Tag: puts

  • Texas Tech Puts Its Anti-Trans Rules In Writing

    Texas Tech Puts Its Anti-Trans Rules In Writing

    Months after beginning to enforce unwritten policies about how faculty members can and cannot teach topics related to gender, Texas Tech University system officials released a memo Monday that officially put those policies—and more—in writing.

    “Effective immediately, faculty must not include or advocate in any form course content that conflicts with the following standards,” Chancellor Brandon Creighton wrote in the memo to system presidents, which was passed along to faculty members. The standards include specific rules around race and sexuality that were not previously discussed, system faculty members told Inside Higher Ed. The memo also enshrines that the Texas Tech system recognizes only two sexes—male and female.

    The fuzzy anti-trans policies that were first introduced via a game of censorship telephone at Angelo State University in September have now been made clear and expanded upon across the entire five-university Texas Tech system. Course content related to race and sexuality is now also subject to heightened scrutiny. Although the memo doesn’t ban outright discussion of transgender topics or any topics that suggest there are more than two genders, policies across the country stating that there are only two sexes or genders have been used to restrict transgender rights.

    Texas Tech is far from alone in its efforts; public systems across Texas have taken on varying politically motivated course reviews, leaving faculty members in the state angry and confused. For example, the University of Texas system recently completed a review of all courses on gender identity, and the Texas A&M system board approved a new policy last month mandating presidential approval for classes that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

    According to Creighton’s memo, faculty members may not “promote” or instill the belief that one race or sex is superior to another; that an individual is, consciously or unconsciously, inherently racist, sexist or “oppressive”; that any person should be discriminated against because of their race or sex; that moral character is determined by race or sex; that individuals bear responsibility or guilt because of the actions by others of the same race or sex; or that meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist or “constructs of oppression.”

    Creighton defined advocacy as “presenting these beliefs as correct or required and pressuring students to affirm them, rather than analyzing or critiquing them as one viewpoint among others. This also includes course content that promotes activism on issues related to race or sex, rather than academic instruction.”

    The memo also outlines a Board of Regents–controlled review process, complete with a flowchart, for courses that include content related to gender identity and sexuality. Although race is mentioned earlier in the memo, it’s unclear whether race-related course content will also be subject to this review.

    “We’ve been in this slow rollout process already. We had to go through all of the courses and essentially do the flowchart before the flowchart existed,” said a faculty member at Angelo State who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “Anything that would cover transgender [people] was flagged.”

    Creighton, a former member of the Texas State Senate, justified the new rules using Senate Bill 37, a law he sponsored earlier this year that, among other things, gave the control of faculty senates to public institution governing boards and established a once-every-five-years review process for general education curricula. An earlier version of the bill that passed the Senate contained language that’s very similar to the restrictions in the Texas Tech memo, including censoring specific course topics that suggest any social, political or religious belief is superior to another and allowing administrators to unilaterally remove faculty senate members for their personal political advocacy. The existing law does not prohibit teaching about transgender identity, racial inequality, systemic racism, homosexuality or any other individual topic.

    “This directive is the first step of the Board of Regents’ ongoing implementation of its statutory responsibility to review and oversee curriculum under Senate Bill 37 and related provisions of the Education Code. This curriculum review under Senate Bill 37 will, in part, ensure each university is offering degrees of value,” Creighton wrote.

    Texas Tech University system spokespeople did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about the memo, including what next steps might be.

    “The Board’s responsibility is to safeguard the integrity of our academic mission and maintain the trust of Texans,” Board of Regents chairman Cody Campbell said in a news release. “The Board welcomed the clarity provided by Senate Bill 37, which reaffirmed the Regents’ role in curriculum oversight. This new framework strengthens accountability, supports our faculty, and ensures that our universities remain focused on education, research, and innovation—core commitments that position the TTU System for continued national leadership.”

    Faculty across the system are largely upset about the changes but unsure about how to push back, a faculty member told Inside Higher Ed. One Texas Tech professor emeritus, Kelli Cargile Cook, told The Texas Tribune she began drafting a resignation letter.

    “I’ve been teaching since 1981 and this was going to be my last class. I was so looking forward to working with the seniors in our major, but I can’t stomach what’s going on at Texas Tech,” she told the Tribune. “I think the memo is cunning in that the beliefs that it lists are, at face value, something you could agree with. But when you think about how this would be put into practice, where a Board of Regents approves a curriculum—people who are politically appointed, not educated, not researchers—that move is a slippery slope.”

    Brian Evans, president of the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors, criticized the memo Tuesday. 

    “Empowering administrators to censor faculty experts’ teaching decisions does a disservice to the university, its students and the state,” Evans said. “Such a system is inconsistent with long-standing principles of academic freedom, university policy and the First Amendment.”

    Graham Piro, faculty legal defense fund fellow for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, decried the memo in a statement Tuesday.

    “The Texas Tech memo unconstitutionally singles out specific viewpoints on these topics, implying that faculty members must adhere to the state’s line on these issues—and that dissenters face punishment. The memo is also so broadly worded that an overzealous administration could easily punish a professor who seeks to provoke arguments in class or advocates outside the classroom for changes to curricula that reflect developments in teaching,” Piro said.

