This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday accusedGeorge Washington University of being “deliberately indifferent” to harassment of Jewish, American-Israeli and Israeli students and faculty.
The Justice Department, in an agency notice,cited a pro-Palestinian encampment on GWU’s University Yard for two weeksduring the spring 2024 term.The District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department cleared the encampment on May 8, arresting nearly three dozen people in the process.
About a week earlier, MPD had refused the university’s request to clear the encampment, and Police Chief Pamela Smith said the department had no plans to remove the demonstrators as long as they were peaceful.When police eventually cleared out the encampment, MPD cited a “gradual escalation in the volatility of the protest.”
The Justice Department has now accused GWU of violating Title VI,which bars federally funded institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin.
GWU is the latest university under fire from the Trump administration for allegedly not doing enough to protect students and employees from antisemitism.
These accusations are often followed by threats that colleges will lose vast swaths of their federal funding unless they adopt sweeping policy changes. Some Jewish lawmakers have accused President Donald Trump of weaponizing antisemitism to attack colleges.
The Trump administration is looking to negotiate with GWU, as it has with other institutions in its crosshairs. The notice of violation states that the Justice Department is offering to enter a “voluntary resolution agreement” with the university.
In the notice, the Justice Department alleges GWU leaders were deliberately indifferent to several incidents.
It says one Jewish student described “being surrounded, harassed, threatened, and then ordered to leave the area immediately by antisemitic protesters.”In another instance, the notice says a Jewish student holding up an Israeli flag near the encampment was surrounded by protesters who had linked arms “for the purpose of restricting the Jewish student’s movements.”
In a public statement on Tuesday, GWU said it is reviewing the Justice Department’s notice.
“GW condemns antisemitism, which has absolutely no place on our campuses or in our civil society,” the university said in the statement. “Moreover, our actions clearly demonstrate our commitment to addressing antisemitic actions and promoting an inclusive campus environment by upholding a safe, respectful, and accountable environment.”
The Trump administration recently hit the University of California, Los Angeles with similar accusations.
In late July, the Justice Department alleged that UCLA had also violated civil rights law. Like with GWU, Trump administration officials pointed to a pro-Palestinian encampment erected in the spring 2024 term that university officials cleared after about a week.
The Trump administration quickly suspended $584 million in federal funding, a move that brought University of California system leaders to the negotiating table in hopes of restoring the money.
However, UC President James Millikensaid in a statement on Aug. 6 that the funding cuts “do nothing to address antisemitism”and accused the Trump administration of ignoring both the system and UCLA’s efforts to combat antisemitism.
Just two days later, the Justice Department proposed a settlement with the university — a whopping $1 billion penalty.
Milliken issued a quick and blunt rebuke. “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” he said in an Aug. 8 statement.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
The University of Nebraska System is offering buyouts this fall to tenured faculty members eligible for retirement across its four campuses as the institution’s leaders look to shave $20 million from its budget.
Buyouts will be available to tenured faculty who will be at least age 62 at their date of separation and have worked at least 10 years in the system.More than 500 faculty members will qualify, according to reporting from Channel 8 News.
In a Friday message to faculty and staff, system Chancellor Jeffrey Gold said the buyouts would position the institution “for long-term strength and financial sustainability.” The system has made several rounds of cuts in the past few years in the face of rising costs and limited state funding increases.
Dive Insight:
Like many other higher education institutions, the University of Nebraska System has sought to lower its expenses amid myriad financial headwinds, including rising labor costs and state and federal funding challenges. In June, system leaders approved plans to cut $20 million from its budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year and raise tuition by an average of 5%.
Those moves come after system leaders slashed $11.8 million from the most recent budget and $30 million from two years prior. The system has also offered several waves of buyouts over the past 15 years, though the payouts have decreased, according to the Lincoln Journal Star.
In this case, those taking the buyouts will receive 70% of their annual base salary in a lump sum payment. In 2019, eligible faculty who took buyouts got 80% of their annual salary and in 2014 they received 90%, the Journal Star reported. In 2010, eligible faculty received 100% of their salary.
Faculty members who take the latest buyouts will separate from the university next summer.
