Universities can’t encourage professors to wade into controversial subjects, then punish professors for disagreeing with the administration
Court: “Student discomfort with a professor’s views can prompt discussion and disapproval. But this discomfort is not grounds for the university retaliating against the professor.”
SEATTLE, Dec. 19, 2025 — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today delivered a decisive victory for the First Amendment rights of public university faculty in Reges v. Cauce. Reversing a federal district court’s opinion, the Ninth Circuit held University of Washington officials violated the First Amendment when they punished Professor Stuart Reges for substituting his satirical take on the university’s preferred “land acknowledgment” statement on his syllabus.
On Dec. 8, 2021, Reges criticized land acknowledgment statements in an email to faculty, and on Jan. 3, 2022, he parodied UW’s model statement in his syllabus: “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.” Reges’s statement was a nod to John Locke’s philosophical theory that property rights are established by labor.
Represented by FIRE, Reges filed a First Amendment lawsuit in July 2022 challenging the university’s actions, which included a months-long “harassment” investigation. University officials created a competing class, so students wouldn’t have to take a computer science class from someone who didn’t parrot the university’s preferred opinions.
“Today’s opinion is a resounding victory for Professor Stuart Reges and the First Amendment rights of public university faculty,” said FIRE attorney Gabe Walters. “The Ninth Circuit agreed with what FIRE has said from the beginning: Universities can’t force professors to parrot an institution’s preferred political views under pain of punishment.”
Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Daniel Bress stated: “A public university investigated, reprimanded, and threatened to discipline a professor for contentious statements he made in a class syllabus. The statements, which mocked the university’s model syllabus statement on an issue of public concern, caused offense in the university community. Yet debate and disagreement are hallmarks of higher education. Student discomfort with a professor’s views can prompt discussion and disapproval. But this discomfort is not grounds for the university retaliating against the professor. We hold that the university’s actions toward the professor violated his First Amendment rights.”
That’s exactly right.
“Today’s opinion recognizes that sometimes, ‘exposure to views that distress and offend is a form of education unto itself,’” said FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley. “As we always say at FIRE: If you graduate from college without once being offended, you should ask for your money back.”
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]
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A long line of students wrapped around Texas A&M University’s academic plaza in early October to receive free training from Google employees on how to use the company’s artificial intelligence tools, such as its chatbot, Gemini, and its research assistant, NotebookLM.
That same day, about 400 faculty members huddled in a campus building for deeper training from Google on how they could use AI tools to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms and how to effectively and ethically help their students use them as well, said Shonda Gibson, Texas A&M System’s chief transformation officer.
The daylong event was part of Google’s three-year $1 billion initiative to support AI education and job training programs throughout the U.S. The initiative, which launched in August, supports the tech giant’s AI for Education Accelerator that provides higher education studentsand educators with free access to tools and training and aims to create a community of institutions sharing best practices.
Texas A&M is one of over 200 higher ed institutions that have signed up for Google’s accelerator, according to Lisa Gevelber, founder of Grow with Google, the company’s workforce development campaign.They include higher ed systems like the University of Texasand University of North Carolina, as well as large institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan and University of Virginia.
“Every student deserves access to the digital tools and the skills and training to set them up for success. And this is our commitment to supporting that,” said Gevelber.
The initiative comes as colleges race to ensure their students are prepared to enter a workforce that is becoming increasingly shaped by AI.
“It’s not just about using the tools,” said Gibson. “We really want our students to have the best experience possible so that they’re fully prepared whenever they leave us to go on and do whatever they’re going to do in their future.”
Professors that integrate AI into their lessons should follow guidance on how to use it to further student learning, said Alexa Joubin,director of George Washington University’s Digital Humanities Institute.
Without that guidance, students risk using AI as a shortcut by having it summarize information for them instead of actually reading the materials presented and experiencing their lessons, said Joubin.
Meanwhile, recent research suggests AI could be detrimental to students’ skills and outcomes.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study released in June found that using AI tools to write essays can impact critical thinking skills and lead to lower cognitive performance.
Over four months, study participants who used AI tools to write essays underperformed at “neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” compared with those who didn’t, raising concerns about the long-term educational implications of relying on the technology, the study found.
Students are essentially “outsourcing key cognitive tasks to AI,” said Joubin.
The $1 billion initiative
The Texas A&M System joined Google’s initiative, Gibson said, because officials viewed the tech behemoth as the only company offering assistance and guidance at that level.
