Tag: Trumps

Trump’s push for ‘patriotic’ education could further chill history instruction

High school history teacher Antoine Stroman says he wants his students to ask “the hard questions” — about slavery, Jim Crow, the murder of George Floyd and other painful episodes that have shaped the United States.

Now, Stroman worries that President Donald Trump’s push for “patriotic education” could complicate the direct, factual way he teaches such events. Last month, the president announced a plan to present American history that emphasizes “a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation’s founding ideals,” and inspires “a love of country.”

Stroman does not believe students at the magnet high school where he teaches in Philadelphia will buy this version, nor do many of the teachers I’ve spoken with. They say they are committed to honest accounts of the shameful events and painful eras that mark our nation’s history.

“As a teacher, you have to have some conversations about teaching slavery. It is hard,” Stroman told me. “Teaching the Holocaust is hard. I can’t not teach something because it is hurtful. My students will come in and ask questions, and you really have to make up your mind to say, ‘I can’t rain dance around this.’”

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These are tense times for educators: In recent weeks, dozens of teachers and college professors have been fired or placed under investigation for social media posts about their views of slain 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk, ushering in a slew of lawsuits and legal challenges.

In Indiana, a portal called Eyes on Education encourages parents of school children, students and educators to submit “real examples” of objectionable curricula, policies or programs. And nearly 250 state, federal and local entities have introduced bills and other policies that restrict the content of teaching and trainings related to race and sex in public school. Supporters of these laws say discussion of such topics can leave students feeling inferior or superior based on race, gender or ethnicity; they believe parents, not schools, should teach students about political doctrine.

“It has become very difficult to navigate,” said Jacob Maddaus, who teaches high school and college history in Maine and regularly participates in workshops on civics and the Constitution, including programs funded by the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute. Almost 80 percent of teachers surveyed recently by the institute say they have “self-censored” in class due to fear of pushback or controversy. They also reported feeling underprepared, unsupported and increasingly afraid to teach vital material.

After Kirk’s death Trump launched a new “civics education coalition,” aimed at “renewing patriotism, strengthening civic knowledge, and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.” The coalition is made up made up almost entirely of conservative groups, including Kirk’s Turning Point USA, whose chief education officer, Hutz Hertzberg, said in a statement announcing the effort that he “is more resolved than ever to advance God-centered, virtuous education for students.”

So far, no specific guidelines have emerged: Emails to the Department of Education — sent after the government shut down — were not returned.

Related: Teaching social studies in a polarized world

Some students, concerned about the shifting historical narratives, have taken steps to help preserve and expand their peers’ access to civics instruction. Among them is Mariya Tinch, an 18-year-old high school senior from rural North Carolina. “Trump’s goal of teaching ‘patriotic’ education is actually what made me start developing my app, called Revolve Justice, to help young students who didn’t have access to proper civic education get access to policies and form their own political opinions instead of having them decided for them,” she told me.

Growing up in a predominantly white area, Tinch said, “caused civic education to be more polarized in my life than I would like as a young Black girl. A lot of my knowledge in regard to civic education came from outside research after teachers were unable to fully answer my questions about the depth of the issues that we are taught to ignore.”

Mariya Tinch, a high school senior in North Carolina, at the 2025 Ready, Set, App! competition (second from left). She developed an app to help students get access to policies and form their own political opinions. Credit: Courtesy of Mariya Tinch

Other students are upset about federal cuts to history education programs, including National History Day, a 50-year-old nonprofit that runs a history competition for some 500,000 students who engage in original historic research and provides teachers with resources and training. Youth groups are now forming as well, including Voters of Tomorrow, which has a goal of building youth political power by “engaging, educating, and empowering our peers.”

Related: What National Endowment for the Humanities cuts mean for high schoolers like me

There will surely be more attention focused on the founders’ original ideals for America as we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this July. Some teachers and groups that support civics teachers are creating resources, including the nonprofit iCivics, with its “We can teach hard things — and we should” guidelines.

How all of these different messages resonate with students remains to be seen. In the meantime, Jessica Ellison, executive director of the nonprofit National Council for History Education is fielding a lot of questions from history teachers and giving them specific advice.

“They might be anxious about any teaching that could get them on social media or reported by a student or parent,” Ellison told me, noting the strategy she shares with teachers is to focus on “the three S’s –— sources, state standards and student questions.”

Ellison also encourages teachers to “lean into the work of historians. Read the original sources, the primary sources, the secession documents from Mississippi and put them in front of students. If it is direct from the source you cannot argue with it.”

In September, students at Berlin High School in Delaware, Ohio, participated in a sign creation and postcard campaign for a levy on the ballot. Credit: Courtesy Michael LaFlamme

Michael LaFlamme has his own methods: He teaches Advanced Placement government and U.S. history at Olentangy Berlin High School outside of Columbus, Ohio, where many of his students work the polls during elections to see up close how voting works. They learn about civics via a participatory political science project that asks students to write a letter to an elected official. He also encourages students to watch debates or political or Sunday morning news shows with a parent or grandparent, and attend a school board meeting.

“There is so much good learning to be done around current events,” LaFlamme told me, noting that “it becomes more about community and experience. We are looking at all of it as political scientists.”

For Maddaus, the teacher in Maine, there is yet another obstacle: How his students consume news reinforces the enormous obstacles he and other teachers face to keep them informed and thinking critically. Earlier this fall, he heard some of his students talking about a rumor they’d heard over the weekend.

“Mr. Maddaus, is it true? Is President Donald Trump dead?” they asked.

Maddaus immediately wanted to know how they got this false news.

“We saw it on TikTok,” one of the students replied — not a surprising answer, perhaps, given that 4 out of 10 young adults get their news from the platform.

Maddaus says he shook his head, corrected the record and then went back to his regularly scheduled history lesson.

