train, educate, nurture, and that go on to fuel the workforces … in communities and states,” she said.

She also described intervening as a matter of “fairness.”

“This is not about special treatment of undocumented students,” Feldblum said. “The tuition-equity challenges are targeting students who have grown up in the U.S., who have graduated from local high schools to pursue postsecondary education. This is what we want them to do. This is why we’re investing in their education.”

Despite the roadblock, Saenz said he’s still confident motions to intervene will ultimately triumph.

“I’m very hopeful, because it’s the law,” he said. “Intervention is legally required to be granted in all of these cases. And when we get to the merits of whether the tuition-equity laws are pre-empted or not, the law is absolutely on our side.”

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November 13, 2025
10 Universities Seek Recognition by a New Accreditor
Just four months after the launch of the Commission for Public Higher Education, the aspiring accreditor has received letters of intent from a cohort of 10 institutions, making them the first potential members.

The initial group to submit a letter of intent seeking CPHE accreditation comes from four states: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. All are currently accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. They are:
- Appalachian State University (N.C.)
- Chipola College (Fla.)
- Columbus State University (Ga.)
- Florida Atlantic University
- Florida Polytechnic University
- Georgia Southern University
- North Carolina Central University
- Texas A&M Kingsville
- Texas A&M Texarkana
- University of North Carolina at Charlotte
With its inaugural cohort and draft standards in place, the newly formed commission—introduced by Florida governor Ron DeSantis at a June press conference in which he railed against existing accreditors—is making progress toward its eventual goal of recognition by the U.S. Department of Education, which is a years-long process. Now the first 10 potential member institutions will offer CPHE a chance to show how it might offer a different approach to accreditation, even as it simultaneously battles accusations that it is aligned with DeSantis and his partisan attacks on higher ed.

The Initial Cohort

The aspiring members are all public colleges or universities—in keeping with CPHE’s stated mission—and represent a range of institution types. Several, including Florida Atlantic, are large research institutions, while NCCU is a historically Black university and Chipola College mostly offers two-year programs, though it does confer some bachelor’s degrees as well.

“I think it’s an extraordinary group. It’s beyond, both in terms of number and in terms of breadth, where I think anyone could have reasonably thought we would be when we started this project,” said Daniel Harrison, vice president for academic affairs at the UNC system, who has worked from the beginning of the project to launch the Commission for Public Higher Education.

Harrison noted that those institutions were the first to express interest before the fledgling accreditor capped the initial cohort at 10, though he anticipates bringing more in next year.

Those institutions will maintain SACSCOC accreditation while going through the recognition process for CPHE, which will include a self-study by the universities, meeting with teams of peer reviewers and site visits—all typical parts of the recognition process for any accreditor.

While Harrison said CPHE encouraged individual institutions to discuss the endeavor with Inside Higher Ed, only three of the 10 provided responses to requests for statements or interviews.

Appalachian State University provost and executive vice chancellor Neva Specht wrote in an email that “we welcome a peer review process that recognizes the characteristics that distinguish institutions of public higher education.” Specht added that they “anticipate that an accreditation process that emphasizes clear outcomes and helps focus our work in alignment with public higher education standards will help bolster confidence not only in our institution, but in our industry, as we continue working together on improving value and return on investment for our students, their families, and the taxpayers of North Carolina.”

Chipola president Sarah Clemmons also offered a response, writing in an emailed statement that the college “believes that a competitive environment fostered by multiple institutional accreditation options promotes innovation and continuous improvement in accreditation practices. Quality assurance is strengthened when accreditors must demonstrate their value and effectiveness to their member institutions. This healthy competition ensures quality which ultimately benefits students, institutions, and the broader higher education community.”

UNC Charlotte, which has faced criticism for allegedly pursuing CPHE accreditation without faculty input, shared with Inside Higher Ed a previously published statement and frequently asked questions page.

Others either did not respond or referred Inside Higher Ed to system officials or CPHE. When asked for comment, the University System of Georgia pointed back to CPHE.

The Specter of Politics

The public first learned about CPHE during the June press conference where DeSantis blasted the failings of higher education broadly and accreditors specifically. The Republican governor attacked the “accreditation cartel” and claimed SACSCOC sought to impose diversity, equity and inclusion standards on Florida universities, though the organization has never had standards on DEI practices. (Asked about that topic, DeSantis falsely claimed it does have DEI standards.)

