Tag: News

2025 Was a Bad Year for College Presidents. Will 2026 Be Better?

Last year turned out to be a tumultuous one for higher education, with institutions buffeted by the Trump administration’s sweeping federal research cuts, unprecedented intrusion into classrooms and relentless crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and speech rights.

In response, campus leaders engaged with lawmakers behind closed doors, spent heavily on lobbying and co-signed higher education associations’ efforts to fight government policies that threatened academic freedom and their institutional missions. But few objected publicly. For the most part, college presidents watched in silence.

Experts say that’s not surprising; university leaders are caught in a unique moment—squeezed between faculty and students demanding action and boards and lawmakers intent on punishing those who speak up.

“Unique challenges facing presidents included that difficult balance between what campus constituents wanted for presidents to say and the desires of trustees to hold very different positions, either based on pressures from legislatures or their own political beliefs,” said Teresa Valerio Parrot, principal of TVP Communications, a sector-focused public relations firm. “Often presidents found themselves in this very interesting position of trying to please internal audiences and also meet the expectations of their bosses when they weren’t congruent.”

Here’s a look at how college presidents navigated 2025—and what observers expect this year to look like for them.

Caught Unprepared

Experts said most presidents were caught off guard by the onslaught of challenges unleashed by the federal government.

Brian Rosenberg, president emeritus of Macalester College and a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Inside Higher Ed that last year was “traumatizing” for campus leaders who struggled “to not get snowed under by all of the challenges they faced.”

Michael Harris, a professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University, argued that presidents had a “failure of imagination” over realizing “how damaging” policy changes would be under Trump 2.0 as the federal government shifted from a trusted partner to attack mode.

“Institutions were still trying to figure out how to navigate all the typical challenges that higher education had been facing before 2025. Those didn’t go away, but then you add on to it the federal landscape changing virtually overnight and continually changing,” Harris said. “When you’re trying to make decisions by which judge has frozen which policy or what might be coming out next, or a Dear Colleague letter that doesn’t match what the logical legal interpretation would be, that’s a challenging environment for anybody, much less a college president.”

At the same time, many leaders were also navigating financial woes, an upended athletics landscape and protests against ICE raids and international student visa crackdowns.

Lost Jobs, Stymied Searches

Institutions and individual presidents alike were caught in the political crosshairs in 2025, leading to a litany of federal and state investigations, resignations and the occasional legal showdown.

Multiple presidents targeted by federal or state lawmakers stepped down in 2025, including Michael Schill at Northwestern University and Jim Ryan at the University of Virginia. Both had drawn scrutiny from the federal government: Schill for his handling of pro-Palestinian protests and Ryan for allegedly failing to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs fast enough. Others, like Mark Welsh at Texas A&M University, were pushed out by pressure from state politicians.

Welsh was caught in a flap between Melissa McCoul, an English instructor, and a student in her children’s literature class who objected to the professor’s statement that there are more than two genders, citing an executive order from President Trump that recognizes gender only as male and female. Welsh initially resisted firing McCoul until the student tagged a Republican lawmaker, who published a video of the incident, ratcheting up pressure on both Welsh and McCoul. Ultimately, Welsh fired McCoul as the controversy swirled and other Texas politicians piled on.

Although Welsh gave state lawmakers what they wanted, it was too late to save his job.

He resigned under pressure and was replaced by interim president Tommy Williams, a former Republican lawmaker. In his first few months on the job, Williams sparked controversy after Texas A&M censored a philosophy course; officials told the professor he could not teach Plato in a class on contemporary moral problems because it conflicted with university restrictions on topics of race, gender and sexuality. (Williams has since noted the university is not “banning Plato altogether.”)

More recently, Texas A&M canceled a graduate ethics class after a professor said it would be impossible to specify the precise timing or manner in which topics of race, gender and sexuality would arise.

Texas A&M did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

Judith Wilde, a research professor at George Mason University who studies presidential searches and contracts, wrote by email that 2025 had “unusually high” turnover both at the presidential level and among other high-ranking academic leaders. She noted that amid the current political volatility, “some institutions seem to be using an interim leader to buy time as they consider their political exposure as well as try to avoid committing to a long-term hire.”

Similarly, Rosenberg pointed to the mid-2024 elevation of Harvard University president Alan Garber from interim to permanent status as an example of a college making a relatively safe choice and sidestepping the internal and external criticism that would inevitably accompany an executive hire. He also noted that Columbia University recently extended its presidential search.

“Nobody wants to do a search right now, particularly at these elite privates, because of the kind of scrutiny it will draw and the difficulty of hiring the right kind of person,” Rosenberg said.

Who Gets to Be a President?

Last year also saw significant presidential hiring drama, such as when the Florida Board of Governors rejected Santa Ono as the next president of the University of Florida, even though the institution’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously to select him as their next leader. The FLBOG largely shot down Ono’s selection over concerns about his past support of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which he unsuccessfully sought to downplay.

Wilde said that reflects a shift not only in who is being hired but also in the fact that “the search itself is no longer the deciding factor in choosing a president” as boards lean into performative public vetting. Now “whether the president can survive the ideological gauntlet” is what matters most in hiring, she said.

She suspects such factors may prevent traditional academics from applying for presidencies.