However, not all faculty members who apply will automatically be approved. While the system plans to allow as many interested employees to participate as possible, an FAQ said “each campus reserves the right to limit the total number of participants in order to preserve the viability of programs and services, as well as to remain fiscally responsible.”
The news comes as the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the system’s flagship campus, plans to slash $27.5 million from its own budget by the end of the year to remedy a structural deficit. The cuts could include eliminating or merging academic programs.
Earlier this month, UNL President Rodney Bennett said will review a planning committee’s recommendations for cuts and present final budget recommendations to Gold in October.
UNL officials also plan to grow extramural grants and contracts and boost revenue through higher enrollment and retention. They also hope to see increased revenue from the system’s tuition hike, which raised in-state undergraduate tuition from $277 to $291 per credit hour.
The other institutions in the Nebraska system are the University of Nebraska at Kearney, the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
A recent hack of Columbia University’s computer system compromised the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people, including students and applicants, new documents show. Over all, about 870,000 individuals were affected by the breach.
The university provided draft notices to officials in Maine and California that it intends to send to affected parties in their states, according to the state attorneys general’s websites. Both states require that their residents be swiftly informed of any breach that includes their data, according to Bloomberg, which reported on the notices.
The notices said a technical outage disrupted some of the university’s IT systems in June, which led university leaders to suspect a possible cybersecurity attack. An investigation revealed that a hacker had taken files from Columbia’s system in May.
The stolen data includes any personal information prospective students provided in their applications or current students gave Columbia over the course of their studies, including their contact details, Social Security numbers, birthdays, demographic information, academic history, financial aid information, insurance details and health information. No patient data from the Columbia University Irving Medical Center seems to have been compromised, according to the notices. The university encouraged those affected to monitor account statements and credit reports to keep an eye out for any fraudulent activity. It also offered them two years of free credit monitoring and identity restoration services from a financial and risk advisory firm.
“We have implemented a number of safeguards across our systems to enhance our security,” the letters read. “Moving forward, we will be examining what additional steps we can take and additional safeguards we can implement to prevent something like this from happening again.”
A public statement from the university’s Office of Public Affairs last week said that since June 24, Columbia has seen no evidence of any further unauthorized access to the university’s system. Starting Aug. 7, the university promised to begin notifying affected students, employees and applicants on a rolling basis via mail.
“We recognize the concern this matter may have raised and appreciate your ongoing patience during this challenging time,” the statement read. “Please know we are committed to supporting the University community.”
A Columbia official previously toldBloomberg that the hacker seemed to be trying to further a “political agenda.” The investigation into the matter also found that the hacker was “highly sophisticated” and “very targeted.”
The alleged hacker, who got in contact with Bloomberg, gave the news outlet 1.6 gigabytes of data, claiming it contained decades’ worth of applications to Columbia. That application data included New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who applied to Columbia but didn’t get in.
Bloomberg confirmed with eight Columbia students and alumni, who applied between 2019 and 2024, that the information about them contained in the data was accurate. They verified that details such as their university-issued ID codes, citizenship statuses and admissions decisions were all correct. The data provided to Bloomberg didn’t contain names, Social Security numbers or birth dates.
The person claiming to be the hacker, who didn’t provide their name, texted Bloomberg that the purpose of the stolen data was to prove the university continued affirmative action in admissions after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against such practices. They claimed to have hacked about 460 gigabytes of data total from the university—including 1.8 million Social Security numbers of employees, students and their family members—after spending more than two months ensuring their access to Columbia’s computer systems.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
The University of California system agreed this week to enter negotiations with the Trump administration in an attempt to have $584 million in suspended federal funding restored to the University of California, Los Angeles.
The funding cut came after the U.S. Department of Justice alleged last week that UCLA broke civil rights law by not doing enough to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment.The agency also launched a probe into whether the UC system discriminates against employees by allowing an antisemitic, hostile work environment.
In announcing the negotiations Wednesday, UC President James Milliken called the UCLA cuts “a death knell for innovative work” and pushed back on the Trump administration’s justification for the revoked funding. “These cuts do nothing to address antisemitism,” he said. “Moreover, the extensive work that UCLA and the entire University of California have taken to combat antisemitism has apparently been ignored.”