While DeSantis emphasized conservative political grievances with accreditation in the initial announcement, CPHE leaders have sought to temper the governor’s remarks.

Harrison—who was traveling to Appalachian State University to meet with professors the same day he spoke to Inside Higher Ed—said the commission is working in a “personalized way” to address concerns about politicization by seeking faculty input at potential member institutions.

“We are coming very earnestly to our faculty and asking them to engage with us and help us to make this what it should be,” Harrison said. “And I think that if faculty will continue to allow us the room to grow and to operate, they’re going to be very pleased by what they see here.”

He also highlighted the appointment of Mark Becker to CPHE’s board.

Becker, the former president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and former leader of Georgia State University, said in a news release announcing his role that “the time is ripe for innovation in higher education accreditation,” adding that CPHE “is poised to take advantage of that opportunity to become a powerful engine for improving student outcomes across the sector.”

Harrison argued that Becker’s “entire career has been built on serious nonpartisanship—not bipartisanship, nonpartisanship. And that is the model that we are following here as well.”

But critics persist.

Faculty voices have been the most critical of CPHE thus far, especially the American Association of University Professors, which held a webinar on “politicizing accreditation” earlier this fall highlighting concerns about the new accreditor.

Matthew Boedy, a University of North Georgia professor who led the AAUP webinar, expressed worry about how state governments might impose their political will on CPHE. In a follow-up email to Inside Higher Ed, he cited CPHE’s “lack of independence” from states as the most significant concern.

“Whatever power SACS or others had to limit political interference or leveraging campus expansions on bad economics or even cuts in programs—all that would be gone,” Boedy wrote. “Administrations at the campus and system level can’t be both the referee and player in this game. There is also a concern that this new ‘state run’ accreditation will not just limit itself to schools but also professional programs like law and medicine that have stuck to diversity goals.”

The AAUP has also encouraged members to contact lawmakers and trustees to express their apprehensions, sharing talking points in a tool kit circulated last month that took aim at the organization.

“CPHE is not an academically credible accrediting body,” reads part of a proposed script in the AAUP tool kit designed to help members organize against the new accreditor. “It is structured to advance political agendas by allowing state government control over institutional accreditation. It threatens academic freedom, faculty shared governance, and institutional autonomy.”

But CPHE officials continue to urge critics to focus not on DeSantis’s partisan rhetoric but rather on how the organization has proceeded since it was launched. Speaking to Inside Higher Ed at the APLU’s annual conference on Monday, Cameron Howell—a University of South Carolina official and CPHE adviser—argued that the organization has eschewed politics in its operations.

“I believe there is nothing political or ideological about what we are doing,” Howell said.

While he said he didn’t “want to end up in a rhetorical argument with the governor of Florida,” Howell emphasized that other speakers involved in the rollout who followed the governor in the June press conference focused on innovation and efficiency. He also emphasized transparency in CPHE operations.

“We have tried very, very diligently to be transparent in the way we’re making decisions and in the way we’re seeking feedback, in part to demonstrate in a way that’s completely aboveboard that nothing that we’re doing is political or ideological,” Howell said. “Now, of course, there are benefits to having stakeholder involvement in and of itself, but I think that we’ve done a pretty good job of convincing a lot of faculty with whom we’ve been working … a lot of other administrators, that we take this very seriously, that it’s about process and results. It’s not about politics.”

Ryan Quinn contributed to this report.
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November 13, 2025
The Hidden Costs of College Beyond Tuition

College affordability conversations tend to focus on tuition. But it’s the total cost of attendance (COA) that can catch many students off guard and derail their progress toward a degree. A new deep dive report from Inside Higher Ed—“Beyond Tuition: The Hidden Costs of College and Their Disproportionate Impact”—reveals how inaccurate COA disclosures and unexpected costs, from mandatory meal plans to technology fees to rising rents, can blindside students and threaten their success.

Join the Discussion

On Wednesday, Dec. 17, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will host a live webcast discussion based on the report. Register for that here. Download “Beyond Tuition: The Hidden Costs of College and Their Disproportionate Impact” here.