Contact editor in chief Liz Willen at [email protected].

This column about patriotism in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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October 7, 2025
Newsom vows to pull state funding from California colleges that sign Trump’s compact
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Dive Brief:
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to pull state funding from colleges that signed a proposed compact from the Trump administration seeking to impose sweeping policy changes in return for priority in research funding.
- “If any California university signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding,” Newsom said in a statement. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”
- First reported by the Wall Street Journal, federal officials offered the compact to the University of Southern California and eight other high-profile research universities this week.
Dive Insight:

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration have waged a legal and financial campaign against colleges in an effort to transform them ideologically. It comes after Trump on the campaign trail described colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and full of academics “obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth.”

With the compact, the administration has gone from using mainly sticks — typically in the form of civil rights investigations and canceled research grants — to using carrots as a means of pushing institutions to make reforms.

The Trump administration offered to prioritize colleges for research grants and other funding if they agree to give the government unprecedented control over internal institutional decisions and governance.

That includes:
- Taking a position of institutional neutrality on events that don’t directly impact the college.
- Committing not to consider race, gender, religion and other characteristics “explicitly or implicitly” in admissions. (The compact would grant exceptions for religious and single-sex institutions to limit admissions based on religious belief and gender, respectively.)
- Conducting broad, public assessments of the viewpoints of employees and students.
- Changing governance structures and potentially dissolving or taking over departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
- Adopting policies that recognize “academic freedom is not absolute” and prevent “discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.”
- Capping international undergraduate enrollment at 15% of the broader student body while screening out “students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.”
- Freezing tuition for five years.
- Requiring applicants to take standardized tests such as the SAT.
- Committing to using “lawful force” and “swift, serious, and consistent sanctions” to handle protests that “delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations.”
The compact would also require colleges with endowments worth $2 million or more per student to waive tuition for students studying hard sciences, though the memo didn’t define the field.

Along with USC, eight other colleges received the administration’s memo detailing the compact: the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.

The compact has drawn alarm and stern rebukes throughout the higher education world.

“College and university presidents cannot bargain with the essential freedom of colleges and universities to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom,” the American Association of Colleges and Universities said in a statement Friday.

Denise Forte, president and CEO of the policy analysis and advocacy organization EdTrust, described the compact in a statement as an “existential threat to all institutions of higher learning and the latest example of the federal government overexerting its power to intimidate colleges and universities viewed as ideological enemies.”

In a joint statement Thursday, top leaders of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers described the compact as offering preferential treatment “in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda” and said that it “stinks of favoritism, patronage, and bribery.” They urged all governing boards and administrators to reject the agreement.

American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell in an interview with The New York Times described the compact as a power play “designed to divide the higher education community.”

And then there is Newsom, who has been among the most vocal Democrats opposing Trump, especially since the president sent the National Guard into Los Angeles this summer, a move that a judge later ruled illegal.

In a press release, Newsom’s office described the compact as tying access to federal research funding to “radical conservative ideological restrictions on colleges and universities.” The governor also specifically threatened to “instantly” pull colleges’ eligibility for Cal Grants, a form of state aid for students from low- and middle-income families.

USC on Friday confirmed it had received and was reviewing the administration’s letter, but the university did not offer further comment.

Most of those institutions have remained quiet about their plans, if any, to sign or reject the agreement. A leader from one, however, voiced enthusiastic openness to the compact.

In a widely shared statement, Kevin Eltife, chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents, said that the system was “honored” that its flagship in Austin was selected among the nine to receive the compact.

“We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” said Eltife, a former Republican state senator.
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October 3, 2025
Trump’s tinseltown tariffs threaten free speech

“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” declared the 47th president in a post earlier this year on Truth Social. To lure more film productions back to America, Trump ordered the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative to place a 100% tariff on foreign films.

Hollywood went into panic mode. But the summer months passed without any update from the White House. Then, on Monday, Trump renewed his calls for a foreign-film tariff.

Much has been made about the financial implications of Trump’s shocking movie mandate. But beyond the economic concerns, both the industry and elected officials alike have failed to consider the broader constitutional implications of the president’s chaotic posts, should the tariffs actually be implemented.

Nestled in his posts, declaring offshore film productions a “National Security threat,” Trump further justified the tariffs this year by labeling foreign films as “propaganda.” For any American who cares about free speech, that should be the cue to jump up and holler, “Cut!”

“Propaganda” carries an ominous connotation, one that those in power have often used to censor speech they dislike. But no matter what the president declares to be propaganda, whether movies or any other medium, it is still protected speech. That protection extends to both making and watching films, regardless of where they were produced, as the First Amendment safeguards not only the right to speak, but also the right to receive information and ideas.

Artists have the right to express their ideas, even when such ideas irk those in power.

Details are incredibly murky, and the White House clarified in May that “no final decisions” have been made on what the policy would look like. But Trump’s threats to use the government’s might to financially punish Hollywood for working with foreign filmmakers, while limiting Americans’ access to those films, are deeply worrying.

Any directive that aims to suppress movies based on their content or filmmakers’ creative choices would violate both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment. The president claims these tariffs would strengthen American industry, but doing so by targeting filmmakers and their art, based on their place of origin or viewpoint, is as un-American as it gets. It’s less Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and more The Manchurian Candidate.

America’s proud free speech tradition is built on protecting speech critical of those in power. Because of this, the arts have historically been a potent force for social and political change in this country. One just has to look at the history of cinema to see that.

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Since the medium’s advent over a century ago, movies have been a dominant form of artistic expression in the United States. Not only that, but it’s historically been used to push back against the status quo.