At UVA, the Board of Visitors tapped an internal candidate, business dean Scott Beardsley, who reportedly scrubbed multiple references to DEI initiatives from his résumé during the search process. (Critics have also accused Beardsley of inflating his academic profile and research output.)

Experts say such instances reflect both sector hiring challenges and the changing nature of the presidency.

“When you have a rash of poor hires, failed searches, failed presidencies, at some point we have to acknowledge that’s not individual failures, it’s systemic failure,” Harris said. “I think we need to acknowledge we have systemic failures in how we hire, recruit, retain, reward and support presidents. Also, the job is changing, insofar as presidents have to be more politically savvy. It’s always been a part of the job, but I feel like now that is even more so the case.”

Rosenberg agreed that a president’s political affiliation matters more than ever, especially in red states like Florida and Texas, which have hired numerous former lawmakers to lead higher ed institutions.

“It’s never been irrelevant, certainly at public institutions, but in places like Florida and in Texas, we’re basically seeing college presidents being chosen from current or former politicians. So political affiliation is important in public institutions in ways that it has never been before,” Rosenberg said.

The Year Ahead

Experts project another challenging year for college presidents owing to a difficult policy environment. But they also note a few points of optimism that presidents can build on in 2026.

Valerio Parrot said that one win from 2025 was that “presidents were able to find coalitions” and to network with other leaders in similar positions, using one another as sounding boards. Such relationships, she said, helped guide them through moments of political uncertainty. Valerio Parrot also pointed to the role higher ed associations played in pushing back on federal overreach.

Rosenberg noted Harvard’s legal victory against the Trump administration after it tried to strip the university of federal research funding, among other actions.

He wants to see more college presidents take a stand and exhibit moral courage.

“I think what they could learn is that not resisting authoritarian growth doesn’t stop it. It enables it,” he said. “You would have thought that people would have learned that from history, but apparently we have not. If you allow authoritarians to continue to expand their power without pushback, they will expand that even more. You do that long enough, and sooner or later you reach a point where you can’t push back. I think the lesson is that duck and cover isn’t working.”

Valerio Parrot urged presidents to ask themselves three questions when considering whether to issue statements: “Why them? Why now? And what is the takeaway from what they’re sharing?” If presidents choose to speak up, she argued, they need to do so in a way that does more than add noise.

While speaking up is perilous, Harris argued it’s the kind of decision presidents must weigh and strike the right balance in execution.

“This is where I think presidents are in a no-win situation. If they spoke out as forcefully as their faculty wanted, they would be in an untenable position,” he said. “At the same time, if you’re not willing to advocate for the core values of your institution, then what are you doing at the top?”

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January 16, 2026
Capstone Course Helps Students Launch Ventures

Students often learn about entrepreneurship without a clear path to turn their ideas into a viable business. The University of Dayton’s capstone course gives them that path.

Launched in fall 2024, Flyer Nest guides students to develop scalable business ideas they can continue after graduation.

Housed in UD’s School of Business Administration, Flyer Nest is part of the university’s entrepreneurship program and teaches students not just how to launch companies but also how to design ventures that solve real problems and benefit their communities.

To date, Flyer Nest has served 12 teams totaling about 70 students, with each team developing a single business venture. Two teams have continued their ventures beyond the course, and six new teams began this semester.

Vince Lewis, associate vice president for entrepreneurial initiatives at UD, said all students in the capstone course end the semester not just with a classroom project but with a proposal they can submit for funding.

“There is a bigger learning outcome than just the start-up,” Lewis said. “Students gain better confidence in actually being able to execute an entrepreneurial venture.”

He added that two students from a continuing team raised about $400,000 to fund their venture aimed at improving helmet safety for football players.

“That’s a valuable, real-world opportunity,” Lewis said. “Students build a business case and then present it to business owners, investors and entrepreneurs at the end of the semester to get feedback.”

“It really does provide a win for students actively pursuing start-ups,” he added.

The approach: The capstone course partners with the Ohio Entrepreneurial Services Provider program and the Ohio Third Frontier Technology Validation and Start-Up Fund (TVSF) to provide critical resources to Flyer Nest teams, including mentorship and connections to potential investors.

Lewis said students build their projects around technologies they find in a database of innovations available for licensing from research labs.

“Scientists and engineers develop [the technologies], but they aren’t focused on commercializing them,” said Lewis. He added that Flyer Nest teams work together to turn these technologies into solutions for real-world problems, from disease detection to health literacy for Black Americans.

Lewis said the team from Flyer Nest’s inaugural cohort focused on helmet safety secured $200,000 in state funding through TVSF, then secured the rest from new-venture competitions and grants.

The project leveraged the students’ football backgrounds and technology originally designed for hazmat suits to create a sensor embedded in helmet chin straps, he said.

“If you integrate Bluetooth and communications already being added into helmets, it can alert coaches or someone on the sideline that a chin strap isn’t tight, potentially preventing head injuries,” said Lewis.

He added that another team from the capstone course is using technology originally designed to detect fatigued pilots to assist truck drivers. The students are currently partnering with three local trucking companies interested in pursuing the venture with them.

What’s next: Lewis said next steps involve expanding Flyer Nest beyond business and entrepreneurship majors, particularly pulling students from engineering, design, communications and other disciplines.