Drawing on data from Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice surveys and other research, plus interviews with dozens of experts, student advocates and students themselves, the report notes that just 27 percent of undergraduates fully understand their institution’s cost of attendance—and that, for some, even an unexpected $100 expense could threaten their enrollment. Hidden costs hit lower-income, first-generation, parenting, international and other student groups especially hard, the report also finds.

Examining efforts to improve COA accuracy and transparency, and zooming in on students and change-makers in California, New York and Texas, the report calls for colleges to provide more accurate COA data, expanded emergency aid and clearer communication to help students plan for the full cost of college, not just the tuition bill.

“The public doesn’t think about living costs, although you have to cover them when you go to school. They also think tuition is skyrocketing when it really hasn’t,” said Robert Kelchen, professor and department head of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “To some extent we’re focused on the wrong problem.”

This independent editorial report is written by Melissa Ezarik, with support from the Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained in the report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Gates Foundation.

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November 13, 2025
Where the Ed Dept. Stands After Longest Government Shutdown

The House of Representatives passed a legislative package late Wednesday evening in a 222-209 vote, putting Congress one step closer to ending the federal government’s longest shutdown in history.

Now, the legislation, which first passed the Senate late Sunday night, heads to the White House. There, President Donald Trump is expected to sign it into law.

One policy expert told Inside Higher Ed that he expects to see little operational change for institutions as the government reopens. But he and others will be paying close attention to whether the Trump administration follows through on one of the bill’s key compromises: reversing the most recent round of federal layoffs.

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Part of the package would fund the Department of Veterans Affairs, military construction, the Department of Agriculture, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Congress through the end of the fiscal year. But it only appropriates funding for the Department of Education and most other agencies until Jan. 30, using what is known as a continuing resolution. For the most part, the CR gives agencies access to the same levels of federal funding as the last fiscal year.

Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, said because some of the Education Department’s staff continued working throughout October and into November, not much will change for colleges and universities.

“Financial aid was being disbursed, student loans were being serviced, all those things. So there probably won’t be an immediate significant shift,” he said. “It will, of course, be important for [grant] programs who have not been able to contact program officers with concerns or questions to have staff now available to them again. But that’s probably the biggest thing.”

Fansmith also noted that some education benefits for military service members, which in many cases have been disrupted and backlogged due to staffing shortages, will take some time to get back up to speed.

The 4 Parts of the Stopgap Bill

“There are veterans who have housing benefits and education benefits and all sorts of assistance that they’re using to fund their educations that have just not been coming through over the last six weeks,” he said. “And even when they turn the government back on … that backlog has only grown in the interim. So it’s not going to be an immediate resolution.”

Senate Democrats also negotiated with Republicans to reverse Trump’s latest round of layoffs in the stopgap bill. Theoretically, the legislation should reinstate more than 460 Department of Education employees within five days of it being enacted.

It mandates that any employee who was subject to a reduction in force during the shutdown “shall have that notice rescinded and be returned to employment status.” (The majority of those employees were tasked with overseeing federal grant programs for both K–12 and higher education.)

But Rachel Gittleman, president of the Education Department’s union, argues the language in the bill doesn’t do enough to protect public servants. She worries that saying staffers must be “returned to employment status” could allow Education Secretary Linda McMahon to place union members on administrative leave and not actually put them back to work.

“The Trump administration has shown us repeatedly that they want to illegally dismantle our congressionally created federal agency,” she said. As such, “We have no confidence that the U.S. Education Department will follow the terms of the continuing resolution or allow the employees named in October firings to return—or even keep their jobs past January.”

Fansmith is also skeptical department employees will return to their jobs.

“[The administration hasn’t] shown much willingness to follow what the law requires. So I would absolutely assume we should expect to see efforts to further reduce staffing,” he said. “They’re not hiding the fact they’re trying to do it, and they don’t have a lot of compunction about the methods they use to do so.”

A department spokesperson, however, told Inside Higher Ed that all employees—both those who were furloughed and those laid off during the shutdown—will return to work, as they remain employees of the department.

The department also pointed to a ruling from the federal district court in Northern California that blocked the reduction in force in late October, saying that under that order, all employees who received a RIF notice during the shutdown remain employees of the federal government.

Inside Higher Ed reached out to multiple Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate to ask about the concerns Gittleman and Fansmith raised. None responded prior to publication.