Gibson also pointed out the free access to normally paid versions of Google tools, which will be available over the next two years to students attending the system’s 12 institutions.
Google’s tools can act as a personal tutor for students to help them work through problems and learn material in a customized way, said Gevelber.
Gemini, for example, has a guided learning feature that can accommodate their learning needs, said Gevelber. The guided learning tool, for example, asks students probing and open-ended questions to spark discussions and dig deeper into the subjects, and it also introduces images, diagrams, videos and interactive quizzes to help them learn topics.
And NotebookLM allows students to upload lecture notes or class reading materials so it can create personalized quizzes, study guides, summaries and even AI podcasts that present the information in an engaging way, Gevelbar said.
“I’m really blown away by how much Google has offered support for all this work,” said Gibson. “They’ve had a real concentrated, strategic approach to supporting higher education and K-12.”
Texas A&M system students and faculty can also access Google’s Career Certificates, which offers courses on topics such as AI literacy and AI prompting courses that are operated by Coursera
The Career Certificates program is available for free to all students at institutions participating in Google’s accelerator. That program provides training for entry-level jobs in career fields like data entry, cybersecurity, analytics, information technology support and project management, Gevelber said. Since it launched in 2018, more than 1 million students have received certificates, Gevelber said.
Using AI with ‘strategic intentionality’
The Google initiative is not the Texas A&M System’s first foray into AI initiatives. System leaders have invested in AI training in recent years, in part because they believe the tools help improve grades and lower course withdrawals, said Gibson.
The system teaches professors how to effectively incorporate AI into their courses through an intensive faculty training effort with the Association of College and University Educators that launched five years ago, said Gibson. Seven of the system’s universities also provide students with AI training via certificates on Coursera’s learning platform through a separate initiative, part of a two-year trial that the system is paying for, she said.
The university aims to allow students to test and try things, make mistakes, and know how to use different technologies so they are prepared to enter the workforce, Gibson said. To accomplish that, the system needs to train its faculty and staff how to use generative AI tools so they can be deliberate about how they embed them in courses and academic programs, she said.
“It is our responsibility to teach students to use it ethically and effectively and we have to do that with a lot of strategic intentionality,” said Gibson.
Professors shouldn’t try to avoid AI, but they should be purposeful about how they allow students to use the tools, said Joubin, who is also an English professor at George Washington.
In disciplines that require students to pay particularly close attention to word choices, such as humanities, outsourcing cognitive tasks to AI can be particularly problematic. That’s because the words people use to describe the world around them — such as a piece of art — can affect how others perceive it, said Joubin.
“It is our responsibility to teach students to use it ethically and effectively and we have to do that with a lot of strategic intentionality.”
Shonda Gibson
Chief transformation officer, Texas A&M System
Joubin uses a custom open source AI program in her classes that draws only from her own lectures, publications and materials, she said. It’s also narrowly tailored — the technology isn’t used to help students write essays but rather to help them think about words or topics more deeply, she said.
If a student asks it a question, for example, the tool will respond with additional questions. She also asks students to rewrite an idea or a sentence in as many different voices as they can, such as from a lawyer, someone at a corporation or a poet. Then she asks the students to use AI to carry out the same task — giving them even more examples of voices.
“We don’t use AI for any task that requires accuracy, such as information retrieval,” Joubin said, adding that they instead use it as a “thinking partner.”
In other disciplines, like computer science, students could use AI to write code, said Joubin. AI tools, such as GitHub Copilot, can assist people who are coding.
But asking AI to write code from scratch is “an utter waste of time,” and not a substitute for students building domain expertise themselves, Joubin said. The quality of the AI-generated code is often lacking — and it may actually take longer and use more resources to create, she said.
“There are many ways to code something, to execute a task,” said Joubin. “For people who think that STEM needs AI, will just do well with AI without this kind of critical thinking or reflection, they are being deceived.”
Google’s guided learning tools, meanwhile, aim to help people challenge their thinking — giving them different points of view and expanding their thinking about a particular problem, said Gevelber.
At Texas A&M, professors will adapt their AI policies to different situations — ranging from banning students from using the tools in their classrooms, allowing students to use them cautiously under their guidance, and giving students full access to them after some basic instruction, she said.