    “Decades ago, the Supreme Court recognized that the First Amendment ‘does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.’ It instead wrote that ‘truth’ is discovered not by ‘authoritative selection,’ but ‘out of a multitude of tongues.’ These principles are timeless, and Texas Tech should not compromise them, no matter the political winds of the day.”

    He also likened the memo to Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, currently blocked by a federal court, which severely limited how Florida faculty members could talk and teach about race, gender and sexuality.

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  • Campus Censorship Puts American Soft Power at Risk

    Campus Censorship Puts American Soft Power at Risk

    International students see American life portrayed in movies and on TikTok; U.S. universities have built global brands, helped along by Hollywood and merchandising. When it comes time to apply, international students can readily imagine a U.S. college experience, starting with seeing themselves in a crimson sweatshirt studying on a grassy quad flanked by ivy-covered buildings.

    And as the U.S.’s hold on cutting-edge science and innovation slips away to China, and other destinations with more welcoming visa policies offer lower-cost degrees and jobs, soft power might be the only edge American universities have left.

    The desire is about more than bricks and mortarboards. Students from other countries have long sought out American values of academic freedom and open discourse. They are excited by ideas and experiences that are as emblematic of the American way of life as tailgating on game day: criticizing the government, discussing LGBTQ+ rights or learning about the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, the Armenian genocide in Turkey or the comfort women victimized by the Imperial Japanese Army.

    But in 2025, those freedoms are at risk of becoming strictly theoretical. Anti-DEI laws in Utah led to Weber State University asking researchers to remove the words “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” from their slides before presenting at a—wait for it—conference on navigating the complexities of censorship. Conference organizers canceled the event after other presenters pulled out in protest.

    University leaders in Texas and Florida are refusing to put in writing policies that prohibit faculty from talking about transgender identity or diversity, equity and inclusion in classrooms, sowing fear and confusion across their campuses. A secret recording of a Texas A&M professor talking about gender in her class led to a successful campaign by a state representative to get her fired and forced a former four-star general to resign as university president.

    This weekend, students at Towson University moved their No Kings rally off campus after school officials told them their speakers’ names would be run through a federal government database. They changed locations out of fear the speakers would be targeted by the Trump administration.

    Meanwhile, dozens of faculty are still out of jobs after being fired for posting comments online about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Repressing free speech on social media is also what the Chinese government does to political dissenters.

    It’s true that colleges are exercising American values by following laws passed by democratically elected legislators. And presidents say they will follow the rule of law without compromising their missions, but overcompliance with vague legislation and policies is incompatible with this aim.

    International students who care about more than a name brand may find the erosion of the country’s global reputation as a democratic stronghold a reason to look elsewhere. That means billions of dollars are also at stake if international students no longer trust in America’s values and choose to stay away. Modeling from NAFSA: Association of International Educators projected a 30 to 40 percent drop in international students this fall that would result in $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer jobs across the country. Records from August suggest a similar outlook: 19 percent fewer students arrived in the U.S. compared to August 2024.

    International students bring more than just valuable tuition dollars to American campuses. They contribute global perspectives to their less traveled American peers and build relationships that could turn into partnerships when they go home and become entrepreneurs or political leaders.

    Higher ed can track the number of international student visas issued, students who enroll and the economic contributions of these students, but they can’t quantify what it means when a student in Shanghai stops imagining America as a place where all ideas can be expressed and explored. It’s taken decades for this country to build power based on free expression and open discourse, but by the time the loss of students starts to register in economic data and visa applications, the decline may be too late to reverse.

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  • How Gov. Shapiro’s role at Penn puts free speech and institutional autonomy at risk

    How Gov. Shapiro’s role at Penn puts free speech and institutional autonomy at risk

    Nearly two years ago, the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza sparked intense debate and demonstrations on American campuses. 

    Many schools responded by attempting to censor controversial but protected speech in the name of combating antisemitism. But in testimony before Congress on Dec. 5, 2023, University of Pennsylvania’s then-President Liz Magill initially declined to follow suit. She explained that “calling for genocide” does not always violate Penn’s rules. Instead, she correctly labeled this a “context-dependent decision,” recognizing that rhetoric some find deeply offensive can still be protected speech. This assertion was in line with Penn’s longstanding — but often ignored — commitment to tracking the First Amendment in its own policies.

    Unfortunately, Magill quickly backtracked in the face of public criticism, including from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The governor said publicly that Magill needed to “give a one-word answer” and that her testimony demonstrated a “failure of leadership.”

    As it turns out, the governor’s response was not limited to his public comments. Recent reporting by The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals how Gov. Shapiro’s office enmeshed itself in this controversy and in Penn’s response to antisemitism on campus in the months and semester that followed October 7.

    Seizing on a rarely used provision of the Penn Statutes of the Trustees that establishes the governor as a trustee ex officio, Gov. Shapiro appointed Philadelphia lawyer Robb Fox as his observer to the board of trustees. Gov. Shapiro’s director of external affairs Amanda Warren explained in a then-private email that Fox would be “integrated into all future board meetings, as well as ongoing antisemitism work, on behalf of the Governor.” Fox was previously part of the governor’s transition team in 2022 and serves as his appointee on the board of SEPTA, Philadelphia’s transit authority.