During the studio system’s heyday, Meet John Doe shone a spotlight on the rising threat of fascism on domestic soil. Later, Casablanca tackled the dangers of isolationism. At the height of the Cold War, the Gary Cooper western High Noon challenged the Red Scare. Heralding the start of New Hollywood, Easy Rider rebelled against the prudish, white-picket-fence America of Eisenhower and Kennedy, while They Live! condemned the Reagan-era capitalism of the late 80s and early 90s. During the War on Terror, The Dark Knight questioned the morality of the Patriot Act surveillance state.

Not only that, but courts have consistently repelled government efforts to suppress artistic expression, reaffirming that artists have the right to express their ideas, even when such ideas irk those in power.

In a free society, the government, regardless of who is in power, cannot dictate what films we can watch or what books we can read.

In the 1948 Supreme Court case Winters v. New York, a 6-3 majority explained that “one man’s amusement teaches another’s doctrine.” The First Amendment protects everything from highbrow political commentary to sensational entertainment. Artistically, the line between high- and low-value expression is too subjective, too paper-thin to entrust the government with policing it. This free speech principle still rings true today, but the president seems willing to cast it aside to exert greater control over the film industry.

The nation’s highest court also has much to say on why taxing speech is unconstitutional because, let’s be clear, Trump’s tinseltown tariffs are just another tax. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment protects us against government taxing expression it dislikes.

Like all art, movies both provoke and inspire. They are, in the words of the late film critic Roger Ebert, “empathy machines.” In the darkness of a movie theater, we sit with strangers from different backgrounds. We gravitate to those cathedral-like spaces to share in one singular experience that is more than likely foreign to our own. We watch movies to be swept up in something different. At the very least, movies can challenge our ideas, much like a thriving free speech culture. At their best, movies change us.

In a free society, the government, regardless of who is in power, cannot dictate what films we can watch or what books we can read. And when we encounter a film that we may disagree with, the way we respond is our own speech, our own art, our own expression. As the nation’s chief executive, Trump cannot use the force of the presidency to target filmmakers and their artistic expression in the name of “national security” or “propaganda.” That’s unconstitutional. And that’s to say nothing of the other legal roadblocks to his plan.

The president’s vague, broad call for speech-retaliatory tariffs against foreign films has the potential to silence storytellers, chill the efforts of studios, and prevent American audiences from participating in the international exchange of ideas movies provide.

That doesn’t “Make Hollywood Great Again.” It makes it worse.

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October 1, 2025
Trump’s ‘domestic terrorism’ memo chillingly targets people by ideology

On Thursday, the White House published a presidential memo — technically, a national security presidential memorandum — outlining its upcoming efforts to combat political violence.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a heightened attention to political violence makes sense. But this memo doesn’t focus on actual violence. It includes frequent references to constitutionally protected speech and ideas.

While there are quite a few pieces of this order that set off alarm bells, a few of the phrases struck me as especially troubling. Here they are.

‘anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity’

The memo says:

There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” [ . . . ] Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

This is the most troubling passage in the memo, and there’s stiff competition for that title. This is the White House directly identifying beliefs, pointing the finger at them, and saying, “These are the suspicious people we need to watch.” In America, we shouldn’t target people for their ideologies. We should target them for their actions, full stop.

Recent Democratic administrations have engaged in the same guilt-by-association tactics. During the Obama administration, the IRS targeted nonprofit groups with the words “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in their names, identifying groups by ideology and punishing them by subjecting them to extra processes. And its explanation was that this was just a “shortcut” — other organizations with similar profiles had violated IRS rules, so they jumped to targeting groups that used similar words.

In 2023, the FBI distributed an internal memo linking “ethnically motivated violent extremists” to traditional Catholic ideology, a call for viewpoint-based targeting that was only exposed by a whistleblower and oversight from Congress. In 2022, an internal FBI memo linked the Gadsden flag and other patriotic symbols to violent extremism. And while such links do exist, and it makes sense for law enforcement to identify them, it also risks sweeping up ordinary Americans.

A man carries a Gadsden flag at a Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, 2019.

It may well be that some people who engage in politically motivated violence have anti-American beliefs, oppose the traditional family, or dislike organized religion. They should be prosecuted. And if there’s evidence of conspiracy or concrete steps toward violence, that may warrant an investigation. But we cannot start investigating other people simply because they happen to share those beliefs. Doing so would open the door to investigations of any political movement or ideology if any one of its adherents happened to engage in violence.

‘…designation as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’’

The memo also says:

[T]he Attorney General may recommend that any group or entity whose members are engaged in activities meeting the definition of “domestic terrorism” in 18 U.S.C. 2331(5) merits designation as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Designating something a domestic terrorist organization sounds like a parallel to the process we use for identifying foreign terrorist organizations (FTO). That process was created by Congress in a statute. Being designated as an FTO triggers a number of legal effects, enabling the government to seize assets, revoke visas, bar entry of non-citizens, and prosecute people who provide any direct help to the organization. Congress has the ability to block or revoke FTO designation, and organizations themselves are entitled to judicial review of the decision to include them on a list.

There is no such process for designating a domestic terrorist organization. In fact, the “domestic terrorist organization” definition proposed here has no legal safeguards and no clear significance. It’s completely made up. It seems an organization so designated will receive extra scrutiny from the federal government until it pleases the attorney general to remove them from the list. Donors, speakers, employees, and members of these organizations will all have their speech chilled for as long as the executive branch sees fit.

It’s hard not to compare this to the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthyism. There were, in fact, real Russian spies elsewhere in America, many of them motivated by their ideological commitment to communism. Some of them were passing nuclear secrets to our rival in the middle of a nuclear arms race, the stakes of which were, potentially, catastrophic beyond all human imagination. Many people on the blacklist did have ties to communism or communist sympathies, as well. But putting people on a list because the government didn’t like their politics violated the freedoms we claimed to be protecting.

‘…politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing…’

“Organized doxing” is a strange phrase.