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November 12, 2025
$UC San Diego Sees Students’ Math Skills Plummet$

UC San Diego Sees Students’ Math Skills Plummet

Other UCs are tracking similar trends, but UC San Diego’s problem is “significantly worse,” the report states.

Laser1987/iStock/Getty Images

The number of first-year students at the University of California, San Diego, whose math skills fall below a middle school level has increased nearly 30-fold over the past five years, according to a new report from the university’s Senate–Administration Working Group on Admissions. In the 2025 fall cohort, one in eight students placed into math below a middle school level, despite having a solid math GPA.

The number of first-year students in remedial math courses at the university surged to 390 in fall 2022, up from 32 students in fall 2020. The remedial math course was designed in 2016 and only addressed missing high school math knowledge, but instructors quickly realized that many of their students had knowledge gaps that went back to middle or elementary school, the report states. For fall 2024, UC San Diego revamped its remedial math course to address middle school math gaps and introduced an additional remedial course to cover high school math. In fall 2025, 921 students enrolled in one of these two courses—11.8 percent of the incoming class.

“This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools,” the report states. “The combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.”

Within the UC system, the San Diego campus isn’t alone, but its problem is “significantly worse,” the report states. This is partly because the university has, since 2022, admitted and enrolled more students from low-income schools that saw greater COVID-era learning loss than other UC campuses. Many other UC campuses are seeing similar, though smaller, declines in student preparation. About half of UC campus math chairs responded to a survey saying that the “number of first-year students that are unable to start in college-level precalculus” increased twofold between fall 2020 and fall 2025, and the other half said the number increased threefold.

High school grade inflation is not helping the university evaluate students’ math skills, the report states. In 2024, the average high school math GPA for students in Math 2, the middle school–level remedial math course, was 3.65—an A-minus.

“At the same time our admit pool is slipping in math preparation, we see a slight improvement in their math grades from high school,” the report states. “The elimination of standardized testing together with COVID resulted in a mismatch between students’ course level/grades and their actual levels of preparation, with far-reaching implications for determining math readiness and course placement.”

The working group put forward a number of recommendations for addressing these shortcomings, including using a “math index” based on historical placement data and transcript-based variables to “predict students’ likelihood of placement into remedial math.” The group also recommended establishing feedback mechanisms with high schools and requiring math placement testing by June 1 for incoming students, among other things.

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November 12, 2025
Trump Defends Enrolling International Students

President Donald Trump stressed the value of international students in the U.S. during an interview aired on Fox News Monday.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham pressed Trump on why he wouldn’t curb international student enrollments, particularly from China. Trump told her doing so would “perhaps make people happy” but colleges and universities would “go out of business.”

“You don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country—destroy our entire university and college system—I don’t want to do that,” Trump said. He also claimed historically Black colleges and universities would “all be out of business.”

“Look, I want to be able to get along with the world,” Trump added.

Ingraham pushed back, raising concerns about Chinese spying and intellectual property theft. But Trump framed welcoming international students as an economic decision.

“We take in trillions of dollars from students,” he said. “You know, the students pay more than double when they come in from most foreign countries. I want to see our school system thrive. And it’s not that I want them, but I view it as a business.”

The annual Open Doors report from the Institute of International Education estimates the economic value of foreign students in the U.S. to be about $50 billion per year.

In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to “aggressively revoke” Chinese students’ visas and intensify vetting for Chinese visa applications. But Trump reversed course this summer and proposed the U.S. allow 600,000 Chinese students into the country, prompting backlash from some members of his base, the Associated Press reported.

The move, and Trump’s reiterated support for it on Fox this week, seem to contradict other actions his administration has taken, such as revoking international students’ visas, arresting international students for First Amendment–protected protests and ramping up scrutiny of international student visa applicants. Some campuses have experienced steep declines in international student enrollments this semester.

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November 12, 2025
Texas Gov. Orders Financial Investigation of Texas Southern

An auditor said that staffing vacancies at Texas Southern University had contributed to financial mismanagement.

Istockphoto.com/michelmond

Texas governor Greg Abbott and lieutenant governor Dan Patrick have ordered an investigation of Texas Southern University, a historically Black institution in Houston, after a state audit found evidence of financial mismanagement and bookkeeping inconsistencies, The Texas Tribune reported. Patrick also said he would look into freezing state funding to the institution.