He also said he wants to create a year-round venture studio where students can continue developing their ideas after the semester ends.

For other institutions interested in creating an experiential course like Flyer Nest, Lewis said it’s essential that they have strong institutional commitment and an engaged community partner embedded in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“The community partners are what makes it work,” Lewis said. “Because they have this vast network of people they can bring in and integrate into the course to help us execute.”

Ultimately, Lewis said, running a capstone course like Flyer Nest requires dedication and a willingness to navigate the uncertainty that comes with real-world learning.

“It’s a significant lift in terms of effort, because there’s a little ambiguity when you’re going into it,” he said. “This experiential, real-world opportunity for students is a really big commitment.”

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January 16, 2026
Appeals Court Reverses Order to Release Khalil

Protesters gathered in Houston in June to oppose President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto via Getty Images

An appeals court has reversed the decision to release from custody Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist who was detained by immigration officials for several months last year, The Guardian and other outlets reported Thursday.

The court dismissed the lawsuit challenging his arrest in a 2-to-1 ruling, on the grounds that the lower court that ordered his release did not have the jurisdiction to do so. Circuit judges Thomas Hardiman, a George W. Bush appointee, and Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, argued that the petition for his release should have been handled in his eventual immigration hearing.

“The scheme Congress enacted governing immigration proceedings provides Khalil a meaningful forum in which to raise his claims later on—in a petition for review of a final order of removal,” they wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, however, Judge Arianna J. Freeman, a Biden appointee, argued that it was appropriate for Khalil to seek faster relief in federal court, as his detainment was causing “irreparable injury.”

“Today’s ruling is deeply disappointing, but it does not break our resolve. The door may have been opened for potential re-detainment down the line, but it has not closed our commitment to Palestine and to justice and accountability,” Khalil said in a statement. ”I will continue to fight, through every legal avenue and with every ounce of determination, until my rights, and the rights of others like me, are fully protected.”

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January 16, 2026
Former Emporia State Pres. to “Find Waste” at Kansas Colleges

Last week, Kansas legislative leaders met in a Statehouse committee room with a broad agenda item—to approve a higher ed budget consultant.

Neither the name nor proposed pay for this consultant was listed. The person Republican leaders were planning to hire didn’t become clear until House Speaker Dan Hawkins began talking at the meeting.

“We have an opportunity,” Hawkins told fellow members of the Legislative Coordinating Council, according to a video the Legislature posted. “One of the presidents of a university has retired. He has intimate insight into the higher ed budget arena. And, certainly, as everybody knows, we have to be very careful and prudent with the dollars in our budget.”

“We really need to cut $200 million from our budget,” Hawkins said, adding that the consultant would help “find efficiencies—find any waste that we can find.”

Within eight minutes—including brief objections from Democratic leaders in the room, one of whom said he was relying on “context clues” to guess whom the hiree would be—the lawmakers voted 5 to 2 to give Hawkins the power to hire this consultant. And, as The Kansas Reflector confirmed after the meeting, Hawkins is indeed planning to hire Ken Hush, who retired as president of Emporia State University last month, at a rate of $10,000 per month. Hush’s leadership of his own institution was controversial, including budget problems, tenured faculty layoffs and enrollment declines.

Tom Day, Kansas’s director of legislative administrative services, told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “We are currently in communication with Mr. Hush putting a contract together,” and there are no documents showing what his “scope of work” will be. But Day said the payment will be “$50,000, over a 5-month period.” Hawkins gets to sign off on the final contract.

Republicans’ hiring of Hush, who the Reflector noted is Hawkins’s former fraternity brother, to give advice on cutting other universities’ budgets has elicited criticism from those who say he wasn’t good at running one institution and suggest he’s benefiting from his political connection.

“Ken Hush’s hiring was a sole-source backroom deal to give an old frat brother—who has a proven track record of being unable to run a university—a job,” Dinah Sykes, leader of the Senate Democrats, said in a statement.

Under Hush’s leadership, Emporia State garnered national controversy after it laid off tenured faculty, saw a 12.5 percent enrollment plunge the next academic year and then defended its general counsel for writing a bill to eliminate tenure protections across public institutions statewide. The top administrator of the Kansas Board of Regents accused the university of breaking the board’s policy requiring preapproval of legislative proposals.

(Emporia State spokesperson Gwen Larson said last year that its top lawyer’s “submission of this bill” was “a surprise to the university,” but defended his right to submit it to lawmakers. Hush had appeared to ask legislators to support such legislation a week before it appeared. The bill failed.)

A lawsuit filed against Emporia State officials during Hush’s presidency also continues, despite his departure.

In 2022, Emporia State abruptly told 33 employees—30 of whom were faculty members, 23 of them tenured professors—they were losing their jobs. The Board of Regents approved these layoffs under a policy that cited “extreme financial pressures” and declared, “Any state university employee, including a tenured faculty member, may be suspended, dismissed, or terminated.” Eleven tenured professors sued, saying they weren’t given due process.

In addition, the American Association of University Professors placed Emporia State’s administration on its censure list and condemned it for “unilaterally terminating the appointments of 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty members.” Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia Conference of the AAUP, was one of the three investigative committee members who wrote that report.

“If the Kansas Republican lawmakers want to cut spending and gut higher education, they found their man in Ken Hush,” Boedy said. “He did exactly that at Emporia State by firing many a professor and upending the school in many ways.”

