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Liam Knox and Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: On Tuesday, the Trump administration fired nearly half of the Education Department’s roughly 4,100 employees, leaving the agency with a skeletal staff of about 2,183. Now, a day later, the scope and impact of those layoffs are beginning to take shape.
The nation’s largest education research agency went from roughly 100 employees to about five, according to a laid-off employee, crippling the government’s capacity to inform education policy. The Office of Federal Student Aid lost hundreds of career staffers, undermining oversight of student loan practices, the maintenance of the federal financial aid system and the authorization of new programs. And the Office for Civil Rights, which fields thousands of student and educator complaints about discrimination and harassment each year, is now down to just five regional offices.
Liam Knox and Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: On Tuesday, the Trump administration fired nearly half of the Education Department’s roughly 4,100 employees, leaving the agency with a skeletal staff of about 2,183. Now, a day later, the scope and impact of those layoffs are beginning to take shape.
The nation’s largest education research agency went from roughly 100 employees to about five, according to a laid-off employee, crippling the government’s capacity to inform education policy. The Office of Federal Student Aid lost hundreds of career staffers, undermining oversight of student loan practices, the maintenance of the federal financial aid system and the authorization of new programs. And the Office for Civil Rights, which fields thousands of student and educator complaints about discrimination and harassment each year, is now down to just five regional offices.
Nicholas B. Dirks
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence.
I didn’t worry much about Trump’s threat at the time. I now realize that was a mistake. American universities did not cause the onslaught that the second Trump administration is unleashing upon them. But they would be in a much stronger position today if they had made a proactive case to the public for their own importance—and taken steps to address their very real shortcomings.
Yael Halevi-Wise '97
January 11, 2024
In the interest of free and accurate speech, please note that the alternative motion proposed by Cary Nelson and Russell Berman, did indeed mention Israel and Palestine too, as you can see here:
EMERGENCY MOTION FOR MLA DELEGATE ASSEMBLY January 2024 (1/2/24)
BACKGROUND: The October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israeli towns and kibbutzim was followed by a major war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel. These events have produced a unique and extremely contentious series of North American campus debates, demonstrations, and bitter social media messages with highly stressful consequences for students of varying ethnicities and political beliefs. Controversy surrounding a congressional hearing featuring three university presidents’ campus responses spread worldwide
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/us/harvard-mit-penn-presidents-antisemitism.html). Students from a variety of backgrounds have testified to feeling unsafe on campus as a result of the hostile climate created
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-campuses-rattled-israel-hamas-war-60-minutes/). Some have felt the right to express their political, cultural, or religious beliefs threatened.
Disagreements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have a long history in English and foreign language departments. MLA’s Delegate Assembly itself has a long history of debating relevant motions and resolutions as well. Rather than press the DA to take sides in these debates, we are urging MLA’s Executive Council help preserve an educational environment where all feel free to voice their positions and concerns.
MOTION: The MLA DA moves that the MLA EC take immediate steps to urge university administrators to defend from threats, harassment, and violence all faculty members, students and staff, regardless of their position on the conflict in the Middle East. As part of that effort the DA asks the EC to write to all North American English and language departments to ask their aid in preserving their campuses as civil environments for academic freedom and free expression.