“That is going to differ depending on the type of course, the level of the course, what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with your students,” said Gibson. But “Gen AI is something we have to be open and transparent about. How do we want our students to use it?”
In this episode, the vice-chancellor of James Cook University Simon Biggs and HEDx’s Martin Betts interview Lisa Brodie, the dean of an innovative new independent college in the UK, ASU London.
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While more details are expected at the University of Liverpool India’s launch event in Bangalore on December 15, the campus in the integrated township — which includes residential, commercial, and institutional facilities — will feature “flexible spaces”, according to the university.
The campus will have smart classrooms, research and collaborative spaces, specialised labs, and comprehensive co-working hubs for faculty, students, and entrepreneurs, offering a “state-of-the-art, 360-degree learning environment” for its inaugural cohort, set to begin in August 2026.
“We are looking forward to welcoming our inaugural cohort of talented students in 2026 and providing them with an exceptional learning experience that strengthens their skills and employability,” said Lucy Everest, chief operating officer, University of Liverpool.
She visited Bangalore and Mumbai this week to meet educators, potential applicants, and alumni as the university plans to grow the campus to 5,000 students in five years and 10,000 in 10.
“Alembic City is the perfect place to realise this vision and our new campus will provide our students with the very best facilities to support their learning journey with us.”
By the time we open next summer, we’ll have developed relationships with a wide range of businesses and social enterprises in Bangalore, which will be really important for students Tim Jones, University of Liverpool
The university has also opened admissions for 2026, offering postgraduate programs in accounting and finance and computer science, alongside undergraduate courses in business management, biomedical sciences, computer science, accounting and finance, and a game design program — “which combines the university’s music and computer science departments, something not many other UK campuses are offering in India”, according to vice-chancellor, Tim Jones.
“What we will ensure is that there’s a ‘Liverpool feel’ to the campus. Students who come to the University of Liverpool, Bangalore, should experience the distinctive elements of Liverpool,” Jones told The PIE News.
“There will be unique features in the design that I hope students will really appreciate.”
For Jones — who was part of the 126-member UK delegation to India led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which included entrepreneurs, cultural figures and university leaders following the landmark trade deal between the two countries — Bangalore was a natural choice for the new campus for a range of reasons.
The city, a major IT hub with leading Indian and multinational tech and biotech firms, is familiar ground for the red-brick Russell Group university, which has a long-standing, research partnership with the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) and ongoing collaborations with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. Both institutions also happen to have two of the world’s oldest and most prominent biochemistry departments.
Moreover, one of the University of Liverpool’s biggest corporate partners is Unilever, which has an R&D centre in Bangalore, with pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca and IT firms like Wipro also expected to play a role in research, innovation and industry collaboration through the India campus.
“We did explore other cities, but it was quite easy for us to pick Bangalore because we had already begun building strong relationships in the city and the wider Karnataka region,” stated Jones, who praised the city’s tech-entrepreneurial culture and the opportunities it offers for a university to “engage, collaborate and grow”.
“By the time we open next summer, we’ll have developed relationships with a wide range of businesses and social enterprises in Bangalore, which will be really important for students. This is a big focus for us this year — we have already started, and we’ll be doing much more.”
In the lead-up to the campus opening next year, the University of Liverpool will focus on faculty exchanges between the Liverpool and Bangalore campuses, attracting international students, and expanding scholarship opportunities for its India-based cohort, according to Jones.
But the university — which views global engagement and partnerships as central to its Liverpool 2031 strategy — is not the only UK institution advancing its India campus plans.
Nine UK universities now have approval to establish campuses in the South Asian country, with the University of Southampton leading the pack, already welcoming around 150 students in the first cohort at its Gurugram campus in August this year.
In this landscape, the University of Liverpool aims to distinguish itself from other UK institutions by offering distinctive programs and embedding research from “day one”, drawing on lessons from its only other international branch campus — the Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, China — as it shapes its approach in India.
“We have experience from our successful campus in China, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary and has nearly 30,000 students. That experience gives us confidence that we can succeed in India as well,” stated Jones.
“The funding model was also different 20 years ago. But the exchange of staff and students is embedded in what we do in China. I see the same happening with India as the campus develops.”
However, despite the China campus’s success, recent reports suggest it may require stronger oversight amid concerns about teaching methods, class sizes, and students’ English proficiency.
While the rapid push to establish branch campuses in India has also sparked debate about the trend among major UK universities, Jones says he is focused on making Liverpool’s India launch a “big success”.