Doxing (or doxxing) is generally defined as publishing private information that makes someone online personally identifiable. It’s also legal in most places, as long as the information was lawfully obtained and isn’t otherwise part of harassment or incitement efforts. Whether you think that’s bad or not, I don’t know that organizing the effort makes it worse. If someone posts your personal information online, your first question isn’t likely to be, “How many people were involved and what was their political purpose?”

However distasteful it might be in context, doxing is protected speech unless it violates some other existing law. After all, doxing describes much of the basic activity of news media, where otherwise unknown information is found and published, and frequently, that information is personally identifiable. That’s especially true when the “doxing” the government is upset about is information related to public employees in the course of their duties, such as the location of ICE agents.

A missive from the most powerful man in the world carries so much force that it is, inevitably, a blunt instrument. When the president uses his pen to take aim at anything, it will cause a chilling effect.

The administration itself has arguably been encouraging coordinated doxing efforts to identify people who said cruel things in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. When the vice president calls on the public to contact the employers of people who made unkind statements, and there have been groups soliciting submissions of those statements to catalog them, it would take exceptional care on the part of any future participants to avoid their efforts turning into doxing.

If organized doxing is a politically motivated terrorist act when an NGO encourages it, but it’s legal when the White House encourages it, the current administration should remember that it will be leaving that loaded gun on the desk of the next president — who may define “permissible doxing” much differently.

‘Investigate institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations…’

The memo directs that the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices shall investigate “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in” political violence, intimidation, or obstruction of the rule of law.

To aid or abet criminal conduct requires knowledge of the conduct. To the extent officers and employees of organizations are knowingly breaking the law, I’d like to think that law enforcement is investigating them anyway. It’s been a few decades since I took criminal law, but I’m pretty sure “investigate people who know they’re breaking the law” was on the first page of the outline. Same with people who are “responsible for” it.

So what this memo is adding, then, is to investigate “institutional and individual funders” who “sponsor” the organizations that aid the principal actors engaged in political violence. That reading is also reflected in a call for the use of financial surveillance tools. It’s also consistent with a Justice Department push to investigate a group tied to billionaire investor and Democratic megadonor George Soros.

If there is evidence that a donor was knowingly funding violence, they should be investigated, but the administration hasn’t actually shown such evidence. They simply assert there is a vast conspiracy on the left — going all the way up to its highest echelons — to fund and foment political violence, and so a sprawling investigation of the president’s ideological and political opponents is justified.

We have already seen orders like this get misused

A missive from the most powerful man in the world carries so much force that it is, inevitably, a blunt instrument. When the president uses his pen to take aim at anything, it will cause a chilling effect.

For example, when President Trump issued an executive order on gender ideology that prohibited federal funding to programs that suggest gender is a spectrum, Texas A&M cancelled an annual drag show and the National Endowment for the Arts reviewed applications for their consistency with the order. Neither of these outcomes were obvious on the face of the order.

What will the overreactions to this new memo look like? Donors ending their support because they don’t want to risk an investigation? Groups being denied bank loans or leases because they’re on a government list with no way to appeal that determination? Activists going underground because they want to challenge an orthodoxy, hiding their opinions from the places where they would otherwise be challenged in the marketplace of ideas?

If this is the plan to save American values, what’s the plan to destroy them look like?

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October 1, 2025
HHS Civil Rights Arm Joins in Trump’s Higher Ed Crackdown

In June, in an escalation of the Trump administration’s pressure on Harvard University to bow to its demands, a federal Office for Civil Rights announced that the institution was violating federal law.

The office released a nearly 60-page report accusing Harvard of “deliberate indifference” to ongoing discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students, which is illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “OCR’s findings document that a hostile environment existed, and continues to exist, at Harvard,” the office said in an accompanying news release.

But this wasn’t the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. It was an office of the same name within the Health and Human Services Department that’s been playing a more public role as part of Trump’s crackdown on higher ed. Officials who served in previous administrations said agencies used to generally defer to the Education Department when it came to civil rights issues in higher ed. But since Trump retook office, colleges and universities are facing increased pressure from probes by HHS and other agencies enforcing the new administration’s right-wing interpretation of civil rights.

HHS OCR said it began its Harvard investigation in February by looking into the university’s medical school, after alleged antisemitism during the May 2024 graduation ceremony. But, in April, it widened its probe to “include Harvard University as a whole and to extend the timeframe of review to include events and information from October 7, 2023, through the present.” (The HHS OCR has jurisdiction over institutions that accept HHS funding, including National Institutes of Health research grants and Medicaid dollars.)

And this wasn’t the HHS OCR’s only investigation into parts of Harvard that didn’t appear related to health or medicine. The news release noted the “findings released today do not address OCR’s ongoing investigation under Title VI into suspected race-based discrimination permeating the operations of the Harvard Law Review journal.” And Harvard is just one of several universities that this non–Education Department OCR has targeted since Trump retook the White House in January.

Civil rights advocates say the HHS OCR has become just one more pawn in Trump’s strategy to target universities and end protections and programs that aid minority groups. For universities, Trump’s HHS OCR represents a new threat to their funding if they’re accused of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion; fostering antisemitism; or letting transgender women play on women’s sports teams.

It’s unnecessary to do what the administration is doing now, unless one is operating like a mob boss.”

—Catherine Lhamon, former head of OCR at the Education Department

The office’s investigations and public denunciations add to the work of the ED OCR, which the Trump administration has also shifted to focus on the same issues. The two OCRs announced a joint finding of violations against Columbia University, but they’ve also trumpeted independent probes into other institutions.

“As we feared, the Trump administration is abusing civil rights tools to advance a radical and divisive agenda that aggressively hoards access to education, living wage jobs, and so much more,” the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said in a statement. “Unfortunately, HHS and many other federal agencies are being used as one of the vehicles to carry out that agenda.”