Boedy added, “The ways in which Mr. Hush went about decimating Emporia State—if that’s to be replicated across the entire state, I would not want to be a student or professor in Kansas anymore.”

But Larson, the university spokesperson, said this week that Emporia State “began to show material results of its turnaround” last fall. Among other things, she said, it eliminated a $19 million deficit, reduced deferred maintenance by 20 percent, saw enrollment rise 6 percent and went from a negative to a stable Moody’s rating.

The Reflector reported that the Legislature gave the university $18 million in total “bailouts” in 2023 and 2024 as enrollment declined. Upon his retirement, Hush announced he was donating about $1.4 million, equivalent to the last four years of his salary, to the university.

It’s unclear what kind of advice Emporia State’s former president will give lawmakers and what Republican lawmakers are looking to cut from universities. But their comments may give a clue.

‘Questionable Spending’

During last week’s meeting, Senate president Ty Masterson expressed a general need to cut costs, partly because of the Legislature’s tax cuts.

“All the stimulus money that happened through COVID … it’s now all dried up, it’s all gone,” Masterson said. “So we have to manage our budget back down to something that is normal. We’re also in a climate where some of the tax cuts that we were able to get through are being implemented, so I think it would be wise to bring on a consultant in that area.”

But Blake Carpenter, the House speaker pro tem, said he’s targeting what he referred to as “questionable spending.” The Republican said he and his staff found around $100 million worth of this spending over the legislative interim period.

Carpenter’s definition of questionable spending includes subjects conservatives have railed against. He listed just three examples: “$75,000 in travel reimbursements to a vanilla bean manufacturing tour guide in Africa,” “$96,000 to a nutritionist guru specializing in vegan cookbooks” and “$111,000 to a social justice headhunting firm specializing in placing executives into leadership positions in nonprofits.”

“If we’re able to find about $100 million just on our own over the interim, with my staff and I looking through these line items, then I think it makes a lot of sense for us to hire an executive who has run one of these universities,” he said. “They know how they operate … I think the $100 million at this point is scratching the surface and we need to continue to dig.”

(Carpenter, Masterson and Hawkins didn’t respond to requests for comment this week. Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach Hush.)

Sykes, the Senate Democratic leader, objected during the meeting to hiring a consultant. “All the talk we have about finding efficiency in government … I think we keep growing government … and to pay $10,000 a month,” she said.

“The first that I saw of this was when it was on the agenda item last night,” Sykes said.

She continued her denunciation in a statement following the meeting. “Republicans’ hiring of Ken Hush is a part of a larger problem with the Legislative Coordinating Council of issuing no-bid contracts,” she said, adding that Republicans on that council “have been dealing out sole-source contracts left and right, acting like kids in a candy store.” She said Hush’s Emporia State presidency “was fraught with failures.”

“If Hush can’t even create a proper plan for the ‘realignment’ of a single university, how could he ever properly identify areas of all of the state’s universities’ budgets to be cut?” Sykes asked.

Mallory Bishop, past president of the Emporia State Faculty Senate, said Hush’s actions at the university shouldn’t be replicated across the state now because it’s too early to tell whether they turned the institution around.

“He just ended his tenure a month ago,” said Bishop, a clinical instructor and program director at Emporia State.

“Was it triage or was it just severing limbs?” she said. “I don’t know.”

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January 16, 2026
Following Texas, Florida Drops ABA Oversight of Lawyers

Florida is now the second state to drop its requirement that lawyers in the state hold a degree from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association, The Tallahassee Democrat reported Thursday.

The Florida Supreme Court, which sets law-licensure requirements, said the decision is designed to open the door for more law school accreditors.

“The rule changes create the opportunity for additional entities to carry out an accrediting and gatekeeping function on behalf of the Court,” the Jan. 15 opinion read. “The Court’s goal is to promote access to high-quality, affordable legal education in law schools that are committed to the free exchange of ideas and to the principle of nondiscrimination.”

The Texas Supreme Court made a similar decision last week, and Ohio and Tennessee’s high courts are also considering minimizing the ABA’s oversight of lawyers in their states.

Republicans, including Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, who called the ABA “a captured, far-left organization,” have targeted the ABA, which accredits the vast majority of law schools in the country, as part of a broader crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Last year, the ABA suspended its DEI standards in response to conservative criticism.

On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis praised the state Supreme Court’s decision as a “Good move” in a post on X. “The (highly partisan) ABA should not be a gatekeeper for legal education or the legal profession.”

For now, though, a new law school accreditor has yet to emerge. And experts say it’s unlikely most law schools will abandon their ABA accreditation any time soon, because it’s created reliable professional standards that make it easier for lawyers to practice in multiple states.

Justice Jorge Labarga, the only dissenting vote in the Florida opinion and the only justice who wasn’t appointed by DeSantis, cautioned that a new law school accreditor would have a tough time rivaling the ABA.

“[The ABA] has cultivated unmatched proficiency in dealing with Florida law-school-specific issues that would require decades for any successor to develop,” he wrote in his dissent. “Refinements can always be made. However, replacing an established entity with an unknown alternative is detrimental in the context of disputes.”

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January 16, 2026
ED Details Higher Ed Staff to Labor Department

The affected staff work in the higher education division at ED’s Office of Postsecondary Education.