“It took us 20 years to go from China to India. There will likely be other ventures in the future, but right now, I’m very focused on making this a big success — for the students, for the university, and for India,” stated Jones.
The student who wrote that line in FIRE’s annual free speech survey wasn’t using a metaphor. They were describing a spring afternoon in 2024 at Indiana University’s Dunn Meadow — a campus green with a lineage of protest dating to the anti-apartheid “shantytowns” of the 1980s — when officers with rifles took positions on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union over the heads of student protesters. Indiana State Police later confirmed they had positioned officers “with sniper capabilities” on rooftops.
The night before, administrators had convened an ad hoc meeting that rewrote IU’s Outdoor Spaces policy to require approval for structures that had long been permitted. By morning, a peaceful protest was recast as a policy violation. By noon, state police had taken a “closed sniper position” above the lawn.
Police arrested dozens of students and faculty over two days, and many received one‑year campus bans later challenged in court. Ultimately, the Monroe County Prosecutor’s office dropped the “constitutionally dubious” charges. FIRE wrote IU leadership objecting to the eleventh‑hour policy change and the resulting crackdown, warning IU that manipulating rules to curtail disfavored protest is incompatible with a public university’s First Amendment obligations.
For a university whose motto celebrates “light and truth,” the optics were unmissable: IU had turned its own tradition of protest into grounds for punishment. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an isolated incident, but a warning for what would follow.
Act now: Condemn Indiana University’s censorship of student media
Indiana University fired its student media adviser for refusing to censor the student paper, then banned the paper’s print edition.
The atmosphere that spring clarified what faculty had been saying in whispered discontent for years: academic freedom and shared governance were being treated as obstacles to be managed. On April 16, 2024, nearly 1,000 faculty came together for an unprecedented meeting where 93% of those present voted no confidence in IU’s leadership. At the time, FIRE noted that the no‑confidence movement explicitly cited encroachments on academic freedom and viewpoint discrimination concerns.
One flashpoint was the university’s handling of associate professor Abdulkader Sinno, suspended from teaching and advising in December 2023 after a dispute over a room reservation — the registered student group he had advised being none other than the Palestine Solidarity Committee. FIRE went on record with a reminder that public universities must not punish faculty for facilitating student expression or for the viewpoints associated with that expression.
Another flashpoint was art. In December 2023, IU’s Eskenazi Museum abruptly canceled a long‑planned retrospective of Palestinian‑American painter Samia Halaby, notifying the artist her work would no longer be shown in a terse letter curtailing three years of preparation. IU invoked concerns about security and the “integrity of the exhibit.” But as FIRE explained, public institutions cannot cancel art because the artist’s politics are unpopular or because controversy is inconvenient.
Meanwhile, cancellations migrated into other corners of campus life. In January 2025, the IU School of Medicine canceled its LGBTQ+ Health Care Conference, initially offering only a bare note on the website. Administrators later cited pending legislation as the reason. One invited keynote speaker, journalist Chris Geidner, publicly confirmed the cancellation. As FIRE frequently reminds universities, preemptively shutting down academic programming due to political headwinds chills debate and undermines academic freedom. Universities exist to give ideas a platform, not to turn them away.
IU’s Israel-Palestine-related cancellations didn’t run in only one political direction, either. In March 2024, IU officials urged IU Hillel to postpone an event with Mosab Hassan Yousef, a prominent pro‑Israel activist and Hamas critic, citing security threats. Instead of securing the event, IU “postponed” it, but apparently never rescheduled.
By the publication of FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, the numbers matched the mood. Indiana University ranked 255th out of 257 institutions surveyed, making it the worst‑ranked public university in America, with bottom‑tier scores in openness, administrative support, and comfort expressing ideas. Roughly one in four IU students reported discipline or threats of discipline for their expression, and nearly three‑quarters of faculty said the administration does not protect academic freedom.
This fall, IU’s crackdown reached the newsroom. Student editors at the Indiana Daily Student ran two straightforward, newsworthy pieces: one on IU’s suspension of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, another on IU’s abysmal free‑speech ranking. Students say Media School Dean David Tolchinsky pressed them to suppress the coverage. When they refused, the university ordered the paper’s print edition halted just before homecoming.
Control at an editorially independent student paper belongs to the students, not to administrators.