The Legal Defense Fund said, “Colleges and universities are being targeted precisely because of the critical role they play in opening the doors of opportunity and preparing the next generation to lead our multi-racial democracy. By attacking institutions that help level the playing field for Black students and other students of color, the Trump administration is ultimately weakening our democracy and our economy as a whole.”

Former officials at the Justice Department, to which HHS OCR can forward cases if the targets of investigations don’t comply, told Inside Higher Ed that HHS OCR historically deferred probes into universities to the Education Department.

Catherine Lhamon, former director of the Education Department’s OCR under Presidents Biden and Obama, said, “There are 13 federal agencies with external civil rights enforcement, of which HHS is one, and it’s relatively large.” She said they’re pieces of Trump’s broader strategy.

“The administration has used every agency in a contemporaneous, simultaneous assault on universities,” Lhamon said, multiplying the amount of federal funding it can threaten.

The HHS OCR’s announced investigations under Trump show it’s investigating similar issues to the Education Department OCR—or what’s left of that office after the administration’s cuts. Lhamon said the practice for decades has been for the agency with principal expertise over an area to investigate that area—hence why universities were mostly investigated by the Education Department OCR.

“It’s unnecessary to do what the administration is doing now, unless one is operating like a mob boss,” Lhamon said.

An HHS spokesperson said, “We’re leading implementation of the president’s bold civil rights agenda,” which includes four focuses: upholding religious conscience rights, fighting antisemitism, ending race-based discrimination embedded in DEI programs and “defending biological truth” in sex-discrimination enforcement. She also said that fighting antisemitism, for instance, is a priority across the whole administration, “so our office is going to be a part of that and going to participate to the fullest extent that we can.”

It remains unclear how much of the HHS OCR’s daily workload is now devoted to Trump’s targeting of higher ed. HHS OCR did investigate higher ed institutions even before Trump took office, the HHS spokesperson said.

“We may be being more public about it now,” the spokesperson said, “particularly because that’s where the issue areas with respect to this administration are.”

She said the office also continues to investigate non–higher ed–related medical providers and non–civil rights issues that it has responsibility for despite the office’s name—such as information privacy under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

The spokesperson said the HHS OCR news releases don’t tell the full story of what the office is currently investigating because—out of the roughly more than 40,000 complaints it receives annually—it doesn’t normally disclose which complaints lead to probes “to protect the integrity of the investigation.” The office also launches some investigations without receiving complaints, she said.

“In the past we’ve not announced through press releases that we’ve opened major investigations,” she said.

She didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed a list of the office’s current investigations. She also didn’t say how many employees HHS OCR has. HHS’s fiscal year 2026 budget request said that “in FY 2010, there were 111 investigators onboard, and in FY 2022, this number fell to 60, while simultaneously HHS received the highest number of complaints in its history (51,788).” (For comparison, the ED OCR, in a FY 2024 report, said it had received its highest-ever volume of complaints, but the number was only 22,687.)

Since taking power, the Trump administration has been slashing the federal workforce—the administration laid off nearly half of the Education Department’s OCR staff in March. It’s unclear how much HHS OCR has been cut. The FY 2026 budget request said the HHS OCR “has faced a continually growing number of cases in their backlog, rising to 6,532 cases by the end of FY 2024.” And that was before the office launched these new probes based on Trump’s priorities.

The HHS OCR receives roughly more than 40,000 complaints annually, a spokesperson said.

Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

A String of Investigations

Since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, HHS OCR has announced a spate of higher ed investigations, mostly without naming the institutions. The spokesperson said most are ongoing.

In early February, it announced investigations of four unnamed medical schools, also citing reports of antisemitism during their 2024 commencements. (That was the same month the Harvard investigation began, HHS OCR later said, so Harvard was likely among the four.)

On Feb. 21, Trump told Maine governor Janet Mills during a televised White House event that her state must bar transgender women from women’s sports or lose federal funding, to which Mills replied, “See you in court.” In response to this, the HHS OCR issued a news release that same day announcing an investigation into “the Maine Department of Education, including the University of Maine System,” due to reports that the “state will continue to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports.” (The HHS spokesperson said the investigation eventually found that the most relevant issues were unrelated to higher ed.)

In March, the office announced investigations into four unnamed “medical schools and hospitals” over “allegations and information” concerning medical education or scholarships “that discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, or sex.” The news release didn’t have much further detail but referenced a Trump executive order targeting “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Later that month—again citing the anti-DEI order—it announced it was investigating “a major medical school in California” over whether it “gives unlawful preference to applicants based on their race, color, or national origin.”

In April, it announced it was investigating an “HHS-funded organization” over whether it excludes “certain races” from a “health services research scholarship program.” Later in April, it launched an “online portal where whistleblowers can submit a tip or complaint regarding the chemical and surgical mutilation of children”—the Trump administration’s phrase for gender-affirming care. Simultaneously, it announced it’s investigating “a major pediatric teaching hospital” for allegedly firing a whistleblower nurse who “requested a religious accommodation to avoid administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children.” (The HHS spokesperson said the first Trump administration brought a focus on religious conscience rights to the office that disappeared under Biden but has now returned.)

Also in April, it announced a second Harvard probe: a joint investigation with the Education Department’s OCR into both Harvard and the Harvard Law Review “based on reports of race-based discrimination permeating the operations of the journal.” The HHS OCR news release said an editor of the law journal “reportedly wrote that it was ‘concerning’ that ‘[f]our of the five people’ who wanted to reply to an article about police reform ‘are white men.’” The office also raised concern about another editor allegedly suggesting expedited review for an article because the author was a minority.