J. David Ake/Getty Images

Some staff at the Education Department will next week start working at the Labor Department, which is set to take over running a number of higher ed grant programs.

Under an interagency agreement signed last year, ED agreed to outsource most of its higher education programs, which include grants that support student success and historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions. ED officials have said outsourcing the grant programs will help to “streamline bureaucracy.” The agreements with Labor and other federal agencies are also part of a broader effort to shut down ED. Critics have questioned the legality of the agreements and the effectiveness of moving the programs to other agencies.

Labor will now essentially administer the grant programs, while ED will continue to set the budget, criteria and priorities for the grant programs and manage hiring and other HR processes, among other activities. ED said in the news release Thursday that grant recipients in the higher ed programs will transition to Labor’s grant and payment management system, “following the detail.” Both agencies will provide grantees with additional guidance.

“We are proud to begin implementing this historic partnership that will not only create a better coordinated federal approach to postsecondary education and workforce development, but will also ensure that students pursuing higher education pursue programs aligned with their career goals and workforce needs,” Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education David Barker said in a statement.

The staff detail announced Thursday affects those who work in the Higher Education Programs Division of ED’s Office of Postsecondary Education.

Rachel Gittleman, president of the union that represents ED employees, said in a statement that moving the federal workers and grant programs was “an unnecessary, unlawful move that will create confusion for grantees and chaos for staff.”

“After gutting the Education Department, the administration is now asking an overworked skeleton crew to manage a risky transfer to an agency with no educational expertise, weakening oversight and increasing the risk of fraud, waste, and abuse,” she added. “This is not efficiency—it’s an insult to the tens of millions of students who rely on the Education Department to protect their access to a quality education and to the taxpayers who rely on federal workers to ensure their money is not wasted.”

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January 16, 2026
Reflections of a Former Presidential Spouse (opinion)
In August, Denise A. Battles stepped down after 10-plus years as president of the State University of New York at Geneseo to take a position with the SUNY system, which meant that my term as her presidential spouse came to an expected but abrupt end. I have since spent a great deal of time musing about my decade in that role, the joys and heartbreaks, the triumphs and the tragedies, and even the title … First Man? First Dude? It’s an odd occupation, since nationwide the job description is either nonexistent or as varied as the institutions where spouses and partners serve. My purpose here is to offer a few observations, derived from my experiences and those of my peers, and also humbly offer some advice to present and future executive spouses and partners.

Denise and I met at our new faculty orientation, which seems like a lifetime ago, and grew up together as academics. She chose administration early on, and I taught for decades before giving up faculty status to become a full-time fellowship director. As she advanced from dean to provost to president, my role as the administrative “trailing” spouse altered in both subtle and overt ways at each new institution, but the core was always rooted in our dedication to the universities we served and to each other. We were fortunate to always be employed at the same university and offered ourselves to search committees as a package deal. Many of my peers gave up careers to serve as dedicated presidential spouses and partners or have positions in business or with outside organizations. For some, their ties to the institution come down to an occasional student play or alumni meet-and-greet, a few calendar events to plan and dress for. Others appear on campus virtually every day, though doing so can be fraught with peril. What’s the old saw? Why do presidents get fired? Houses and spouses (cue laughter).

There’s a kind of isolation that comes with being a presidential spouse or partner, as virtually everyone at the institution or the surrounding community seems to either work in some way for the president or chancellor or is related to or knows someone who does. That reality leaves a distance, an unspoken space many feel from campus and community acquaintances and even those considered friends. I often discussed this condition with other board members of the spouses-and-partners group that is affiliated with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and for which I served for over a decade. Many feel a sense of remoteness even with the myriad social outlets that come with the role—entertaining, dinners, social and athletic events, fine arts performances, donor visits, local clubs and organizations. The pandemic left many of us questioning the roles we played as presidential spouses and partners and what the future would bring for our ghostly campuses, overworked partners and largely absent student body. In many ways, that anxiety has not much changed.

My wife and I were lucky enough to live in a stately historic presidential residence on Main Street in a quaint western New York village, mere steps from the campus. We would often sit on the front porch and greet the students and villagers, even the mayor, walking by … Pleasant as it was, we never forgot we were living in someone else’s house. I still work remotely with fellowships on a phased retirement plan for the college and recently have found myself missing the bustle of the campus and community, attending campus events, and even wearing the golden name badge signifying I was part of the campus team.

During Denise’s presidency, I would see her mostly only at the end of the day, after she had been dealing with perhaps a sticky personnel matter or one of the myriad other pressing issues on campus, and when she was still digesting the implications and finding solutions. We followed a strict code of confidentiality and professionalism about discussing these matters, which meant I was often not privy to what may have been happening. I made it a point in casual conversation with the campus and village community to refer to Denise as “the president,” to subtly suggest that I was not some kind of informational conduit and also that I knew little. After a while, folks stopped asking.

Most presidential spouses and partners ache to do more to help their loved ones but know that unconditional support is the best strategy. They are not vice presidents or back-door conduits, as there are plenty of people on campus to serve those functions. Of course, it is true that university chancellors and presidents are well compensated for their work, but the grind offers little respite and few moments for a personal life or chances to escape the endless crises. The average life of a college presidency has shrunk to a mere 5.9 years due to the strain. Faculty, staff and, yes, administrators are being asked to do more, even as they feel anxiety about what the future will bring for their families and positions. As perhaps never before, our campuses must find a unity of purpose to face the fallout from domestic politics and world events.