The audit found 700 invoices, totaling $280 million, linked to contracts that were listed as expired in the institution’s database. Another 800 invoices, worth $160 million, were dated before the purchases were approved, the Tribune reported. TSU was also months late in turning in financial statements for the past two fiscal years.

The auditor attributed the errors to staffing vacancies, poor asset oversight and weak contracting processes.

TSU officials said they had already fixed some of the issues outlined in the audit.

“Texas Southern University has cooperated with the state auditor in evaluating our processes,” officials said in a statement. “The University enacted corrective measures prior to the release of the interim report, including a new procurement system. We look forward to gaining clarity and continuing to work with the state auditor to ensure transparency for all taxpayers of Texas.”

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November 12, 2025
Berkeley Law Dean Urges SCOTUS to Be “Guardrail” for Democracy

UC Berkeley School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky spoke at this week’s APLU conference.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

PHILADELPHIA—The final speech at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’ annual conference this week dissected the Trump administration’s “financial assault” on universities and urged the Supreme Court to be a check on a president whom Congress hasn’t reined in.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and a constitutional scholar, also told the attendees of the APLU meeting that their institutions should be united against the administration’s attacks on higher ed.

“The one thing we all learned on the playground is if you give in to a bully, it only makes it worse in the long term,” Chemerinsky said Tuesday, adding—to applause—that “it’s so important that institutions of higher education stand together at this moment and stand together for our shared missions.”

The speech comes after multiple prominent universities, including a few public ones, refused to sign Trump’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which asked them to give up significant autonomy in exchange for an unspecified edge in competitions for federal funds.

It also follows legal victories against the administration’s grant cancellations. Litigation by UC researchers against Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency and other federal agencies and officials has restored more than $500 million in federal research grants, which the administration cut at UCLA after the Justice Department accused it of tolerating antisemitism during a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment. Chemerinsky, who is Jewish, is representing the researchers in that litigation.

Asked for comment, a White House official told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “UC Berkely clearly needs to make some changes – violence broke out on UC Berkeley’s campus just last night and they have failed to police antisemitism by tolerating an ‘unrelenting’ steam of antisemitic harassment toward Jewish students and faculty.”

Even before the latest cuts, Chemerinsky estimated the Trump administration had already slashed close to $1 billion in funding for faculty and researchers across the UC system, a figure that he said was much higher than DOGE’s tally. The UC system didn’t confirm or deny this estimate or provide a more recent estimate Tuesday, saying the system was closed for Veterans Day.

“I think the termination of grants that we’ve seen, whether it’s to researchers and faculty or to universities, is clearly illegal,” Chemerinsky said. But when it comes to “nonrenewal of grants in the future and funding in the future,” he added, the “government has far more discretion, and there it’s going to be much harder to bring legal challenges.”

Chemerinsky also said federal funding cuts are just one of four financial vulnerabilities the administration has identified in universities: “they’re very dependent” on federal money, tuition, philanthropy and foreign students. Using his own institution as an example, he said Berkeley Law has an L.L.M., or master of laws, degree program that’s exclusively for foreign students and represents $20 million in its annual budget.

He then expressed concern about how the Supreme Court has ruled on the administration’s actions, even beyond higher ed.

“By my count, 39 matters have come to the Supreme Court since [Inauguration Day] Jan. 20, challenging actions of the Trump administration,” he said. “All are instances where the lower courts ruled against the Trump administration, and in 36 of 39, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Trump administration.”

Noting eight of the nine justices graduated from the law schools at either Harvard or Yale Universities (Amy Coney Barrett graduated from the University of Notre Dame), he said, “My optimistic self believes that the United States Supreme Court will stand up for higher education.” Chemerinsky added that since Congress hasn’t served as a check on the president, it’s up to the federal judiciary to uphold the laws and the Constitution.

Fittingly, his speech took place at a Philadelphia hotel about a 15-minute walk from where the founders adopted the Constitution. APLU said more than 1,300 people attended this week’s three-day conference.

“Ultimately, I believe the guardrail of our democracy has to be the courts and the Supreme Court,” Chemerinsky said. “If there is going to be a check on a president who has authoritarian impulses, it’s going to have to be from the restraints of the Constitution—and the only way we can enforce those is the courts.”