Dive Insight:
Many of the Justice Department’s allegations against UCLA stem from a pro-Palestinian encampment erected on its campus in the spring 2024 term.
University leaders allowed the encampment to remain for nearly a week, citing a need to balance safety with free speech protections. They ultimately asked the Los Angeles Police Department to clear the encampment following a violent night in which counterprotesters attempted to tear down the encampment’s barricades, launched fireworks into it and hit pro-Palestinian demonstrators with sticks and other objects.
The pro-Palestinian protesters at times fought back, though video footage from the night shows few instances of them initiating confrontations, according to reporting from The New York Times. When police arrived — hours after violence first broke out — they didn’t step in immediately.
According to the Justice Department, at least 11 complaints were filed with UCLA alleging that students experienced discrimination based on race, religion or national origin from encampment protesters.
The agency also cited a UCLA task force report that found some encampment protesters formed human blockades to stop people — including students wearing the Star of David or those who refused to denounce Zionism — from freely moving throughout Royce Quad.
Milliken noted in his statement that UCLA has taken several steps since then to tighten campus protest policies and combat antisemitism. The university instituted a systemwide ban on encampments and launched a campus initiative in March to fight antisemitism, including through training and an improved system for handling complaints.
UCLA also agreed last month to pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit brought by three Jewish students and a Jewish professor who alleged the university violated their civil rights by allowing the encampment protesters to impede their access to the campus. Over one-third of the settlement payment will go toward organizations that fight antisemitism, The Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, the university is facing a separate lawsuit brought by about three dozen pro-Palestinian students, faculty and others who allege that UCLA’s leaders didn’t protect them from the counterprotesters and failed to uphold their right to free expression. The lawsuit also names the counterprotesters as defendants.
Their lawsuit says UCLA police merely “stood and watched” for hours while counterprotesters “ruthlessly attacked” the encampment demonstrators, alleging the group broke their bones, burned their eyes with chemicals, and hit them with metal rods and other weapons.
The next day, the LAPD and the California Highway Patrol cleared the encampment at the request of university leaders. According to the lawsuit, law enforcement “hurled flashbangs, shot powerful kinetic impact projectiles at peoples’ heads and faces, and used excessive physical force against and falsely arrested students, faculty, and concerned community members.”
Police arrested over 200 people while clearing the encampment. Those detained faced “invasive searches, false arrests, sexual assaults, and prolonged detentions,” and hijab-wearers were forced to remove their head coverings “infringing on their religious practices,” the lawsuit alleged.
The pro-Palestinian plaintiffs suing UCLA are seeking damages and for the judge to declare the clearing of the encampment illegal, among other measures.
LEXINGTON, K.Y., Aug. 7, 2025 — A University of Kentucky professor suspended for criticizing Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war now has legal representation thanks to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Ramsi Woodcock had established a steady career as a law professor at UK, where he has taught for seven years. He earned tenure in 2022 and was promoted to full professor on July 1.
Less than two weeks later, the vice provost of the university informed the professor that the university received unspecified complaints about Woodcock’s criticisms of Israel outside the classroom on his personal website and at conferences.
The university failed to respond to Woodcock’s requests for copies of the complaints. On July 18, university officials removed Woodcock from teaching and banned him from campus. The university also sent a message to its campus condemning Woodcock’s views as “repugnant” and publicly announcing an investigation.
Specifically, the university took issue with a petition Woodcock circulated to other law professors across the country that called for military action against Israel because of its war in Gaza, as well as his arguments that Israel should cease to exist.
“This isn’t complicated,” said Graham Piro, FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund fellow. “Woodcock’s arguments about Israel are clearly protected speech on a matter of public concern, and as a faculty member at a public institution, he has the right to voice his ideas, regardless of whether others find them objectionable. And reprimanding a professor over one set of views opens the door to further restrictions on other opinions down the road.”
With the help of the FLDF, Woodcock is being represented by Joe F. Childers of Joe F. Childers & Associates. Childers will work to lift Woodcock’s suspension so he can return to teaching in the classroom and continue speaking freely outside of it.