Presidential partners often face unexpected challenges when crises arise, as they may become targets for disgruntled and mentally unstable individuals from the campus and community, an unsettling and frightening reality that I unfortunately experienced too many times. Early on, I made the decision to eschew social media entirely, as the viciousness and ignorance were both unrelenting and entirely predictable. These potential grim truths are features of the job, but in the absence of some kind of orientation or guidebook, many partners are left to deal with these situations alone without anyone to confide in but their harried presidents, who can commiserate but may be legally and ethically barred from reciprocating.

Like many presidential couples, my wife and I have been together day in and day out, pretty much continuously, since we began in academia. But “together” is a bit of a misstatement, as even though we were under the same roof, the work never ended, the email only increased and, if possible, our time together talking as a couple about the everyday things and our future was ever more brief. That reality is echoed in stories I hear from my spousal and partner colleagues across the nation—presidential relationships are being tested as never before.

So, here’s my advice to present and future presidential partners, humbly offered and born from 10 years on the job. I could list 20 more points, but these seem like the most important ones.
1. Make the role your own. Since there is no template, you can choose what to be or not to be, regardless of what a predecessor may have been or done. Garden club membership is not required, and you can miss that regular season game. Take your time before committing and remember that you can always say no.
2. Find supporters and confidants among your spouse and partner peers. Family and friends are often well meaning, but, as with many occupations, cannot really understand what you are going through. AASCU’s Spouse and Partner Program offers a safe and confidential circle of fellow travelers who are more than willing to lend an ear and offer their own experiences to help you through your struggles as you help them through theirs. I recommend membership highly.
3. Be there for your president or chancellor. Listen, but don’t try to fix anything. Doing so can be the hardest part of the job. Sometimes they just need to vent, especially during the worst of times—and if they seem upset or a bit hostile, usually it’s not about you. You are not an administrator; no one hired you to advise, and doing so may make things worse. They are privy to information that may frankly be none of your business, until it is, and if so, they will tell you what you need to know.
In writing this piece, I don’t seek pity or sympathy for spouses and partners. I fully acknowledge the privileges that my position as a presidential spouse entailed and feel a deep sense of gratitude for having been given the opportunity to serve the university and the community. I have spent my entire working career in academia as an educator and, with this essay, seek only to inform the larger academic community as to the nature of the job and counsel those who may assume the role at some point. Presidential spouses and partners will continue to live in a strange kind of uncertainty as they struggle to support their presidents and chancellors, often while surrounded by acquaintances but still largely alone, and a bit uncertain as to what their roles truly require.

Michael Mills is director of national fellowships and scholarships at the State University of New York at Geneseo.
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January 16, 2026
Students Should Insure an Investment as Important as College

To the editor:

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the recent opinion essay “Degrees of Uncertainty” (Dec. 15, 2025). The author raises important questions about rising college costs, institutional incentives and the risks of oversimplifying complex financial challenges facing students and families.  We are pleased that she recognizes Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs) help address affordability challenges and provide many benefits for students and colleges.

However, the author questions whether students should benefit from a guarantee that their college degree will be economically valuable.

LRAPs are, at their core, student loan insurance. It can be scary to borrow large student loans to finance an expensive college degree. There is a market failure, however, every time a student does not attend their preferred college, study their preferred major or pursue their preferred career because they are afraid of student loans. Students should be free to pursue their passions—not forced into second-best choices because of the cost of the degree or the prospect of a lower income in the future.

Society also loses out—especially if the lower-income career a student wants to pursue is a human service profession, such as education, where they will invest in improving the lives of others.

Most purchases come with a warranty or guarantee. Why should college be different? Colleges promise to provide value to students. We applaud those colleges and universities that stand behind that promise with a financial guarantee.

As consumers, we routinely insure our biggest risks and largest purchases. We insure our homes, cars, boats and lives—and even our pets. Why shouldn’t we insure an expensive investment in college?

In any class, we can expect some students will earn less than their peers. It is reasonable for students to fear being among that group. An individual student cannot diversify that risk. That is the function of insurance.

LRAPs spread the risk across many students, just as insurance does with other familiar risks. Most drivers can’t protect themselves from the chance of being in a car accident and facing large repair and medical expenses. Insurance spreads that risk, turning a small chance of a very large cost into a small premium that protects against that loss.

LRAPs serve the same function for students—without the cost—because colleges cover the program, giving students peace of mind and the freedom to attend their preferred college and pursue their passions.

By doing this, LRAPs are a tool that can help colleges increase enrollment and revenue. This additional revenue can be invaluable at a time when colleges face many structural challenges—from regulatory changes to the disruption of AI to declining enrollment caused by the demographic cliff.

LRAPs provide meaningful protection to students while maintaining clear incentives to focus on completion, career preparation and postgraduation outcomes.

Peter Samuelson is president and founder at Ardeo Education Solutions, a loan repayment assistance program provider.