    Per the Chronicle, Fox “quickly immersed himself in Penn’s affairs — arguing technicalities of the board of trustee’s rules, liaising with students, faculty, and administrators, and contributing to Penn’s task force on antisemitism.” He began corresponding with Marc Rowan, who serves as chair of the Penn Wharton School’s board of advisors and was an early critic of both Magill and Bok. And in one early email regarding a proposed statement from the board, Fox said he would tell them “enough with the statements” and that they needed “a vote on board chair [Scott Bok] and president remaining.”

    Days later, Magill and Bok resigned. A member of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences’ board later thanked Fox for this early engagement, saying the trustees were able to oust Magill and Bok “with the governor’s nudge and with his support.”

    All of this broke with precedent. Historically, Penn did not allow designees to attend board meetings in the governor’s place. The university only broke with this tradition after “many conversations between the Governor, President Magill, Board leadership, and staff.”

    Fox’s influence reportedly expanded in the months that followed. Penn’s then-interim President Larry Jameson intervened to add Fox to the university’s antisemitism task force. One member of the task force told the Chronicle that Fox frequently said he was trying to represent the governor’s position. And when Fox got the impression that the task force was trying to treat him as a mere spectator, he reached out to Warren and declared that he would “not be an observer.”

    Throughout all this, Fox and Warren frequently acted as a team. She connected him with Rowan in the early days of his appointment, and later connected him with the Penn Israel Public Affairs Committee. Fox and Warren were both part of an email exchange with Penn’s new board chair that sought information about the burgeoning encampment. And when Fox considered bypassing the task force on antisemitism and going directly to President Jameson to address an Instagram post by a pro-Palestine student organization, he first emailed Warren to discuss the issue with her.

    Neither Penn nor Gov. Shapiro’s office deny any of this involvement. Indeed, both parties acknowledged their relationship in comments to the Chronicle, with Gov. Shapiro’s spokesperson explaining that they and Fox intervened in order to combat hate and antisemitism.

    State pressure on private universities can be a dangerous backdoor to censorship

    Combating unlawful antisemitic harassment is a noble goal, but when powerful public officials wield their influence to regulate speech at private universities, they’re playing a dangerous game. We saw this play out recently at Columbia University, where university leaders responded to the Trump administration’s unlawful funding freeze (purportedly a response to campus antisemitism) by capitulating to demands that will chill protected speech. 

    Columbia incorporated the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s overbroad definition of antisemitism, which the Trump administration had earlier demanded, into its own definition. Later, in a settlement agreement it signed to restore government funding, Columbia required students to commit to vague goals like “equality and respect” that leave far too much room for abuse, much like the DEI statements, civility oaths, and other types of compelled speech FIRE has long opposed.

    Gov. Shapiro’s intervention here is not nearly as heavy-handed, but it is still cause for concern. If the Chronicle’s reporting is accurate, then he and his office must act with greater restraint given the state’s influence over Penn, a private institution, and the potential for overreach.

    The Chronicle notes that when President Jameson took office, Penn was working to reclaim $31 million in funding for its veterinary school and $1.8 million designated for the Penn Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases that had been withheld by the Pennsylvania legislature over antisemitism concerns. When faced with the loss of so much funding, many institutions, even those as wealthy as Penn, will be quick to fall in line with the state’s demands.

    This backdoor approach to regulating speech, known as jawboning, is both incredibly powerful and uniquely dangerous. The First Amendment only protects against state censorship, not private regulation of speech, so when the state pressures private institutions into censoring disfavored speech, it blurs the legal line between unconstitutional state action and protected private conduct. The Supreme Court unanimously condemned this practice in NRA v. Vullo, reaffirming its 60-year-old ruling that governments cannot use third parties to censor speech they disfavor. The Court explained that this practice would allow a government official to “do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.” 

    Jawboning’s chilling effects go beyond the pressured institution itself. For example, Gov. Shapiro’s close involvement at Penn incentivizes campus leaders to over-enforce their anti-discrimination and harassment policies in ways that prohibit or chill what would otherwise be lawful speech. Rather than risk state interference, many institutions will censor first and ask questions later.

    None of this is to say that Penn has a sterling history when it comes to managing speech controversies on its own. In fact, Penn finished second to last in FIRE’s 2023 campus free speech rankings. But the situation is likely to get worse, not better, when the government amplifies the impulse to censor.

    Transparency limitations at private universities amplify the risks of state involvement

    Private universities are not subject to open-records laws like many public universities. At a public university, it is often possible to obtain records that reveal how or why the school changed a speech policy or engaged in censorship. By contrast, at a private university there is no formal way (besides the costly process of litigation) to request records that reveal the basis for such actions, including the extent to which they were the result of state pressure.

    For example, after Penn’s tumultuous 2024 spring semester, the university adopted a vague and overbroad events and demonstrations policy. This policy prohibits “advocat[ing] violence” in all circumstances, even when it doesn’t cross the line into unprotected and unlawful conduct or speech, like incitement or true threats. Moreover, the policy fails to define “advocat[ing] violence.” This leaves students guessing and will lead to administrative abuse and uneven enforcement. Is the common but controversial slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a call for violence in Israel or a call for political change? Calling for U.S. bombing of terrorist groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda is explicitly advocating violence. Is that prohibited? Under Penn’s new policy, that’s left to administrators to decide. 