In May, the HHS OCR announced it’s investigating a “prestigious Midwest university” over alleged discrimination against Jewish students. Later that month came its announcement of its joint finding with the Education Department OCR that Columbia University violated Title VI through “deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students.” (This was part of the administration’s pressure campaign on Columbia that culminated with a controversial July settlement.)

In June came the HHS OCR’s Title VI finding against Harvard in the investigation of alleged antisemitism. Then, in July, HHS OCR said it was investigating “allegations of systemic racial discrimination permeating the operations of Duke University School of Medicine and other components of Duke Health,” which includes “other Duke health professions schools” and “health research programs across Duke University.” In a statement alongside that announcement, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “Federal funding must support excellence—not race—in medical education, research, and training.”

And last week, after months of silence on new higher ed–related investigations, the HHS OCR announced an investigation into the legal scholarship of an HHS-funded “national organization,” over allegations that it “preferences applicants of certain races and national origin groups.”

Lhamon, the former Education Department OCR head, said what the administration has called civil rights investigations into Harvard, Columbia and other universities aren’t really investigations. She noted the administration has used a “mob theory” by going ahead and pulling HHS and other funding from multiple institutions before the investigations are over.

Instead, she said, this is “an assault on universities, which is a very different thing from ensuring compliance with the civil rights laws as Congress has enacted them.”

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September 24, 2025
Trump’s New York Times lawsuit is a call to action for the ‘paper of record’

This article originally appeared in MSNBC on Sept. 18, 2025.

President Donald Trump’s escalating legal battle against America’s media industry continued Monday as he filed a lawsuit against The New York Times. The whopping 85-page complaint alleges the paper defamed him, and it seeks $15 billion, plus punitive damages, which exceeds the market cap of the entire company.

The lawsuit refers to the Times’ historic reputation as the “newspaper of record,” and that’s important for understanding the stakes of the case. The moniker speaks to the Times’ massive readership and prestige but also to an authoritative role — often setting the standards in terms of fact-checking, objectivity and independence that produce a definitive accounting of events for the record books. They’re the standards to which other newspapers are held.

In light of that role, and Trump’s continued successful shakedowns of media outlets of lesser prestige, a capitulation would be devastating. Instead, the Times has an opportunity, and an obligation, to rise to its historic role by categorically rejecting the lawsuit — and putting a stop to a particularly insidious legal idea that provides support for Trump’s media war.

The complaint, which First Amendment law professor Don Herzog calls “a press release masquerading as a lawsuit,” is a massive document that leaves ample room to hit familiar Trump beats, finding time to pick at the Times’ “deranged” endorsement of Kamala Harris and to hail Trump’s 2024 win as the “greatest personal and political achievement in American history.”

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The alleged damages center on reporting published in the pages of the Times and in the book “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” written by Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, that suggested Trump’s multimillion-dollar inheritance from his father was largely a product of fraudulent tax evasion schemes and that Trump owes his later fortune to producer Mark Burnett’s “discovery” of him as a host for “The Apprentice.” But Trump alleges that he was already famous and that his success with “The Apprentice” was “thanks solely to President Trump’s sui generis charisma and unique business acumen.”

Through what Trump alleges are false statements and negligent fact-finding, the lawsuit claims this reporting sought to illegally “damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success” and “sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States.”

The lawsuit has been met with universal dismissal by First Amendment scholars. “The complaint is full of bluster,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, but “short on any allegations of specific false statements of fact that would meet the rigorous standards for defamation claims brought by public figures.”

One part of the complaint has been a particular focus of criticism, specifically where it states that the defendants had a “desire for President Trump to fail politically and financially. Each feels actual malice towards President Trump in the colloquial sense.”

As Fallow alluded, to prove defamation Trump must show “actual malice” on the part of the Times — and that’s a tough hill to climb, even assuming that the reporting is proven to be false.

As laid out in the landmark case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, actual malice requires Trump to prove that the defendants actually knew their statements were false — or at least entertained actual, serious doubts about their truth. So resting this lawsuit on the idea that the defendants just really, really dislike Trump was met with predictable disbelief by legal experts.

But this section and the broader lawsuit belie something more sinister than a blustery failure to establish its claims’ basic elements. Trump believes it is — or would like it to be — legally actionable to harm his political ambitions when you really, really dislike him. In his view, reporters should be liable for statements that make people not wish to support him.

Beyond being a threat to the media, this idea is a threat to the very speech that makes up the core of our democratic process. No politician is entitled to support or votes, and to commodify them in this way is a perversion of democratic self-governance and a threat to core political speech.

And we’ve already seen Trump advance this idea in his other lawsuits against the media.

The lawsuit has been met with universal dismissal by First Amendment scholars.

When he targeted CBS News last October, he alleged billions of dollars in damages from the impact of what he claimed was “deceptive editing” of a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Harris on campaign fundraising and “support values.” Later that year, he targeted pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register, claiming her polling miss was “election interference” that required him to “expend … campaign expenditures.” With legal help from my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Selzer is fighting these bogus claims.

The New York Times must similarly take this lawsuit as an opportunity to reject this idea, full stop. Its unique role in the media industry warrants a strong and defiant message in defense of the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate that depends on it.

Anything less risks a future in which Trump’s lawfare barrels through smaller outlets that don’t have the same resources.

FIRE has seen this in the campus context.

A negotiation and a settlement between Columbia and the Trump administration have led the administration to triumphantly charge at less resourced universities, such as George Mason University and George Washington University. As FIRE counsel Tyler Coward warned, “We said from the beginning it was going to take a big institution like Harvard or Columbia to stand up for its rights, and if they failed to do so — if they capitulated to unlawful demands from the administration — there was little hope for smaller institutions down the line.”

The New York Times, the Harvard of newspapers, should understand its role here accordingly.