“Punishing me for my views on Israel sends a terrifying message to students and colleagues: voice the ‘wrong’ opinion on a sensitive subject and face consequences from the university,” Woodcock said. “It’s not only my career that’s at stake — it’s about whether the University of Kentucky will continue to exist as an institution that encourages and permits free thought and expression.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought—the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending the individual rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.
CONTACT:
Karl de Vries, Director of Media Relations, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]
The University of Utah’s trustee board approved plans Tuesday to discontinue 81 courses and degree programs in response to a new state law ordering public colleges to cut funding for certain academic offerings and administrative functions and invest in high-demand fields.
The programs up for elimination range from a bachelor’s in chemistry teaching to a Ph.D. in theater. Most of them are graduate programs, and about one-quarter are in the university’s humanities college. The programs can be discontinued once the Utah System of Higher Education and state lawmakers sign off on the plan, according to a Tuesday announcement from the university.
Each of the programs graduated at most one student over the past eight years, Richard Preiss, president of the university’s Academic Senate, said in a July 22 letter to the board.Students in affected programs will either be given pathways to complete their studies or referred to “academically appropriate alternatives,” the university said.
Dive Insight:
Earlier this year, Utah lawmakers cut 10% from the instruction budgets for each of the state’s eight public colleges, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. The cuts amounted to $60.5 million, with University of Utah facing the largest budget reduction of $19.6 million.
To reclaim the funding, the legislation orders colleges to craft three-year plans for cutting certain academic programs and administrative expenses and redirecting the money to high-demand programs.
In guidance released earlier this year, the Utah System of Higher Education said the funds could be reinvested in programs that meet the state’s workforce needs, lead to high-wage careers, teach students “durable skills” such as critical thinking and problem-solving, or focus on services to increase student retention.
The law came on the heels of a 2024 legislative audit that said the state’s public universities were losing students to “private non-traditional” colleges, such as Western Governors University, a large online institution. The audit also found that university leaders largely weren’t able to calculate program-level data about costs, enrollment and completion rates.
“Because institutions currently lack metrics required to calculate program-level efficiencies — including returns on investment — presidents are unable to fully understand the degree to which programs maximize their use of student and taxpayer resources,” the audit stated.
The University of Utah submitted a draft of its three-year plan to the state’s higher education board in May.
Under the plan, the university said it would cut $7.5 million from its fiscal 2026 budget— including reductions in academic support services and administrative costs — and reallocate that money to instruction aligned with the state’s workforce needs.
The university said it plans to devote more money to instruction in engineering, artificial intelligence, nursing, biotechnology and behavioral health, as well as to provide more support for general education about civic engagement.
Utah lawmakers aren’t the only ones ordering public colleges to shed certain programs. Six of Indiana’s public institutions are moving to either cut or consolidate over 400 programs to comply with a new state law aiming to end academic offerings that award low numbers of degrees.
The impacted programs account for 19% of all degree offerings at Indiana’s public colleges.
Credit for prior learning is one strategy colleges and states can employ to expedite adult learners’ progress toward their degrees and promote student success. Past research also shows that students who take advantage of CPL opportunities have higher employment rates and increased earnings after graduation.
But administering CPL can be a challenge, in part because of different departments’ and academic disciplines’ understanding and evaluation of prior experience.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Colleen Sorensen, Utah Valley University’s director of CPL and student assessment services, about new state legislation requiring credit for prior learning opportunities for students and how her office supports instructors and learners navigating CPL.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Colleen Sorensen, director of credit for prior learning and student assessment services
Colleen Sorensen, Utah Valley University
Q: Can you introduce yourself, your work and your institution to our audience?
A: My name is Colleen Sorensen. I’ve been at Utah Valley University located in Orem, Utah, for about 31 years. We’re a pretty large institution; we’re actually the largest in the state of Utah. Our enrollment in fall 2024 was 46,809 students. Now, of that, about 45,000 were undergraduates, just under 1,000 were graduate students, and we actually have a pretty large number of concurrent enrollment students. About 16,000 of our students are working towards adding some college-level work while they’re still in high school, and we’re open enrollment. All of that together makes for a really interesting blend of individuals, from first-generation to returning students to nontraditional who all come together at Utah Valley.