Chemerinsky noted that “one characteristic of every authoritarian—or would-be authoritarian—rule is the way they go after universities. What we’ve seen in the last nine and a half months is unprecedented in American history.”

He compared Trump’s actions to McCarthyism, the 1950s-era political persecution of faculty, government employees and others. But Chemerinsky pointed out that back then, “it wasn’t the president of the United States leading the attack on higher education,” and “there wasn’t the financial assault on universities.”

“But the one thing that the McCarthy era should say to all of us is that history will judge us,” he said. “Twenty, 30, 50, 75 years from now, people will look back on us the way we look at university officials in the McCarthy era, and they will judge us as to whether we capitulated or whether we had courage.”

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November 12, 2025
Former Professor on How New College of Florida Lost Its Way

Amy Reid spent more than 30 years at New College of Florida, where she served as a professor of French and the founder and director of the gender studies program. Her relatively secure employment as a tenured professor emboldened her to become one of the most outspoken critics of the conservative effort to transform NCF into a “Hillsdale College of the South,” led by then-interim president Richard Corcoran, who was hired by a swath of conservative trustees installed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023.

That same year, Reid was elected to serve as faculty representative on the Board of Trustees; she voted against Corcoran’s appointment to be the college’s permanent president and pushed back against numerous policies, including an effort by the administration to use the faculty to help enforce gendered bathroom laws.

Last month, Corcoran denied a recommendation from the New College provost that Reid be granted emerita status at the college, citing Reid’s advocacy for faculty and academic freedom, which he described as “hyperbolic alarmism and needless obstruction.” In response, the New College Alumni Association Board of Directors made Reid an honorary alum.

Since taking unpaid leave in August 2024 and then retiring a year later, Reid has brought her talents and penchant for advocacy to PEN America, a nonprofit focused on fighting education censorship and protecting press freedom.

Inside Higher Ed spoke with Reid over Zoom about her experience as the faculty representative on the New College Board of Trustees, the transformation of the public liberal arts college and expanding efforts by Florida conservatives to censor faculty speech.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Before you became faculty representative on the Board of Trustees at New College, the previous representative quit in protest. What motivated you to pursue the role and what were you hoping to do with it?

A: Things had been contentious on campus. Frankly, that’s an understatement. When the new board members were appointed that January [2023], they described their arrival on campus as a “siege”—using military language. So I began organizing with other faculty members and providing support to students so that they could respond to the rapid changes on campus, changes that included the immediate firing of our president [Patricia Okker], and then, over the coming weeks, a number of key leaders; the censoring of student speech and chalking on campus; the denial of tenure to a number of very qualified faculty.

I started holding weekly teas for students, providing them a place to ask questions and to be heard and also to have cookies. So working with my colleagues and providing support for students were the two things that I really wanted to do.

As a senior member of the faculty and as the leader of the gender studies program, I felt like I had a particular responsibility to speak up on campus. I knew that colleagues of mine who were not tenured couldn’t necessarily do that, so I tried to speak up for my community. And after Matt Lipinski resigned from the Board of Trustees and from his faculty position [after the board denied tenure to five professors], he actually reached out and asked me to stand for election as chair of the faculty, because I’d been both working in collaboration with others through the union and also because of my outspokenness as director of the gender studies program. So after talking with other colleagues, I agreed to stand for election in collaboration with two other colleagues.

Q: What was the initial reception from the board when you joined?

A: What I really remember, actually, was the real support that I had from colleagues and students and alums. So yes, there was a certain amount of tension with certain members of the Board of Trustees. There were people on the board who did reach out in friendly and professional ways—greeting me at meetings, things like that—but really I had strong support from faculty, alums and students, and that’s what mattered.

Q: Do you think you were successful in the faculty representative role?

A: That’s really a challenging question, and it depends on what metrics you want to use. I think I did a good job of raising serious questions and concerns in the trustee meetings, even if my votes were not often on the winning side. I always brought my integrity with me, and as an educator, that was really important to me. I think I was able to help rally faculty around various policy proposals that we put forth, because my job wasn’t just in the Board of Trustees, it was also in the management of the faculty, which meant multiple meetings every week about budgets and other administrative issues.