When Jim Rodenbush, the director of student media, declined to enforce content restrictions, he was fired. FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative immediately wrote IU on Oct. 16, condemning the firing as apparent retaliation and the print‑ban directive as unconstitutional censorship by a public university. The students’ response captured the stakes: an image of an empty newspaper rack on campus captioned with a single word in block letters, “CENSORED.”
IU has since reversed the print shutdown amid national outcry and a federal lawsuit filed by Rodenbush. The chancellor has authorized IDS to print through June 30, 2026, within budget parameters. FIRE’s position remains: Control at an editorially independent student paper belongs to the students, not to administrators.
Seen together — the midnight rule change at Dunn Meadow, the snipers on the roof, the faculty’s 93% vote of no confidence, the sanctioning of a professor for defending a student group’s right to meet, the cancellation of an artist’s exhibit, the quiet erasure of a healthcare conference, the postponement of a controversial speaker under the elastic banner of security, and finally the order to stop the presses — it is clear Indiana University has a crisis on its hands. This is a campus where students practice self‑silencing to survive the semester, where faculty measure every sentence against the week’s political weather, where the oxygen of inquiry thins until only the safest words remain.
Today — Monday, Nov. 10 — FIRE answers in one forum the university can’t control: the public square. Our first billboard went up in Bloomington this morning. It’s stark — black, white, and FIRE red — and it names the problem plainly, pointing readers to see the record for themselves.
IU has a chance here to do the right thing, but if they don’t, more boards will follow, put up in places where IU’s leaders, alumni, and visitors will pass them on their way to games and meetings and flights. The point is not spectacle but accountability: to hold a mirror up to a public university that has tried, repeatedly, to dodge the image it has made for itself.
The first billboard in FIRE’s campaign, installed in Bloomington on Monday, Nov. 10, 2025
FIRE doesn’t launch campaigns like this to score points. We’re launching this campaign because IU, a taxpayer‑funded institution, has betrayed its public duty, believing it doesn’t need to answer to the Constitution or the consequences of ignoring the First Amendment.
Any university that posts sharpshooters over a peaceful protest, cancels art for its connotations, shutters a conference because of its politics, and then turns around and tells student journalists they can’t print the truth about any one of these stories hasn’t merely lost its way. It has chosen a different map — one that trades the honest noise of debate for the chilling silence of control. That’s not how we do things in America.
What the hell is going on at Indiana University?
Indiana University just banned its student paper for reporting its awful free speech ranking. You literally can’t make this up.
The rifles are gone from the roof now, but the memory of their presence is as much a part of Dunn Meadow as the grass. The empty newspaper racks may soon be refilled, but national headlines about a campus with no newspaper endure like a warning label.
Indiana University’s leaders have a choice to make.
They can continue to censor and pretend it’s not a problem. Or, they can acknowledge what these last 20 months have made obvious and begin to repair what fear has fractured. They can ensure student and faculty speech is not micromanaged, that journalists report without preclearance, that art hangs because it is art, and that a university’s purpose is not to avoid controversy but to teach, especially when the debate is loud and the issue is of great public importance.
We’re calling on IU to issue a public statement acknowledging its violations of students’ and faculty members’ free speech rights and to meet with FIRE’s experts to begin improving its ranking. Reinstating Rodenbush would also be a meaningful first step in demonstrating that IU is serious about addressing its free speech problems.
Until then, we’ll keep telling this story where it cannot be edited away — on screens, on pages, and, starting today, on the unmissable canvases that rise beside Indiana’s roads.
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Dive Brief:
Columbia University’s operating surplus fell by just over 63% year over year to $112.6 million in fiscal 2025, according to financial statements released Thursday.
Operating revenues increased 2.1% while expenses rose 5.3%, Anne Sullivan, the Ivy League university’s executive vice president for finance, noted in a public message. In a tumultuous political year, federal grant revenue remained essentially flat at $1.3 billion, she said.
Sullivan described the Trump administration’s termination of hundreds of grants to Columbia this year as “destabilizing” and said the university’s financial report “does not adequately capture the level of strain experienced by the research enterprise in the third and fourth quarters.”
Dive Insight:
Columbia’s head-on encounter with the Trump administration left a mark on its finances, even if — as Sullivan pointed out — the damage wasn’t fully captured in the institution’s fiscal year, which ended June 30.