I have the lucky pleasure of working with them in the space of credit for prior learning. I was officially made director [of CPL] in 2022; before that, I’ve been over all of testing services for the institution for about the last 25 years. So I’ve been a part of the credit for prior learning process with exam administration for challenge exams and CLEP and ACT and SAT and standardized assessments and professional licensure assessments. Now I get to work also in the space of making credit for prior learning, instead of it being just a department-run system, to taking that and scaling it and modeling it across the entire institution so that all of our academic departments have access to and support to develop credit for prior learning options.
Q: When you talk about this expansion and scaling of credit for prior learning across the institution, can you share more about how that looks and what that’s meant, in terms of where you started and now the vision moving forward?
A: When I started in this, we had a few areas that were already doing quite a bit of work in this space.
One of the things we value in the state of Utah is service, and so a lot of our students will stop out from college and go serve as missionaries across the world for 18 to 24 months.
During that time, they’re often learning a new language. Then they come back to UVU. Our language department recognized that years ago and put together a credit for prior learning process for those students to earn upwards of 16 credits of language [courses] if they can demonstrate [their skill] through a placement test and a course with a faculty member. If they pass that course, they’ll get up to 16 credits of 1000- to 2000-level language. So that’s been going on for a long time.
In 2019, there was legislation that was passed just before COVID that required all of the public higher ed institutions in the state of Utah to provide credit for prior learning options at a larger scale. So with the pandemic, that kind of put it on the back burner for a while, but in 2022 I started to pick this up as a new assignment.
At first, I met with different department chairs. I don’t know if it was just wrong timing with the pandemic, but it felt like a lot of doors closed to it at that time. But there were a few departments that were like, “Oh, I was one of those nontraditional students. I would like to see more opportunities in this space.”
And so slowly but surely, I started working with a few faculty, a few departments and started building sustainable systems of, how can we assess these students? Because each student is unique in what they bring as an adult learner. It’s not just like, “Let’s open this one program and as long as they have step one, two, three and four, they can award credit.” Each student needs to be looked at very uniquely. So I designed what I call a concierge approach to this process, where students can apply through our credit for prior learning website. We have a small team of students and part-timers and myself who are looking at what the student has provided. We’re prompting them with different things and then we’re reaching out within the academic community at UVU to look at possible matchups for credit for prior learning. So when we started, we only had a few departments that would engage with us, and now up to 75 percent of our academic departments are not just looking at but considering and awarding credit.
This year alone, we’ve awarded almost 6,000 credits to CPL over 1,500 courses. In just six months, we’ve saved students over $1.6 million in tuition. So that’s exciting to me.
Q: You bring up an interesting point with this division of responsibility between your office and then the faculty and the academic role in CPL. We want to ensure that students are actually meeting those learning outcomes and that the credits that we’re awarding them do reflect their experiences. But there can be some tension or a challenge point there when it comes to ensuring that there are these systems set up and making sure that every student is being recognized in the ways that reflect their abilities and their learning.
I wonder if you can talk about building that bridge between your office and these academic departments and how you opened up the conversation to make this a space that’s both trusting but also institutionalized.
A: What’s been really important is for me to establish [is] that I’m here to support academic departments and to ensure that the CPL policy that I’m the steward of is being met, but that the governance happens with the subject matter experts and the departments themselves.
Because the way that the school of business assesses prior learning is going to be very different than the way that dance or the botany lab assesses prior learning. I wanted to make sure that each department chair and subject matter expert understands that they’re in charge of deciding what we assess, how we assess it and when we assess it.
Some departments only look at 4000-level coursework for CPL. Others look at 1000- [and] 2000-level coursework. It’s not my job to tell them how to do that within their area. They’re the ones who know. My job is to support them with [questions such as:] Do we need to bring in a national expert in your area if the department is not feeling confident in doing this yourself? Or to bring in templates for them or trainings for them of how to assess their particular type of coursework?