There was a lot of work there behind the scenes to support faculty, to support the curriculum and also to advocate for students in a number of ways. I know that students and faculty and alums felt that they could reach out to me about their concerns, that they knew I would listen and respond. When people spoke at Board of Trustees meetings, I paid attention and took notes on all of the people who came to speak. In that way, I think I was effective, but frankly, the votes on the board were stacked.

Q: When you resigned, you said that the “New College where you once taught no longer existed.” Was there a specific moment that tanked your faith in New College leadership?

A: It’s really not about a loss of faith in the new leadership. Richard Corcoran came in with a set of ideas about how he wanted to change the campus, to change what one trustee called the “hormonal and political balance on campus.” And Corcoran followed through on that. I can point first to the firing of valuable and dedicated campus leaders, including President Patricia Okker, the dean of diversity, the campus research librarian. [I can also point to] the denial of tenure to six very qualified and effective faculty, the chasing away of over 30 percent of the faculty and about 100 students—and that’s a real record for the first eight months of this administration.

Then you have the painting over of student art on campus, the replacement of grass with Astroturf and the plowing down of hundreds of trees along the bay front. You have the wasting of millions of dollars of state funds on bloated administrative salaries and portable dorms that were uninhabitable within three months due to mold. You have the abolishing of the gender studies program in the summer of 2023, the erasure of our budget, our eviction from our campus office in December of 2023. The imposition of a rigid and limited core curriculum in spring of 2024. The withholding of diplomas from a cohort of students in May 2024, the wholesale destruction of the student-led gender and diversity center in August 2024. That was a student-led space with a collection of books that had been curated by students for over 30 years, all thrown in the dumpster.

So not one moment, but a lot. But what I still have faith in, even today, is the determination of students and alums to pursue an education that embodies academic freedom, which I understand is the right of students to pursue an education free from government censorship. And also, I have great faith in those faculty who are remaining, who support the New College academic mission and who are doing their best day in and day out to support our students.

Q: Were you surprised when Corcoran denied the dean’s recommendation to grant you emerita status?

A: Not really. I’d say it’s par for the course, but I was surprised that he was so up front about his reasons. In his statement, he noted that despite my record of achievement as a teacher and a researcher, it was my advocacy for the college—my opposition to him—that was the problem. So now he’s on the record explicitly as punishing speech, and that is stunning.

What happened to me is just one small thing, but it reflects a pattern of censorship on the campus that needs to be called out. But more importantly at this moment, I really want to thank my colleagues who nominated me for emeritus status and the New College alums who adopted me as one of their own. That’s meaningful, and I am very grateful.

Q: As a reporter, I spend a lot of time reading and writing bad news, but I’m seeing the same types of attacks on faculty speech and academic freedom that happened at New College occur at other institutions, in Florida and elsewhere. Would you say these current attacks on faculty speech are unprecedented?

A: A lot of people have talked about this as unprecedented, but what I see is the culmination of a pattern of censorship we’ve seen playing out at state levels across the country. In Florida, in 2022, they passed House Bill 233, which allows or encourages students to surreptitiously record faculty if they intend to file a complaint against them.

Since then, really, the state has been tightening a gag around faculty speech in myriad ways. Just in the past couple of months, we’ve seen a number of faculty sanctioned—even one emeritus professor at [University of Florida] lost his status based on complaints about his social media posts. So what’s happening now could be cast as unprecedented, but yet, it’s part of this pattern we see playing out now, not just in Florida, but across the country, where some 50 faculty members have been sanctioned or fired because of their speech or social media posts since the start of September.

Since 2021, PEN America has been actively tracking efforts to censor speech in college and university classrooms across the country, and we’ve seen a real rise in the number of bills introduced to censor speech … and in the numbers that are being passed; 2025 was really a banner year for censorship in higher education in this country. There were a record number of gag orders passed across the country—10 of them, 10 bills that explicitly limit what can be said in college and university classrooms.

And then there are other restrictions designed to chill faculty speech—restrictions on tenure or curricular control bills, and let’s also remember the bills that were introduced or passed to limit student protests on campus. All of those things are designed to make people afraid to speak up and to question things on campus. That’s not healthy for our education system, and it’s not healthy for our democracy. Currently, about 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in a state that has at least one state-level law restricting classroom speech at the college and university level. Is that something we’re OK with as a country? Do we really think that our First Amendment rights are that fungible?