    FIRE criticized this policy at the time and expressed concern that it was driven in part by viewpoint discrimination. But at a private university like Penn, there is no public records mechanism for the public to scrutinize how or why the policy was adopted. And although private universities are generally well within their rights to keep these decisions private, this arrangement becomes more troublesome when the state gets involved.

    Private universities have their own free speech rights

    Private universities themselves have free speech rights. A federal district court recently reiterated as much, explaining that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment when it conditioned funding to Harvard on the university “realigning its campus to better reflect a viewpoint favored by the government.” 

    Harvard, like Columbia and many other institutions, has been the target of a federal pressure campaign purportedly aimed at combatting antisemitism. But unlike Columbia, Harvard chose to defend its rights in court. This stand is praiseworthy, and the district court’s decision shows that private institutions stand on solid legal ground when they resist unlawful government pressure. Unfortunately, not every institution will be bold enough, or sufficiently well resourced, to fight the state in court.

    State actors should protect students by enforcing the law, not by censoring protected speech

    Given these dangers, Gov. Shapiro and other government actors seeking to combat discrimination must act through the proper legal channels. In the federal context, this means following the procedures laid out by Title VI and binding federal regulations. In its ruling for Harvard, the district court explained that this process is designed to ensure that recipients of federal funding “are shielded against being labeled with the ‘irreversible stigma’ of ‘discriminator’ until a certain level of agency process has determined that there was misconduct that warranted termination.” In other words, this process is a check on government overreach and all the harms that entails. The same principle applies to states trying to combat discrimination within their borders.

    Enforcing valid anti-discrimination laws is important. But there’s a significant danger when state actors attempt to use the rationale of anti-discrimination to regulate speech at private universities. If left unchecked, this backdoor regulation risks turning private universities into de facto extensions of the state — undermining both academic freedom and the First Amendment itself.

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  • AI and Art Collide in This Engineering Course That Puts Human Creativity First – The 74

    AI and Art Collide in This Engineering Course That Puts Human Creativity First – The 74

    I see many students viewing artificial intelligence as humanlike simply because it can write essays, do complex math or answer questions. AI can mimic human behavior but lacks meaningful engagement with the world.

    This disconnect inspired my course “Art and Generative AI,” which was shaped by the ideas of 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His work highlights how we are deeply connected and present in the world. We find meaning through action, care and relationships. Human creativity and mastery come from this intuitive connection with the world. Modern AI, by contrast, simulates intelligence by processing symbols and patterns without understanding or care.

    In this course, we reject the illusion that machines fully master everything and put student expression first. In doing so, we value uncertainty, mistakes and imperfection as essential to the creative process.

    This vision expands beyond the classroom. In the 2025-26 academic year, the course will include a new community-based learning collaboration with Atlanta’s art communities. Local artists will co-teach with me to integrate artistic practice and AI.

    The course builds on my 2018 class, Art and Geometry, which I co-taught with local artists. The course explored Picasso’s cubism, which depicted reality as fractured from multiple perspectives; it also looked at Einstein’s relativity, the idea that time and space are not absolute and distinct but part of the same fabric.

    What does the course explore?

    We begin with exploring the first mathematical model of a neuron, the perceptron. Then, we study the Hopfield network, which mimics how our brain can remember a song from just listening to a few notes by filling in the rest. Next, we look at Hinton’s Boltzmann Machine, a generative model that can also imagine and create new, similar songs. Finally, we study today’s deep neural networks and transformers, AI models that mimic how the brain learns to recognize images, speech or text. Transformers are especially well suited for understanding sentences and conversations, and they power technologies such as ChatGPT.

    In addition to AI, we integrate artistic practice into the coursework. This approach broadens students’ perspectives on science and engineering through the lens of an artist. The first offering of the course in spring 2025 was co-taught with Mark Leibert, an artist and professor of the practice at Georgia Tech. His expertise is in art, AI and digital technologies. He taught students fundamentals of various artistic media, including charcoal drawing and oil painting. Students used these principles to create art using AI ethically and creatively. They critically examined the source of training data and ensured that their work respects authorship and originality.

    Students also learn to record brain activity using electroencephalography – EEG – headsets. Through AI models, they then learn to transform neural signals into music, images and storytelling. This work inspired performances where dancers improvised in response to AI-generated music.

    The Improv AI performance at Georgia Institute of Technology on April 15, 2025. Dancers improvised to music generated by AI from brain waves and sonified black hole data.

    Why is this course relevant now?

    AI entered our lives so rapidly that many people don’t fully grasp how it works, why it works, when it fails or what its mission is.

    In creating this course, the aim is to empower students by filling that gap. Whether they are new to AI or not, the goal is to make its inner algorithms clear, approachable and honest. We focus on what these tools actually do and how they can go wrong.

    We place students and their creativity first. We reject the illusion of a perfect machine, but we provoke the AI algorithm to confuse and hallucinate, when it generates inaccurate or nonsensical responses. To do so, we deliberately use a small dataset, reduce the model size or limit training. It’s in these flawed states of AI that students step in as conscious co-creators. The students are the missing algorithm that takes back control of the creative process. Their creations do not obey AI but reimagine it by the human hand. The artwork is rescued from automation.