In March, the administration terminated $400 million of Columbia’s federal grants and contracts. The cuts came just days after the government announced a probe over allegations that the university hadn’t done enough to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.
Amid the turmoil, Columbia laid off nearly 180 employees tied to federally funded projects. The university also dipped into its endowment’s unrestricted funds to help preserve some of the research projects, creating what the institution called its Research Stabilization Fund.
Sullivan on Thursday said the fund issued some 500 internal grants to Columbia researchers in June and September. She didn’t specify the total amount spent but described the scale as “modest.”
Soon after terminating Columbia’s funding in March, the Trump administration offered the university an ultimatum. Columbia agreed to a host of unprecedented conditions in return for the government reinstating most of the canceled research grants.
Columbia signed a formal agreement with the Trump administration in July that included a $200 million payment to the government, to be paid over three years, in addition to a $21 million sum for a claims fund under an agreement with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although signed just after the close of fiscal 2025, the settlement is accounted for in Columbia’s financial statements.
But the heaviest impact on the university’s income statement came from rising operating costs, which jumped 5.3% to $6.6 billion. Expenses rose across the board — from salaries for instructors and administrators to research costs to maintenance.
Meanwhile, revenues grew more slowly. Sullivan described Columbia’s 4.1% increase in net tuition and fee revenue, which totaled $1.6 billion, as “modest.” Tempering that gain was a 4.6% rise in institutional financial aid to $622.6 million for the fiscal year. Columbia is among the most expensive colleges in the country to attend, though it offers free tuition to students from families that make under $150,000 a year.
With expenses rising at more than double operating revenue, Columbia saw its operating income shredded by nearly two-thirds, which Sullivan characterized as “modest” and “lower than our historical average.”
Still, Sullivan described its operating surplus as critical to helping fund capital projects, including maintenance and renovation of its facilities.
“The University’s ongoing cost containment efforts remain important to preserve financial flexibility and ensure that resources are allocated in a manner consistent with our priorities for excellence in teaching, research, and patient care,” she added.
To be sure, Columbia is still among the wealthiest universities in the U.S. Its net assets grew 3.7% year over year to $20.5 billion.
Gifts to the university’s endowment fell by about a quarter, to $177.9 million. Even so, the value of the endowment’s donor-restricted funds still rose 8.7%, to $10.9 billion.
In terms of operating income, Columbia’s Ivy League peer Harvard University fared worse. Its recently issued fiscal 2025 financials showed a $112.6 million operating loss, Harvard’s biggest loss in nearly a decade and a half.
Like Columbia, Harvard has come under financial attack by the Trump administration, which has sought to damage the institution on multiple fronts and is using several government agencies in its withering campaign of attacks.
“Even by the standards of our centuries-long history, fiscal year 2025 was extraordinarily challenging,” Harvard President Alan Garber said in a message accompanying the financial statements.”
On Oct. 14, Indiana University abruptly fired Director of Student Media Jim Rodenbush after he refused to enforce unconstitutional content restrictions on the student paper the Indiana Daily Student. The very next day, IU ordered IDS to halt print publication.
This illustrates why IU ranked dead last among public universities — and third-to-last overall — in FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings. Firing a student media adviser for refusing to censor a student newspaper, then banning print editions of that paper, sends a message that would chill even the most courageous young journalist: Cover stories we don’t like, and you’ll lose your ability to print — and your faculty support.
What did the Indiana Daily Student do to provoke this reaction?
They used their front page to attack IU’s track record on free speech, citing IU’s suspension of the Palestine Solidarity Committee and IU’s ranking as the worst public university in the nation for free speech. In the wake of these stories hitting newsstands, administrators summoned Rodenbush to a meeting to discuss “expectations” for what belongs in the paper.
IU’s Media School instructed the student paper to publish an edition exclusively devoted to homecoming flattery with “no other news at all.” When Rodenbush stood his ground, administrators then said they “lost trust” in his leadership — and immediately fired him.
But public universities can’t order students to publish puff pieces. They can’t shut down newspapers for coverage that makes administrators uncomfortable. And they can’t fire advisers who refuse to play the censorship game.
Firing Rodenbush and banning the paper are textbook First Amendment violations that IU claims are part of a digital-first media strategy. But that’s a smokescreen. Cutting the print edition and removing a longtime adviser after critical coverage isn’t a strategy. It’s retaliation. And it’s illegal.