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November 12, 2025
Ken Bain Changed College Teaching Forever
Is it possible for someone you’ve never met to be a mentor?

I don’t know how else to describe Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do, a book that transformed not just my teaching, but my entire life.

Ken Bain passed away on Oct. 10. I first learned this news on LinkedIn from Jim Lang, who did know and was directly mentored by Ken Bain and, like the several dozen folks who offered comments on his passing—and also me—whose life and work were profoundly affected by Ken Bain’s work.

(I also recommend checking out this episode of Bonni Stachowiak’s Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, which remembers Ken Bain and provides links to his multiple appearances on the show.)

I read an advance copy of What The Best College Teachers Do sometime in early 2004 in a period where I was starting to question the folklore of teaching I had absorbed as a student and graduate assistant, and it immediately changed how I thought about my own work, kicking off a process of consideration and experimentation around teaching writing that continues to this day.

What the Best College Teachers Do reflects more than a decade of study and is entirely based in observations of teaching, teaching materials, student responses and reflections, interviews and other sources, filtered through various lenses (history, literary analysis, sociology, ethnography, investigative journalism) to draw both big conclusions about not just what teachers do, but how they think, how they relate to students, how they view their work and how they evolve their approaches.

The method is relentlessly qualitative rather than quantitative, and it can be straightforwardly adapted to one’s own work.

At least that’s how I used the book. Looking through some of the text for the first time in years, I can see significant strands of What the Best College Teachers Do DNA in my writing about the writer’s practice. The lens of “doing” as the central feature of any work has been part of my personal framework for so long that I almost lost its origin, but there it is.

One of my very first posts at Inside Higher Ed, back before I even had my own section and was merely guesting at Oronte Churm’s joint, was on What the Best College Teachers Do.

The book is more than 20 years old, but its framing questions are evergreen and even more relevant in this AI age. The book asks and answers the following questions:
1. What do the best teachers know and understand?
2. How do they prepare to teach?
3. What do they expect of their students?
4. What do they do when they teach?
5. How do they treat students?
6. How do they check their progress and evaluate their efforts?
The book helpfully encapsulates the study’s findings under these categories, and as bullet points of good teaching practice they are spot-on. But I am also here to testify that they are not a substitute for the full experience of reading What the Best College Teachers Do, because the act of reading the specific illustrations and examples that gave rise to these findings allows for the individual to reflect on their own practices relative to others.

The first thing I did after reading and absorbing What the Best College Teachers Do was change my attendance policy to no longer punish students based on a maximum number of absences. I’d engaged in this practice because it had been handed down as conventional wisdom: If you don’t police student attendance, they won’t show up. Bain’s best teachers challenged this conventional wisdom.

The positive effects were immediate. I stepped up my game in terms of making sure class was viewed by students as productive and necessary. My mood improved, as I no longer stewed over students who were pushing their luck in terms of absences, daring me to dock their overall semester grade.

Attendance went up! I asked students about this, and they said that when a class says you “get four absences” they were treating that as a kind of permission (or even encouragement) to go ahead and miss four classes. Student agency and self-responsibility increased. If they missed a class, they knew what they had to do, and it didn’t involve me.

The experiments continued, leading ultimately to the writer’s practice and my embrace of alternative assessment, developments that made me a much more effective instructor and now, improbably, someone invited to colleges and universities to share his expertise on these subjects.

It would not have happened without the work and mentorship of Ken Bain, mentorship I experienced entirely through reading his book.

I worry that mentorship is going to be further eroded by AI, particularly if entry-level jobs with their apprenticeship tasks are now completed through automation, rather than by working with other, more experienced humans. The enthusiasm for letting large language models compress texts into summaries rather than reading the full work of another unique intelligence is also a threat.

My conviction that our way forward through the challenge of AI is rooted in deeply examining the experiences of learning and fostering those experiences for students only grows stronger by the day. What the Best College Teachers Do is experiences all the way down, a book of observations conveyed in such a way that allows us to make use of them, literally, in what we do.

A great man. A great mentor. Ken Bain’s work will live on through the many pedagogues he’s inspired.
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November 12, 2025