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September 18, 2025
Higher Education Inquirer : Trump’s War on Reality
The second Trump administration has unleashed a coordinated assault on reality itself—an effort that extends far beyond policy disagreements into the realm of deliberate gaslighting. Agency by agency, Trump’s lieutenants are reshaping facts, science, and language to consolidate power. Many of these figures, despite their populist rhetoric, come from elite universities, corporate boardrooms, or dynastic wealth. Their campaign is not just about dismantling government—it’s about erasing the ground truth that ordinary people rely on.

Department of State → Department of War

One of the starkest shifts has been renaming the State Department the “Department of War.” This rhetorical change signals the administration’s embrace of permanent conflict as strategy. Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Princeton graduate and former hedge fund executive, embodies the contradiction: Ivy League polish combined with cable-news bravado. Under his watch, diplomacy is downgraded, alliances undermined, and propaganda elevated to policy.

Department of Defense

The Pentagon has been retooled into a megaphone for Trump’s narrative that America is perpetually under siege. Despite the promise of “America First,” decisions consistently empower China and Russia by destabilizing traditional alliances. The irony: many of the architects of this policy cut their teeth at elite think tanks funded by the same defense contractors now profiting from chaos.

Department of Education

Trump’s appointees have doubled down on dismantling federal oversight, echoing the administration’s hostility to “woke indoctrination.” Yet the leaders spearheading this push often come from private prep schools and elite universities themselves. They know the value of credentialism for their own children, while stripping protections and opportunities from working families.

Department of Justice

Justice has been weaponized into a tool of disinformation. Elite law school alumni now run campaigns against “deep state” prosecutors, while simultaneously eroding safeguards against corruption. The result is a justice system where truth is malleable, determined not by evidence but by loyalty.

Department of Health and Human Services

Public health has been subsumed into culture war theatrics. Scientific consensus on climate, vaccines, and long-term health research is dismissed as partisan propaganda. Yet many of the leaders driving this narrative hail from institutions like Harvard and Stanford, where they once benefited from cutting-edge science, they now ridicule.

Environmental Protection Agency

The EPA has become the Environmental Pollution Agency, rolling back rules while gaslighting the public with claims of “cleaner air than ever.” Appointees often come directly from corporate law firms representing Big Oil and Big Coal, cloaking extractive capitalism in the language of freedom.

Department of Labor

Workers are told they are winning even as wages stagnate and union protections collapse. The elites orchestrating this rollback frequently hold MBAs from Wharton or Harvard Business School. They speak the language of “opportunity” while overseeing the erosion of worker rights and benefits.

Department of Homeland Security

Reality itself is policed here, where dissent is rebranded as domestic extremism. Elite operatives with ties to intelligence contractors enforce surveillance on ordinary Americans, while elite families enjoy immunity from scrutiny.

The Elite Architecture of Gaslighting

What unites these agencies is not just Trump’s directives, but the pedigree of the people carrying them out. Far from being the populist outsiders they claim to be, many hail from Ivy League schools, white-shoe law firms, or Fortune 500 boardrooms. They weaponize their privilege to convince the public that up is down, war is peace and lies are truth.

The war on reality is not a sideshow—it is the central project of this administration. For elites, it is a way to entrench their power. For the rest of us, it means living in a hall of mirrors where truth is constantly rewritten, and democracy itself hangs in the balance.

Sources
- New York Times, Trump’s Cabinet and Their Elite Connections
- Washington Post, How Trump Loyalists Are Reshaping Federal Agencies
- Politico, The Ivy League Populists of Trump’s Inner Circle
- ProPublica, Trump Administration’s Conflicts of Interest
- Brookings Institution, Trump’s Assault on the Administrative State
- Center for American Progress, Gaslighting the Public: Trump’s War on Facts
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September 7, 2025
FIRE statement on ruling that Trump’s funding freeze for Harvard was unlawful

Today, a federal court echoed what FIRE has said all along: The Trump administration trampled Harvard University’s First Amendment rights and broke civil rights law when it yanked billions in federal grants and contracts over alleged Title VI violations.

The worthy goal of combating unlawful anti-Semitic discrimination on campus cannot justify the flatly unlawful and unconstitutional means used by the Trump administration in this attempted hostile takeover, including demanding that Harvard impose ideological litmus tests and restrictive speech codes. Our government may not use civil rights laws as a pretext to violate the First Amendment.

Read FIRE’s amicus brief here.

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September 3, 2025
Financial Aid Advisers Question Trump’s ID Verification Efforts

Many financial aid advisers are worried that the Trump administration’s latest effort to bolster identity verification in the student aid system could have unintended consequences. Instead of simply catching fraudulent grant applicants and borrowers, some fear that the verification process could also prevent real, eligible students from accessing public benefits.

Education Department officials, however, assure aid advisers that one of their top priorities is to distribute aid smoothly to the students who have a right to it, even as they protect the integrity of the taxpayer-funded programs.

In an electronic announcement published Aug. 12, Federal Student Aid officials said they would be checking the identities of an additional 300,000 aid applicants, on top of the 125,000 students already flagged in June. Some college advisers said they were alarmed by the sheer scale of the requests—especially given what they describe as a very tight timeline.

While aid officers generally support the concept of catching identity thieves, they fear that requiring students to complete the verification process so quickly could delay or even block aid access for some legitimate students, putting them in a financial hole. FSA says the program will eventually be automated, limited to first-time students and managed by agency officials. But at the moment, it’s a manual process that can affect students midway through their program; financial aid officers say it is becoming increasingly complicated and burdensome.

“Schools have been asking for help on how to find these people and prevent fraudulent identities from obtaining Title IV aid, so we’re very supportive of the Department of Ed’s attempts to assume responsibility,” said Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “Unfortunately, the timing and how long it took ED to get this off the ground means that it’s August … We are entering, if not already in, the season of really large-scale disbursement. If verification is outstanding, schools may have to hold disbursements for those students.”