    What’s a critical lesson from the course?

    Students learn to recognize AI’s limitations and harness its failures to reclaim creative authorship. The artwork isn’t generated by AI, but it’s reimagined by students.

    Students learn chatbot queries have an environmental cost because large AI models use a lot of power. They avoid unnecessary iterations when designing prompts or using AI. This helps reducing carbon emissions.

    The Improv AI performance on April 15, 2025, featured dancer Bekah Crosby responding to AI-generated music from brain waves.

    The course prepares students to think like artists. Through abstraction and imagination they gain the confidence to tackle the engineering challenges of the 21st century. These include protecting the environment, building resilient cities and improving health.

    Students also realize that while AI has vast engineering and scientific applications, ethical implementation is crucial. Understanding the type and quality of training data that AI uses is essential. Without it, AI systems risk producing biased or flawed predictions.

    Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Tenn. Lawsuit Puts Hispanic-Servings’ Fate on the Line

    Tenn. Lawsuit Puts Hispanic-Servings’ Fate on the Line

    Two years after its Supreme Court victory against Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, Students for Fair Admissions has a new target in its sights: Hispanic-serving institutions. On Wednesday, the advocacy group joined the state of Tennessee in suing the U.S. Department of Education, arguing that the criteria to become an HSI are unconstitutional and discriminatory. The move is distressing HSI advocates, who hoped to see the institutions left out of the political fray.

    To qualify as an HSI, a college or university needs to have a student body comprised of at least 25 percent Hispanic students and enroll at least 50 percent low-income students, or more than other comparable institutions, among other criteria. No Tennessee institutions operated by the state meet the threshold and are thus prohibited from applying for HSI-specific grants—even though they serve Hispanic and low-income students, according to the Tennessee attorney general and SFFA. As a result, the federal designation criteria amounts to discrimination, and Tennessee universities and students suffer as a result, the plaintiffs argue.

    They also say Tennessee institutions find themselves in an “unconstitutional dilemma”: Even if they wanted to, they argue, they can’t use affirmative action to up their Hispanic student enrollments since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against using race as a factor in college admissions. That 2023 decision resulted from lawsuits SFFA brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    “The HSI program is particularly egregious in terms of how it treats students based on immutable characteristics,” Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti, who’s representing the state in the suit, told Inside Higher Ed. “It is just manifestly unfair that a needy student in Tennessee does not have access to this pool of funds because they go to a school that doesn’t have the right ethnic makeup.”

    The lawsuit calls for “a declaratory judgement that the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements are unconstitutional” and “a permanent injunction prohibiting the [Education] Secretary from enforcing or applying the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements when making decisions whether to award or maintain grants to Tennessee’s institutions of higher education.”

    HSI proponents may be jarred by the legal challenge, but they aren’t entirely surprised. Conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the American Civil Rights Project have previously proposed abolishing enrollment-based minority-serving institutions (MSIs), including HSIs and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–serving institutions, which are defined as enrolling 10 percent of students from these groups.

    “It was only a matter of time before the anti-DEI movement hit the enrollment-based MSIs,” said Gina Ann Garcia, a professor who studies MSIs in the school of education at the University of California, Berkeley. “It still was a punch to the gut.”

    2 Sides At Odds

    Congress established the HSI program in the 1990s to improve the quality of education at colleges and universities that disproportionately serve Latino students, who were concentrated at colleges with relatively fewer financial resources. They’ve historically enjoyed bipartisan support. Last year, the federal government appropriated about $229 million for the country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions; $28 million of that funding went to 49 of the HSIs that applied for the competitive grants.

    Deborah Santiago, co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, an organization that promotes Latino student success, believes the lawsuit mischaracterizes the program and its role in the national higher education landscape. She said it’s in the country’s “self-interest” to invest in colleges and universities with limited resources that serve a growing student population with stubborn degree-attainment gaps.

    “If a disproportionate number of students of any background are at an institution that has a high enrollment of needy students, low educational core expenditures and serves a high proportion of students that that could benefit from that [funding] to serve the country, I don’t think that’s discriminating,” she said.

    She also stressed that the grant program “doesn’t explicitly require any resources to go to a specific population” but funds capacity-building efforts, like building new laboratories and facilities, that benefit all students at the institution.

    The HSI program is a way “to target limited federal resources and meet the federal mandate of access for low-income students,” she said. “We know that it costs more to educate Hispanic students, because they’re more likely to be low income and first gen, so college knowledge, student support services—all of that takes institutional investment.”

    But opponents of HSIs don’t buy it.

    Wenyuan Wu, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a think tank and watchdog organization focused on promoting “equal rights and merit,” firmly believes enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are discriminatory and applauded the lawsuit as a step in the right direction.

    She argued that HSI funding has gone to efforts specifically to support Latino students, including some she sees as “ideological.” For example, the University of Connecticut at Stamford proposed using the funding to start a program called Sueño Scholars, to “recruit, support and mentor undergraduate Hispanic, other minority, low-income, and high-need students” to enter teaching graduate programs and included a goal of “developing and sustaining antiracist orientations towards teaching and learning,” according to the department’s list of project abstracts.