That’s how I support them and then help them navigate through the whole process so that it’s not left to bureaucracy, red tape of sorts, just to support them all the way through.
Q: CPL can be a very confusing process for the student. Can you talk about how UVU seeks to support students as they navigate the process? One, in understanding that this is available to them and that you can recognize their prior learning, but also, what that process looks like and how they might feel navigating that situation.
A: Some departments have things really well established on their websites. Others do not. And so that’s why we have the CPL office and the CPL website. It’s a basic inquiry; it just asks a few questions to the student of, what are your academic goals? What do you think you might be eligible for and how much involvement do you want from us? Do they want a phone call from one of our CPL concierge support individuals, or do they just want to be sent on their way and take care of it themselves?
We really allow the student to gauge that, but we’re here to support them from inquiry all the way up until the credit is awarded. They can walk into our office, or they can contact us via the website and we’ll help them figure out any part of the process such as, do we just need to connect two individuals together? Do we have a faculty member who might be away and so their request has been sitting in a queue for longer than feels natural or normal to a college student? Or what is the natural process that the department has established?
Some departments will say that they’ll review inquiries during these windows of time and maybe the student didn’t catch that piece of information. We’ll reinforce that for the department to say, “Yes, you’re in the queue. It’s going to get reviewed during XYZ, so just hang tight and if you have any other questions, contact us again.”
We are there to support [students] all the way through. That’s the concierge aspect of it, and we found that to be really valuable, because there’s a lot of moving parts when it comes to credit for prior learning and creative solutions that we might not have thought of.
I’ll get three or four different areas together—I might get an associate dean, an adviser and two subject matter experts in a room together. I’m like, “OK, let’s look at this case. What can we do with what we know and what have we not thought of before? How do we best support the student in their academic goals while still keeping all of our academic rigor required?”
Q: I imagine you play the role of translator sometimes, too—helping the student understand what the department is asking and helping the department understand what the student wants to know—which can be a really needed role. It’s wonderful that you have yourself and your team to help draw those dots and connect the lines and make sure everybody’s working towards the same goal.
A: Yes. I’m setting up working with different departments on, “OK, if they do a challenge exam or they do a portfolio review, can they do a second [attempt]?” There are pros and cons to each, right? We want academic rigor, but also, depending on the area, it’s very contextual per level of course and program.
So for someone who’s going for a very high level of coursework [in CPL], is it a one-time [exam] or do you offer a retake, [giving them] one more time with some feedback, helping the student to be able to speak to the learning outcomes more clearly? I’ve seen departments do it both ways. Some will say, “No, they should either know it or they don’t, or they need to be in the classroom.”
The academic departments will go to their board of trustees and talk about it and have a good conversation of, “How much leeway do we want to give here?” Our policy states that you’re allowed up to one retake or not. Sometimes it works in the benefit [of the student] to have it be an all or nothing. And again, that’s very department and program specific. It’s not my job to tell them what it should or shouldn’t be; they know best.
Q: CPL can be very resource intensive, one, for the institution and the faculty or whoever is assessing the project, and sometimes there’s a fee associated for students. Can you talk about the labor, the time and the resources that go into this work and how you help coordinate that? And how is the institution investing in this work?
A: That is the hottest topic of conversation in this work. We’re a very large institution, the course load of our faculty— Adding this on top of it can feel significant in how much time it takes. This isn’t a quick grading process. To grade a portfolio, or to prepare for an oral interview or to write a challenge exam that needs to be updated on a regular basis, all of that takes faculty time.
At the moment, at our institution, there are small amounts of dollars involved that go back to the department who do the assessments and then the department decides whether they pool that money together or they pay out to their faculty. Often they’ll have a conversation among themselves of what’s the best usage of this and do a collaborative decision. Some it’s to pay the faculty; for others, it’s to help fund something that all of the faculty have agreed to.
Ideally, in our future, we would like to see more fees, smaller out of pocket, less than $100 fees, attached to credit for prior learning assessments. But we don’t have full consensus yet among all ofour leadership, and so that is still to be determined at our institution.