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January 15, 2026
Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

A recent op-ed by David Randall, executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, argues that faculty hiring in American universities has become so corrupt that it requires sweeping legislative intervention. NAS’s proposed Faculty Merit Act would require public universities to publish every higher ed standardized test score—SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT and more—of every faculty member and every applicant for that faculty member’s position across different stages of a faculty search. The goal, they claim, is to expose discrimination and restore meritocracy.

Letter to the editor

A letter has been submitted in response to this article. You can read the letter here , and view all of our letters to the editor here.

The proposal’s logic is explicit: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If average scores decline from round to round, or if the eventual hire scored lower than dozens—or even hundreds—of rejected applicants, the public, Randall argues, should be able to “see that something is wrong.”

But the Faculty Merit Act rests on a serious misunderstanding of how measurement and selection actually work. Even if one accepts Randall’s premise that a standardized test score “isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit,” the conclusions he draws simply do not follow. The supposed red flags the proposed act promises to reveal are not evidence of corruption. They are the expected mathematical consequences of using an imperfect measure in a large applicant pool.

I am a data scientist who works on issues of social justice. What concerns me is not only that NAS’s proposal is statistically unsound, but that it would mislead the public while presenting itself as transparent.

A Statistical Mistake

The proposed act depends on a simple idea: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If the person hired has a lower score than many rejected applicants, or if average scores decline from round to round, something must be amiss.

This sounds intuitive. It is also wrong.

To see why, imagine the following setup. Every applicant has some level of “true merit” for a faculty job—originality, research judgment, teaching ability, intellectual fit. We cannot observe this truth directly. Instead, we observe a standardized test score, which captures some aspects of ability but misses many others. In other words, the test score contains two parts: a signal (the part related to actual merit) and noise (everything else the test does not measure).

Now suppose a search attracts 300 applicants, as in Randall’s own example. Assume—very generously—that the search committee somehow identifies the single best applicant by true merit and hires that person.

Here is the crucial point: Even if test scores are meaningfully related to true merit, the best applicant will almost never have the highest test score.

Why? Because when many people are competing, even moderate noise overwhelms rank ordering. A noisy measure will always misrank some individuals, and the larger the pool, the more dramatic those misrankings become. This is the same reason that ranking professional athletes by a single skill—free-throw percentage, say—would routinely misidentify the best overall players, especially in a large league.

How Strong Is the Test-Merit Relationship, Really?

Before putting numbers on this, we should ask a basic empirical question: How strongly do standardized tests actually predict the kinds of outcomes that matter in academia?

The most comprehensive recent research on the GRE—the test most relevant to graduate education—finds minimal predictive value. A meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found that GRE scores explain just over 3 percent of the variation in graduate outcomes such as GPA, degree completion and licensing exam performance. For graduate GPA specifically—the outcome the test is explicitly designed to predict—GRE scores explained only about 4 percent of the variance.

These studies assess near-term prediction within the same educational context: GRE scores predicting outcomes for the very students who took the test, measured only a few years later—under conditions maximally favorable to the test’s validity. The NAS proposal extrapolates from evidence that is already weak even under these favorable conditions. It would evaluate faculty hiring using test scores—often SAT scores—taken at age 17, applied to candidates who may now be in their 30s, 40s or older. Direct evidence for that kind of long-term extrapolation is scarce. However, the limited evidence that does exist points towards weak relationships rather than strong ones. For instance, Google’s internal hiring studies famously found “very little correlation” between SAT scores and job performance.

Taken together, the research suggests that any realistic relationship between standardized test scores and faculty merit is weak—certainly well below the levels needed to support NAS’s proposed diagnostics.

What This Means in Practice

The proposed Faculty Merit Act raises an important practical question: Even if standardized test scores contain some information about merit, how useful are they when hundreds of applicants compete for a single job?

Taking the GRE meta-analysis at face value, standardized test scores correlate with relevant academic outcomes at only about 0.18. Treating that number as a proxy for faculty merit is already generous, given the decades that often separate testing from hiring and the profound differences between standardized exams and the actual work of a professor. But let us grant it anyway.

Now, consider a search with 300 applicants. With a correlation of 0.18, I calculate that the single strongest candidate by true merit would typically score only around the 70th percentile on the test—roughly 90th out of 300. In other words, it would be entirely normal for around 90 rejected applicants to have higher test scores than the eventual hire.

Nothing improper has happened. No favoritism or manipulation is required. This outcome follows automatically from combining a weak proxy with a large applicant pool.

Even if we assume a much stronger relationship—say, a correlation of 0.30, which already exceeds what the evidence supports for most academic outcomes—the basic conclusion does not change. Under that assumption, I calculate that the best candidate would typically score only around the 80th percentile, corresponding to a rank near 60 out of 300. Dozens of rejected applicants would still have higher test scores than the person who gets the job.

This is the point the proposal gets exactly backward. The pattern it treats as a red flag—a hire whose test score is lower than that of many rejected applicants—is not evidence of corruption. It is the normal, mathematically expected outcome whenever selection relies on an imperfect measure. Scaling this diagnostic across many searches does not make it informative; it simply reproduces the same expected misrankings at a larger scale.

Why ‘Scores Dropped Each Round’ Proves Nothing

The same logic applies to the claim that average test scores should increase at each stage of a search.