    Wu asserted that putting federal money toward efforts like these is a problem. She’d rather see the funds designated for HSIs channeled into Pell Grants or other supports for low-income students.

    “Taxpayer funds should not be used to engage in racial balancing, and that’s exactly the kind of behavior that has been incentivized by MSIs,” said Wu, who is also chair of the Georgia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

    Possible Outcomes

    Robert Kelchen, head of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, believes the lawsuit has “a possibility of success.” It was filed in a conservative-leaning federal district court in Knoxville, and Tennessee seems to have shown it has legal standing, he said.

    Even “if the court here in Knoxville doesn’t agree, another state could choose to file a similar lawsuit in their district court as well,” he said. Ultimately, “the question is, can they find one court that agrees with the plaintiffs’ interpretation.”

    The move by Tennessee comes just a week after the federal government successfully sued Texas to eliminate in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy Republican state lawmakers had tried but failed to end. The Texas attorney general celebrated the challenge, siding with the U.S. Department of Justice in a matter of hours, and a judge promptly quashed the two-decade-old state law. (Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, called the episode “transparently collusive.”)

    Kelchen believes the Tennessee lawsuit is following a similar playbook. He expects to see more red states and conservative organizations sue the Education Department on issues where they align “to get rid of things that neither of [them] like,” he said—though in Tennessee’s case, it’s unclear how the department will respond.

    Skrmetti told Inside Higher Ed that “from Tennessee’s perspective, this is not part of a broader strategy to influence education policy. This is about discrimination against Tennessee schools because of the ethnic makeup of their student bodies.”

    If the plaintiffs win, it’s unclear whether that would mean changing the federal definition of an HSI to eliminate a Hispanic enrollment threshold or axing the HSI program altogether. The implications for other types of enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are also hazy.

    Skrmetti is open to multiple options.

    “At the end of the day, there’s [HSI] money out there to help needy students, and we want to make sure that needy students can access it regardless of the ethnic makeup of the schools they’re at,” he said. “There are a couple different avenues I think that could successfully achieve the goal operationally. We need to just get a declaration that the current situation does violate the Constitution.”

    Santiago, of Excelencia in Education, said there’s room for “thoughtful discussion” about reforming or expanding requirements for HSI grant funding, but she believes “it needs to come from the community.”

    She also pointed out that the lawsuit is against the Department of Education, which administers HSI funding but doesn’t control it—Congress does. So the department doesn’t have the power to end the funding.

    Nonetheless, “it would be foolish to not take it seriously,” she said.

    Garcia, the Berkeley education professor, said that while she’s not a lawyer, she believes there are legal questions worth raising about the lawsuit, particularly the way it leans on the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in admissions.

    She pointed out that HSIs tend to be broad-access or open-access institutions that admit most applicants, rather than selective institutions explicitly recruiting Latino students; only about two dozen of the 600 HSIs are highly selective, she said. So, the assertion that HSIs have any connection to the affirmative action ruling is up for debate, she said.

    Skrmetti believes it’s a cut-and-dried case.

    “You can’t make determinations about the allocation of resources based on ancestry or skin color or anything like that without inherent discrimination,” he said. “We need to help all needy students. And the HSI designation is an obstacle to that.”

    Garcia believes that regardless of whether the lawsuit is successful, it’s already done damage to HSIs by dragging them—and enrollment-based MSIs in general—into the country’s political skirmishes over diversity, equity and inclusion.

    “I’ve been just watching HSIs fly a little bit under the radar,” she said. “They don’t come up a lot” in national conversations about DEI. But the lawsuit “brings HSIs into the light, and it brings them into the attack.”

    She worries that students are the ones who will suffer if HSIs no longer receive dedicated funding.

    HSIs “are often underresourced institutions,” she said. “They’re institutions that are struggling to serve a large population of minoritized students, of students of color, of low-income students, of first-gen students. We’re not talking about the Harvards and the Columbias.”

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  • Trump’s Deportation Database Puts Students at Risk – The 74

    Trump’s Deportation Database Puts Students at Risk – The 74

    School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.

    Tennessee state Sen. Bo Watson wants to eject undocumented students from public school classrooms. But first, he needs their data. 

    Watson seeks to require students statewide to submit a birth certificate or other sensitive documents to secure their seats — one of numerous efforts nationwide this year as Republican state lawmakers seek to challenge a decades-old Supreme Court precedent enshrining students’ right to a free public education regardless of their immigration status.

    Some 300 demonstrators participate in a Waukegan, Illinois, rally on Feb. 1 to draw attention to an increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the area. Privacy advocates warn student records could be used to assist deportations. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

    In my latest feature this week, I dive into why those efforts have alarmed student data privacy advocates, who warn that efforts to compile data on immigrant students could be used not just to deny them an education  — it could also fall into the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    As the Trump administration ramps up deportations and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency reportedly works to create a “master database” of government records to zero in on migrants, data privacy experts warn that state and federal data about immigrant students could be weaponized. 