Q: Good luck with that conversation. It’s always fun to enter shared governance conversations, especially when we’re talking about student success and what’s gonna be best for the learner at the end of the day.
As we’re thinking about scaling and institutionalizing CPL across UVU, one thing I wanted to ask about is some of those processes that can be very easy. We’ve talked about language requirements and how students who have come from their missions—that’s a pretty set process and it’s pretty understood and simple to navigate for the student. Are there other processes that you’re looking at or working with departments to streamline how this works and what a student can expect?
A: There’s a few things that we’re doing to help this. One, we’re encouraging every department to have some real estate on their home page, on their website, of CPL options so that students can look very quickly if they’re shopping at two o’clock in the morning and don’t want to wait for a response from one of our team who tend to work more traditional hours. We want websites to be able to cater to that, as well as we want advising conversations to be able to cater to that.
We’re even asking faculty to put CPL options on their syllabi, so that if a student sits down on day one and they’re looking at this course and they’re looking at the topics, they’re looking at the learning outcomes, they’re like, “I already know this.” Wouldn’t it be great to also see, “And here’s a credit for prior learning option that you could challenge this,” that maybe they missed up until this point in advising or on the websites, or maybe they didn’t know to contact the CPL office? The syllabus is also another place of marketing as well as [traditional] marketing, which we attempt to do quite a bit of, that could help the student to recognize that there’s another option here.
Q: If you had to give advice to a peer working in a similar role at a different institution, are there any lessons you’ve learned or insights you would want to pass on in this work and the ways that you’ve been advancing this university goal?
A: Start small, but strategically. Like find a department or a faculty champion who has a clear use case, like a common industry certification or a workforce training pathway and then support them with some tools, some templates, some training. Don’t just tell them, “You got to figure this out.”
Center it on the student experience. Talk with your students, learn what they wish could have happened, because there’s so much that can be done, or that might already be being done. It’s just that this department may not understand what that department is doing.
Something that we did this year for the first time is we hosted a faculty summer institute. It’s a three-week commitment, but it’s one day of being together in person. Faculty had to apply for this, and there were four areas of focus—you needed to have a tangible asset at the end of this. One was to develop a CPL pathway. Another was to embed a credential into a program. Another was experiential learning, and the fourth was a continuing education credit process for those who have finished up and now they just want to add on.
We did offer a stipend to these individuals who were approved to come to this training. We spent the morning in education—we brought in Nan Travers, director of the Center for Leadership in Credential Learning from SUNY Empire State College, who is considered the fairy godmother of all credentialing. She was fabulous—to teach and train our faculty. Then we brought in a statewide person to discuss workforce alignment. Then we had a luncheon and we strategically placed all of the faculty into their area of focus. So seated at my table were faculty all focused on generating a credit for prior learning pathway. We had botany, biotech, psychology, computer science and business accounting. They’re all coming in from different schools within the institution.
We sat together at lunch and then we had an afternoon of working on the projects. So Nan was there, as the expert; she would come around to the tables and discuss things and answer questions. But these faculty got to interact with each other, with people outside of their standard focus, and they loved it. They said, at the end of the day, “I never get to do this. I never get to talk with faculty outside of my own area of focus.” They were passing phone numbers to each other. They were sharing their models and thinking and helping tweak each other’s.
It was such a fun, collaborative experience. And we have 11 new CPL pathways that came out of that one day, and then we gave them another three weeks to work on it. We plan to continue to do that summer after summer. We need funding from our administration to help pay the faculty to do that, but I will advocate to do that again and again. It was so successful.
Q: It’s almost like a CPL incubator, like how they have the student entrepreneurship programs, but for faculty to think about ways to be entrepreneurial in their own field.
A: Yeah and, you know, they said, “Thank you for thinking about me and my needs as the faculty member,” really taking care to be able to answer their questions and help them get over those mental blocks that they were experiencing of, “I don’t know how to address this or this or this.” We took care of all of that that day.
Q: It’s nice to just do it all in one day sometimes, too, right? It’s not an email chain. It’s not a series of meetings—like, we can all just sit in the same room and figure it out all in one go.