IU is failing its students, its faculty, and the Constitution it is bound to uphold. FIRE is demanding that IU reverse the print ban, offer Rodensbush reinstatement, and make a public commitment to restore student press freedom on campus.
Stand with us and tell IU President Pamela Whitten to end this censorship crusade.
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Dive Brief:
George Mason University’s governing board said late last week that it wants to negotiate with the Trump administration to resolve allegations that it violated civil rights law.
In late August, the U.S. Department of Education alleged that George Mason has illegally used race and other protected characteristics in hiring and promotions, a conclusion reached just six weeks after the agency announced a probe into the university.
An attorney for university President Gregory Washington, who is at the center of the probe, hasrepudiated the agency’s allegations, describing them as “a legal fiction.” Washington’s attorney will also be involved in talks with the Education Department, according to the board’s statement.
Dive Insight:
Over a period of weeks this summer, the Trump administration ramped up pressure on George Mason. The departments of Education and Justiceopened at least four probes between them into the university, often citing comment from Washington in support of diversity initiatives.
Washington’s attorney, Douglas Gansler, took the Education Department to task for how quickly it determined George Mason violated the law.
“It is glaringly apparent that the OCR investigation process has been cut short, and ‘findings’ have been made in spite of a very incomplete fact-finding process, including only two interviews with university academic deans,” Gansler wrote.
The attorney also described some of the evidence cited by the Education Department as “gross mischaracterizations of statements made by Dr. Washington” that didn’t lead to policy changes.
For example, when the Education Department concluded that George Mason violated civil rights law, it linked to a statement Washington made in 2021 in support of having faculty reflect the diversity of the student body and broader community. The department took the statement as expressing “support for racial preferencing” in hiring.
But, as Gansler highlighted, Washington specifically said in the statement that the diversity principles he was promoting were “not code for establishing a quota system.”
Gansler also warned the university’s board against requiring Washington to apologize, which was among the demands made by the Education Department. The lawyer pointed out that such an apology could open the university up to liability.
Through all of this, George Mason’s board of visitors — headed by Charles Stimson, who holds leadership positions at The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank — has been relatively quiet.
To represent it in dealings with the Trump administration, the board hired Torridon Law, which was co-founded by William Barr,formerly U.S. attorney general during the first Trump administration. The firm also has several prominent Republican lawyers on staff.
In July, the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors voted no confidence in the board and called its response to the Trump administration’s actions to that point “inadequate and deeply troubling.”
And yet, in August — at a meeting that the AAUP chapter warned could set the stage for Washington’s ouster — George Mason’sboard voted to give the leader a raise.
Since then, Democrat members of a Virginia Senate committee have blocked six appointeesto George Mason’s board picked by the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. The move has left the board of visitors without a quorum for conducting official business.
In announcing plans to negotiate with the Education Department, the board said Friday that it “remains committed to ensuring that George Mason complies with all federal civil rights law and remains hopeful that a favorable resolution can be reached.”
George Mason is just the latest in an expanding set of colleges targeted by the Trump administration over allegations related to racial preferencing, campus antisemitism and policies supporting transgender student athletes.
Organization recognized for excellence in high-impact tutoring design and student achievement gains
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 25, 2025 –Catapult Learning, a division of FullBloom that provides academic intervention programs for students and professional development solutions for teachers in K-12 schools, today announced it earned the Tutoring Program Design Badge from the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) at Stanford University. The designation, valid for three years, recognizes tutoring providers that demonstrate high-quality, research-aligned program design.
The recognition comes at a time when the need for high-impact tutoring (HIT) has never been greater. As schools nationwide work to close learning gaps that widened during the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerate recovery, Catapult Learning stands out for its nearly 50-year legacy of delivering effective academic support to students who need it most.
“Catapult Learning is honored to receive this prestigious national recognition from the NSSA at Stanford University,” said Rob Klapper, president at Catapult Learning. “We are excited to be recognized for our high-impact tutoring program design and will continue to uphold the highest standards of excellence as we support learners across the country.”
Each year, Catapult Learning’s programs support more than 150,000+ students with nearly four million in-person tutoring sessions, in partnership with 2,100 schools and districts nationwide. Its tutors, many of whom hold four-year degrees, are highly trained professionals who are supported with ongoing coaching and professional development.