    In the news

    Cybercriminals demanded ransom payments from school districts nationwide this week, using millions of K-12 students’ sensitive data as leverage after the files were stolen from education technology giant PowerSchool in a massive cyberattack late last year. The development undercuts PowerSchool’s decision to pay a ransom in December to keep the sensitive documents under wraps. | The 74

    Gutted: Investigations at the Education Department’s civil rights office have trickled to a halt as the Trump administration installs a “shadow division” to advance cases that align with the president’s agenda. | ProPublica

    • Civil rights groups, students and parents have asked courts to block the Education Department’s civil rights enforcement changes under Trump, saying they fail to hold schools accountable for racial harassment and abuses against children with disabilities. | K-12 Dive
    • Among the thousands of cases put on the back burner is a complaint from a Texas teenager who was kneed in the face by a campus cop. | The 74

    ‘The hardest case for mercy’: Congratulations to Marshall Project contributor Joe Sexton, who was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting on a legal team’s successful bid to spare the Parkland, Florida, school shooter from the death penalty. | The Marshall Project

    The city council in Uvalde, Texas, approved a $2 million settlement with the families of the victims in the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School, the first lawsuit to end with monetary payouts since 19 children and two teachers were killed. | Insurance Journal 

    • In Michigan, a state commission created in the wake of the 2021 school shooting at Oxford High School, which resulted in the deaths of four students, issued a final report calling for additional funding to strengthen school mental health supports. | Chalkbeat
    • Meanwhile, at the federal level, the Education Department axed $1 billion in federal grants designed to train mental health professionals and place them in schools in a bid to thwart mass shootings. | The 74

    A high school substitute teacher in Ohio was arrested on accusations she offered a student $2,000 to murder her husband. | WRIC

    Connecticut schools have been forced to evacuate from fires caused by a “dangerous TikTok trend” where students stab school-issued laptops with paper clips to cause electrical short circuits. | WFSB

    Eleven high school lacrosse players in upstate New York face unlawful imprisonment charges on accusations they staged a kidnapping of younger teammates who thought they were being abducted by armed assailants. | CNN

    Sign-up for the School (in)Security newsletter.

    Get the most critical news and information about students’ rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox.

    The Future of Privacy Forum has “retired” its Student Privacy Pledge after a decade. The pledge, which was designed to ensure education technology companies were ethical stewards of students’ sensitive data, was ended due to “the changing technological and policy landscape regarding education technology.” | Future of Privacy Forum

    • The pledge had previously faced scrutiny over its ability to hold tech vendors accountable for violating its terms. | The 74
    • New kid on the block: Almost simultaneously, Common Sense Privacy launched a “privacy seal certification” to recognize vendors that are “deeply committed to privacy.” | Business Wire

    Google plans to roll out an artificial intelligence chatbot for children as the tech giant seeks to attract young eyeballs to its AI products. | The New York Times

    Kansas schools plan to spend state money on AI tools to spot guns despite concerns over reports of false alarms. | Beacon Media

    ICYMI @The74

    A new report from the Department of Health and Human Services suggests gender-affirming health care puts transgender youth at risk but the report ignores years of research indicating otherwise. (Getty Images)

    HHS Condemns Gender-Affirming Care in Report That Finds ‘Sparse’ Evidence of Harm

    Chicago Public Schools’ Black Student Success Plan Under Investigation Over DEI

    SCOTUS to Rule in Case That Could Upend Enforcement of Disabled Students’ Rights

    Emotional Support

    Birds are chirping. Flowers are blooming. And 74 editor Bev Weintraub’s feline Marz is ready to pounce.


    Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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  • New ICE Policy Puts International Students at Greater Risk

    New ICE Policy Puts International Students at Greater Risk

    The Trump administration issued plans earlier this week for a new policy that vastly expands federal officials’ authority to terminate students’ legal residency status, according to newly released court documents.

    The policy detailed in the filings asserts that immigration officials have the “inherent authority” to terminate students’ legal residency status in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System “as needed.” It also explicitly lays out two new justifications for SEVIS terminations: the vague “evidence of failure to comply” with nonimmigrant visa terms, and a visa revocation, which can be issued without evidence of a violation by the State Department—and which, crucially, is not subject to court challenges.

    Immigration attorneys told Inside Higher Ed that if implemented, the new policy would enshrine broad permission for ICE to begin deporting students practically at will.

    “This is very bad news for foreign students,” said Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney representing 133 international students in the largest lawsuit challenging recent SEVIS terminations. “Any student who’s arrested, literally for any reason, is probably going to have their status terminated going forward.”

    Last Friday a U.S. attorney promised an official update to ICE policy on SEVIS terminations. On Tuesday, U.S. attorneys presented the document as evidence in a court filing in Arizona, describing it as “recently issued … policy regarding the termination of SEVIS records.”

    It was the first time that details of a new SEVIS termination policy were made public, and it was not at first clear whether it reflected official federal policy. On Tuesday, U.S. attorney Johnny Walker confirmed during another hearing for a SEVIS lawsuit in D.C. that it did, though the policy had yet to be finalized. Spokespeople for ICE did not respond to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed.

    The plan comes less than a week after the administration began restoring thousands of foreign students’ SEVIS statuses after a series of court decisions overturned hundreds of status terminations. Kuck said the plan seemed to be a way for ICE to get around those rulings.

    “This is basically a cover-your-ass policy,” he said. “The fact that ICE initially reinstated visas was no surprise. They probably had U.S. attorneys screaming at them, ‘What are you doing?’ Now they’re trying to retroactively develop a policy that would allow them to do what they already did.”