A: One thing we’re known for in Utah is we like soda with mix-ins. So we had a little beverage bar for them to go get drinks whenever they wanted, with a cute little mix-in to keep them energized and caffeinated all afternoon.
Q: That’s so fun. So as you’re thinking about this work, what are your goals for the upcoming year? Where do you want this program to go?
A: Yeah. There’s a couple things. One, I would like to get us from 75 percent of departments tapping into CPL to over 90 percent, for starters.
We’ve been hosting at UVU for the last three years a statewide conference. We brought in all the other USHE [Utah System of Higher Education] schools to just share best practices in credit for prior learning and ask things such as: How do we make this work? How do we track the data? How do we compare things and be more inclusive as a whole structure within the state of Utah and have less competition between schools? How do we be more collaborative in this process? So continuing to expand that conference is one thing.
I’m partnering with another school, Salt Lake Community College, starting this fall to do a once-a-month lunch and learn hourlong best practices over the phone. Covering, “Hey, what’s keeping you up at night? What are your headaches? How have you solved this?” Just allowing everyone to learn together, because we’re all pretty new, since this legislative mandate in 2019, of really bringing this into fruition. And how do we not reinvent the wheel, but just learn from each other?
Those are a few things, as well as, UVU launched a campuswide adult learner initiative in 2022, and it’s strategically housed within the provost suite. It’s focused on reimagining adult education over all. We’re focusing on student support and faculty support, as well as credit for prior learning. As I said earlier, kind of getting into the mind of the adult learner. I’d really like to see more conversation in the coming year, and my goal is to have conversations around this—could we do shorter-term classwork, or more hybrid classwork, where students are on campus? Because we find there’s great value in face-to-face, what if we’re only bringing them to campus once a week and we’re hybrid twice a week for courses? Can we offer more adult learner–friendly pedagogy? What does that look like and how can we accomplish that? So, I’d like to spend more time in that space in the coming year and really listening to students of what’s working and what’s not working.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
Stanford University laid off 363 staff memberslast week as part of a plan to reduce its budget by $140 million for the 2025-26 academic year.
In a July 31 message to campus, senior university leaders attributed the need for cuts to “a challenging fiscal environment shaped in large part by federal policy changes affecting higher education.”
The private California institution warned of forthcoming layoffs in June, when it extended a hiring freeze implemented in February and said it would focus capital spendingon critical projects or those with external sources of funding.
Dive Insight:
“Ongoing economic uncertainty” has created serious challenges for the higher education sector, according to Elizabeth Zacharias,Stanford’s vice president for human resources.
“At Stanford, anticipated changes in federal policy — such as reductions in federal research funding and an increase in the excise tax on investment income — are expected to have significant budgetary consequences,” Zacharias said in a July 31 filing with the California Employment Development Department.
Like many research institutions, Stanford has suffered under the tidal wave of efforts by the Trump administration to slash federal spending on research and development — despite some of those moves being blocked in court for the time being.
Changes to the endowment tax could also hit Stanford hard.
In fiscal 2024, the university had the fourth-largest endowment among U.S. colleges, valued at $37.6 billion, according to research from the National Association of College and University Business Officersand asset management firm Commonfund.
Before 2017, colleges did not pay taxes on their endowment earnings. That year, a GOP-controlled Congress enacted a 1.4% tax on private nonprofit colleges with at least $500,000 in endowment assets per student.
But President Donald Trump’s signature spending bill introduced a tiered tax based on endowment assets per student that will more than quintuple the tax for the wealthiest institutions from 1.4% to 8%.Stanford, with roughly $2.1 million in endowment assets per full-time-equivalent student, will likely pay the top rate.
These shifts, combined with rising operational costs and changes to funding sources and programs, pushed Stanford to implement layoffs, Zacharias said.
Stanford employs 18,000 staff and faculty, according to its website.
The affected employees — about 2% of its workforce — worked in departments from across the university, ranging from student support services to libraries to donor and alumni relations, according to legal filings.
In addition to 60 days oflegally mandated paid notice to impacted workers, eligible employees received severance packages and career transition services, a university spokesperson confirmed Wednesday.