Recent data from Catapult Learning’s HIT programs show strong academic gains across both math and reading subject areas:
8 out of every 10 math students increased their pre/post score
9 out of every 10 reading students increased their pre/post score
These results come from programs that have also earned a Tier 2 evidence designation under the Every Student Succeeds Act, affirming their alignment with rigorous research standards.
The Badge was awarded following a rigorous, evidence-based review conducted by an independent panel of education experts. The NSSA evaluated multiple components of Catapult Learning’s program – including instructional design, tutor training and support, and the use of data to inform instruction – against its Tutoring Quality Standards.
“This designation underscores the strength and intentionality behind our high-impact tutoring model,” said Devon Wible, vice president of teaching and learning at Catapult Learning. “This achievement reflects our deep commitment to providing high-quality, research-based tutoring that drives meaningful outcomes for learners.”
Tutoring is available in person, virtually, or in hybrid formats, and can be scheduled before, during, or after school, including weekends. Sessions are held a minimum of three times per week, with flexible options tailored to the needs of each school or district. Catapult Learning provides all necessary materials for both students and tutors.
Catapult Learning, a division of FullBloom, provides academic intervention programs for students and professional development solutions for teachers in K-12 schools, executed by a team of experienced coaches. Our professional development services strengthen the capacity of teachers and leaders to raise and sustain student achievement. Our academic intervention programs support struggling learners with instruction tailored to the unique needs of each student. Across the country, Catapult Learning partners with 500+ school districts to produce positive outcomes that promote academic and professional growth. Catapult Learning is accredited by Cognia and has earned its 2022 System of Distinction honor.
The U.S. Department of Educationannounced Monday that it has opened a civil rights investigationinto Duke University and its law journal, based on allegations that the institution racially discriminates to select the publication’s editors.
Separately, the Education Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also sent a letter Monday to university officials saying they’re reviewing allegations that Duke’s medical school and Duke Health racially discriminate in their hiring, admissions, financial aid and recruitment practices.
The probes come less than a week after U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said officials hoped that Columbia University’s $221 million settlement with the federal government would be a “template for other universities around the country.”
Dive Insight:
Like with the federal government’s previous Columbia probes, the Education Department has opened an investigation into Duke University to determine whether it has violated Title VI, which prohibits federally funded institutions from discriminating based on race, color or national origin.
The department said its probe is based on recent reporting that Duke Law Journal racially discriminates against students applying to be editors. It comes one month after The Washington Free Beacon,a conservative publication, alleged that Duke Law Journal potentially gave students applying to be editors an edge if they held leadership positions in affinity groups or if they explained how their “membership in an underrepresented group” would help them promote diverse voices.
Duke Law Journal shared this information only with the law school’s affinity groups, according to the Beacon.
The letter from HHS and the Education Department doesn’t provide the source of the allegations of racial discrimination against Duke’s medical school and Duke Health.However, it says Duke Health would be “unfit for any further financial relationship with the federal government” if the federal government determines they are true.
In their letter, officials suggested they want to cut a deal with the university.
“Our Departments have historically recognized Duke’s commitment to medical excellence and would prefer to partner with Duke to uncover and repair these problems, rather than terminate this relationship,” McMahon and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote.
The two Cabinet secretaries demanded that the university review and reform policies at Duke Health to ensure they don’t include illegal racial preferences, including by making “necessary organizational, leadership, and personnel changes.”
They also asked Duke to establish a Merit and Civil Rights Committee, which would be delegated authority from the university’s board, to conduct the review.
“The Committee must be made up of those members of Duke’s leadership and medical faculty most distinguished in and devoted to genuine excellence in the field of medicine, and the members chosen must satisfy the federal government as to their competence and good faith,” McMahon and Kennedy said in their letter.
McMahon and Kennedy threatened Duke with enforcement actions if the federal government and the Merit and Civil Rights Committee reach an impasse — or if they don’t change the “alleged offending policies” within six months.
Following Columbia’s controversial agreement with the federal government — which also included vast policy changes — law and free speech scholars warned that the Trump administration may attempt to increase their pressure campaigns against other universities to cut deals.
“The Trump administration has made clear that while Columbia is first in line, it intends to reach comparable agreements with other schools — to scale the Columbia shakedown into a broader model of managing universities deemed too woke,”David Pozen, a Columbia law professor, wrote in a blog post. “As has already occurred with law firms, tariffs, and trade policy, regulation by deal is coming to higher education.