    Immigration lawyer and Columbia University Immigrants’ Rights Clinic director Elora Mukherjee has been counseling international students across New York City for the past two months. After the visa-restoration decision last week, some students wanted to know if they were in the clear; she cautioned them against celebrating prematurely.

    “Whiplash is a good way to describe it,” she said. “Students are losing sleep—not just those whose visas have been terminated but those who are worried theirs could be next any day.”

    Fly-by-Night Policymaking

    The updated policy was outlined in an internal Department of Homeland Security memo filed as evidence in an Arizona federal court on Wednesday, where one of more than 100 lawsuits challenging visa revocations is being litigated.

    The unorthodox manner in which it was publicized has left immigration attorneys scratching their heads and international students’ advocates wondering how to respond.

    It also appears to have taken some federal officials by surprise. Kuck said that when he heard about the memo and brought it before the judge in his own case in Georgia, the U.S. attorney defending the government asked if he could send him a copy.

    Fanta Aw, president of NAFSA, an association of international educators, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the document “should not be relied upon as ICE’s new policy.” She also emphasized that there is no change to ICE’s visa termination policy included in the memo, only SEVIS terminations.

    The document is labeled as a “broadcast message … for internal SEVP use only,” meaning it would have been sent to Designated School Officials working in colleges’ international student offices. But Aw said that’s not accurate, either, because it lacks the customary broadcast message number, and DSOs in her organization said they had not received it.

    Kuck said the lack of a rule-making process for a sweeping policy change like the one outlined in the memo is most likely unlawful, and he was working on filing an amendment to challenge it on Thursday. But that doesn’t mean it should be taken lightly.

    “People should view this as the future,” Kuck said. “This is clearly the power ICE wants to give itself, so they’re going to move ahead with it.”

    ‘A Nightmare Booby Trap’

    Mukherjee said such a broad license to terminate SEVIS status would allow ICE to deport international students far more quickly and with less accountability. The new policy, if implemented and upheld by the courts, wouldn’t just revert to the status quo of the last few months, she said; it would create a landscape in which ICE could begin deportation proceedings with impunity.

    “We’ve already seen many students whose SEVIS terminations led directly to removal proceedings,” Mukherjee said. “It’s terrifying.”

    Kuck said it’s crucial that students understand that they’re still in danger of deportation even if their status was restored last week—and not just because of the new policy plan.

    The few hundred students who won a temporary restraining order in court over the past week have had their statuses reinstated and backfilled to when they were revoked. But the status of thousands more who did not file lawsuits was only reactivated from that point onward. That means they have a gap in status for the days or weeks in between—which, according to ICE policy, is grounds for removal from the country, even if their initial SEVIS termination was accidental.

    “This is a nightmare booby trap for these kids,” Kuck said.

    The only way to protect them, he said, is by filing a class action lawsuit for all affected international student visa holders. Kuck said he’s working on filing an injunction for one right now, and he is acting with urgency.

    In the meantime, Mukherjee said students—both those in the country and those who had planned to come in the fall—are “deeply unsettled.” She’s been asking them questions she’d never been concerned about before: whether they have any social media accounts or even tattoos.

    “I’m talking to international students who are currently in the U.S., to international students who’ve been admitted to study in the U.S. starting in the fall, and they’re asking, ‘Will we be able to complete our degree program?’” she said. “The answer is that it’s unclear.”

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  • This week in 5 numbers: Education Department puts 60 colleges on notice

    This week in 5 numbers: Education Department puts 60 colleges on notice

    The number of colleges put on notice this week by the Education Department over allegations of antisemitism. The agency warned the institutions via letters that it could take enforcement action against them if it determines that they aren’t sufficiently protecting Jewish students from discrimination, including by providing “uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.”

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  • Ohio University puts Black alumni reunion weekend on hold

    Ohio University puts Black alumni reunion weekend on hold

    Ohio University has postponed its annual Black alumni reunion weekend while it reviews the event in light of the Office for Civil Rights’ Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter, which declared illegal virtually all race-based activities at public institutions.  

    While the Black alumni reunion “has always been open to all individuals who have an interest in the event,” read a statement from the university, “based on OCR’s recent guidance related to Title VI compliance, some of the programming historically included in the event may need to be reimagined. The University is obligated to follow OCR’s guidance in order to protect our access to critical federal funding, including students’ continued access to federal financial aid.”

    The statement also cited the impact of “proposed State of Ohio legislation,” without specifically mentioning SB 1, a bill the Senate has passed that calls for the elimination of DEI statements, offices and trainings.

    “Without question, should this bill pass the House in its current form and be signed into law by the Governor, it will bring changes for all of us,” university president Lori Stewart Gonzalez wrote in an earlier message to the campus community. “However, to define today the specific changes we might make would preempt the legislative process on a bill that is not finalized.”

    Still, all signature events planned for Black alumni reunion weekend, which was scheduled for April 10–13 in Athens, were canceled.

    “While this is difficult news to share, we remain committed to honoring the legacy and accomplishments of Ohio University’s Black alumni,” said planning committee co-chairs Terry Frazier and Jillian Causey in the statement. “We will continue working with the University to develop a plan that aligns with evolving federal and state guidelines while preserving the significance of this gathering.”

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