The largest unknown seems to be what the consequences of an incomplete or overdue identity verification will be.

The majority of students in the latest wave of verification requests are returning to college and need to verify their identity for the 2024–25 academic year as well as secure their awards for 2025–26. But some were flagged solely for last academic year and in most instances have already graduated or stopped out, making it harder to track them down and complete the process.

Verification results for 2025–26 can be submitted up to 60 days after the data portal opens Aug. 31. At the same time, according to a Federal Register notice, verifications and any other changes to aid applications for 2024–25 must be completed by Sept. 13, making for a busy two weeks for students and aid officers.

Experts have raised a number of questions about whether missing this tight deadline for 2024 could have repercussions. Some fear it could block students from completing future identity verifications or receiving upcoming disbursements; others worry that aid already disbursed in 2024–25 will need to be retracted. Either way, they say, it could have a crippling effect on low-income students.

“There’s going to be a variety of impact,” one financial aid adviser said. “The monetary impact could be anything from a few hundred dollars to 10-, 15- or 20,000.”

However, the Office of Federal Student Aid told Inside Higher Ed that missing that deadline shouldn’t be a problem—except in rare situations.

Verifications for 2024 don’t have to be reported through the portal the same way upcoming 2025 ones do, one agency official said on background. Rather, aid officers just need to verify the student’s identity and determine internally whether a student’s 2024 aid should be awarded; therefore, “there’s no deadline that people are going to hit and fall afoul of,” he added.

And in the “rare” scenario where an institution discovers inaccuracies on a 2024 FAFSA form, the department said, colleges can reach out to FSA to ensure a student’s eligibility is not impacted.

‘We Are Not Blocking Students’

“If anyone has any examples of that Sept. 13 deadline actually being a blocker for students, we can move the deadline back, because we are here to make sure we are not blocking students,” the FSA adviser said. “There is no reason” a 2024 verification delay should affect a student’s ability to complete the 2025 process and have their award disbursed.

Department officials also noted that they have streamlined the process to reduce the administrative burden, cutting steps such as making students provide a statement of purpose or notarizing the verification.

And of the 300,000 aid applicants flagged in the most recent set of verification requests, the external vendor that helped identify them says that at least 50,000 are examples of fraud. The vendor is “very confident” that the other 250,000 are as well, the FSA official said, but the agency is playing it safe and having colleges check each case for good measure before stripping those recipients of aid.

Ellen Keast, the department’s deputy press secretary, said it’s all part of the agency’s “student- and taxpayer-first mentality.”

“We are committed to ensuring that every single dollar is spent on eligible students, not fraudsters,” she said. “This is not about putting a burden on postsecondary institutions; it’s about warning them, before they disburse both taxpayer money and their own, that the ‘student’ in front of them is most likely not a real person.”

But representatives from NASFAA and college financial aid officers are still not clear on how the process will play out.

Caleb Williams, director of enrollment management at Northern Arizona University, said that in addition to the typical verifications that occurred before the Trump administration’s new campaign was announced, selection rates for 2024–25 verification at his institution rose by 54 percent in June and another 13 percent in August. As he understands it, he added, a student “flagged for Identity verification cannot receive aid in any year until the process is completed.”

Meanwhile, Charles Mayfield, the director of financial assistance at Northwest Missouri State University, believes that if an institution misses the September deadline for 2024 verifications, it will not be able to reinstate any of last year’s aid. But it would still be able to complete the 2025 verification and process that year’s aid.

Mayfield hopes that the department will put out clarified guidance to relieve aid advisers’ confusion and explain exactly what the September deadline means, how it will be enforced and what the consequences will be for students. But like the staff at NASFAA, he said his greatest frustration is not the general need for clarification but its timing at the end of an academic year.

“These students have received financial aid for the whole academic year, and now it’s all going to be taken away, and they’re at risk of not being able to enroll for the next academic year,” he said. “In the industry, we all know that students who stop out are much less likely to finish their degree.”

It would be one thing if these concerns and challenges were specific to one college, Mayfair said, but when there are 15 or 20 colleges expressing the same confusion on a Listserv on the same day, the department should be more responsive.

“It feels like when something doesn’t go right, we have to prove to the FSA that it didn’t work the way it was supposed to,” he said. “And until we can outright prove that—using data that’s on their system, that they should already have access to—they won’t acknowledge it.”

McCarthy from NASFAA said that what the department told Inside Higher Ed about 2024 and 2025 verification being handled separately “sounds promising,” but as of Aug. 22 she hadn’t received the same notification from FSA.

Other smaller concerns, such as whether the system for flagging fraud is accurate and if the new portal is functional, also have yet to be addressed, she added.

“It’s an awful lot of work being pushed onto schools,” she explained. “So we want to make sure that it’s useful, beneficial work and that these are actual, really concerning applications, not sloppy work on the Department of Ed which then leads to delays for students.”

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August 27, 2025
FIRE statement on President Trump’s executive order to outlaw flag burning

On Aug. 25, President Donald Trump issued an executive order cracking down on flag burning, which is protected expressive activity under the First Amendment. During the signing, Trump remarked, “If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail.” The following statement can be attributed to FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere.

President Trump may believe he has the power to revise the First Amendment with the stroke of a pen, but he doesn’t.

Flag burning as a form of political protest is protected by the First Amendment. That’s nothing new. While people can be prosecuted for burning anything in a place they aren’t allowed to set fires, the government can’t prosecute protected expressive activity — even if many Americans, including the president, find it “uniquely offensive and provocative.”

You don’t have to like flag burning. You can condemn it, debate it, or hoist your own flag even higher. The beauty of free speech is that you get to express your opinions, even if others don’t like what you have to say.

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The right to burn the American flag sparks heated debate, but the First Amendment protects flag burning in most cases.

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August 25, 2025