Faculty hiring is not one-dimensional. Early stages might screen for general competence; later stages may emphasize originality, research direction, teaching effectiveness and departmental fit—traits that standardized tests measure poorly or not at all. As a search progresses, committees naturally place less weight on test scores and more weight on other information. When that happens, average test scores among finalists can stay flat or even decline. That pattern does not signal manipulation. It signals that the committee is selecting on dimensions that actually matter for the job.

Transparency, Justice and Bad Diagnostics

Randall’s op-ed, published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, frames the proposal as a response to injustice. But transparency based on invalid diagnostics does not mitigate injustice; it produces it.

Publishing standardized test scores invites the public to draw conclusions that those numbers cannot support—and those conclusions will not fall evenly. Standardized test scores are strongly shaped by socioeconomic background and access to resources. Treating them as a universal yardstick of merit—especially for faculty careers—will predictably disadvantage scholars from marginalized and nontraditional paths.

From the standpoint of justice, this is deeply concerning. Accountability mechanisms must rest on sound reasoning. Otherwise, they become tools for enforcing hierarchy rather than fairness.

If the goal is genuine academic renewal, it should begin with renewing our understanding of what numbers can—and cannot—tell us. Merit cannot be mandated by publishing the wrong metrics, and justice is not served by statistical arguments that collapse under careful inspection.

Chad M. Topaz is a faculty member at Williams College; co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity; and winner of the Mary and Alfie Gray Award for Social Justice from the Association for Women in Mathematics. He is the author of Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in May, and can be found on Bluesky at @chadtopaz.

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January 15, 2026
State Lawmakers Enacted 21 Censorship Bills in 2025

Fourteen of last year’s 21 enacted bills contain gag orders, which PEN defines as direct censorship.

Last year was a record-setting one for education censorship; more than half of U.S college and university students now study in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how college campuses can operate, according to a new report from PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for campus free speech and press freedom.

Last year, lawmakers in 32 states introduced a combined 93 bills that censor higher education. Of those, 21 bills were enacted across 15 states: Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

“Censorship is, sadly, now an intractable reality on college and university campuses, with serious negative impacts for teaching, research, and student life,” Amy Reid, program director of Freedom to Learn at PEN America, said in a news release. “With threats of formal sanctions and political reprisals coming from both state and federal governments, campus leaders and faculty feel they have no choice but to comply, and are increasingly acting preemptively out of fear. Politicians are expanding a sweeping web of political and ideological control over higher education in American campuses, reshaping what can be taught, researched, and debated to fit their own agenda. That’s dangerous for free thought in a democracy.”

The report highlighted Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, a sweeping higher education bill that mandated institutional neutrality on “any controversial belief or policy,” established a post-tenure review policy, banned DEI initiatives and required institutions to demonstrate “intellectual diversity.” It also called out Indiana’s House Bill 1001, Ohio’s House Bill 96 and Texas’s Senate Bill 37, which all curb or eliminate faculty senates’ decision-making power.

Fourteen of last year’s 21 enacted bills contain gag orders, which PEN defines as direct censorship. Seven of those laws apply to higher education (the others apply only to K–12 education). In addition to the enacted laws, PEN documented five gag-order policies set by state or university system boards, including Texas Tech’s rules that effectively ban teaching on transgender topics and Texas A&M’s weaponized ban on teaching race or gender “ideology.”

Most of the proposed bills introduced last year contained some kind of indirect censorship, the PEN report states. It divides such bills into six categories: curricular control; tenure restrictions; institutional neutrality mandates; accreditation restrictions; diversity, equity and inclusion bans; and governance restrictions.

“Our research shows that legislators are more frequently adopting indirect means to achieve their end goal of censoring higher education, effectively expanding their web of control over the sector in numerous directions,” the report states. “Indirect censorship measures exploded in popularity, with state legislators introducing more than twice as many of them as they did educational gag orders (78 vs 33).”

In total, state lawmakers passed 20 out of 78 bills that contained indirect censorship—some of which also included gag orders. The 26 percent rate of passage is “remarkably strong,” the report states. Among the new laws are Indiana’s aforementioned HB 1001; Idaho’s Senate Bill 1198, which prohibits faculty from making “critical theory” courses a requirement for majors or minors; and Kansas’s Senate Bill 78, which allows institutions to sue their accreditor if punished for following state law—useful primarily because several of Kansas’s state laws violate accreditors’ academic freedom standards.

The PEN report also covers federal pressure to censor colleges and universities. In 2025, the Departments of Justice and Education launched more than 90 investigations into alleged Title VI violations. The Trump administration targeted $3.7 billion in research funding and Trump signed 19 executive orders related to education, including an order to end DEI initiatives at colleges and universities. Also last year, the administration suggested 38 universities should be suspended from federal research partnerships because of their hiring practices.

“The administration frequently justifies its actions in the name of protecting free expression, but the record shows its aim is to censor speech and exert control over the circulation of ideas,” Jonathan Friedman, the Sy Syms managing director of U.S. free expression programs at PEN, said in the news release. “The ‘viewpoint diversity’ they are pushing is not a value-neutral proposition about true debate or diversity of thought, or even free speech. It’s just a coded phrase being used to censor certain progressive ideas, while promoting conservative ones. The apparent aim is to turn colleges and universities into mouthpieces for the government. That’s not what our higher education institutions are supposed to be.”

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January 15, 2026