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A Minnesota judge dismissed the federal government’s challenge to a state law in Minnesota that makes some undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition.
This is the first ruling against the Trump administration’s campaign to end in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy that the government’s lawyers have argued violates federal laws. In three of the seven lawsuits so far, the states agreed with the administration and scrapped their state laws. But Minnesota challenged the Justice Department in court and sought to dismiss the lawsuit altogether.
College Republicans have sued the University of Florida’s president on free speech grounds over the school’s decision to deactivate its chapter after being notified that at least one member engaged in an antisemitic act.
The University of Florida College Republicans filed the lawsuit Monday in federal court against interim president Donald Landry, asking a judge to stop the enforcement of the school’s decision and to restore access to facilities on the Gainesville campus. “The University of Florida punitively deactivated and shut down the UFCR, in response to alleged viewpoints expressed by a member of UFCR, and in an effort to silence the club and chill its future speech,” the group said in its lawsuit.
A week before colleges must report years of admissions data to the federal government, a group of Democratic state attorneys general sued the Trump administration to block what they say is an unlawful demand.
In recent weeks, colleges and the institutional research offices tasked to collect and report the data have been sounding the alarm about the looming deadline. An association recently requested a three-month extension. The Education Department responded with a conditional three-week extension.
Iowa is considering a slate of bills that would limit speech in college classrooms and threaten academic freedom. These measures would mandate reviews of classroom content for DEI or critical race theory, remove topics like “multiculturalism” from teacher training programs, and enshrine a viewpoint-discriminatory definition of “antisemitism” into university policy.
These proposals test longstanding constitutional limits on government interference with academic freedom and classroom discussion, so let’s take a look at each one in turn.
Almost 10 months after the Trump administration temporarily froze all student visa interviews in spring 2025, the State Department has released data showing the impact of that pause.
According to Inside Higher Ed’s analysis of the data, which was released Friday and covered the months from June to August, the number of student visas issued in summer 2025 declined by more than 100,000 from the previous summer, to 186,160. While the sharpest drop was in F-1 visas, which are for international students studying at a college or university and is the largest category of student visa, the number of J-1 and M-1 visas also declined.
I regularly teach a freshman seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. And every semester, without fail, the same scene plays out. A student lingers after class, or appears at my office door, or sends a carefully worded late-night email, sharing a view they would never dream of voicing to their peers. Sometimes it’s a defense of Israel, or abortion rights, or gun control, or simply to confide that they are not extremely liberal.
I thought about those students when I read the new Gallup and Lumina Foundation report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.” Its central message is reassuring: the critics of higher education are exaggerating. But before accepting that reassurance, it helps to know who’s offering it. The Lumina Foundation is one of the most influential funders in American higher education, with an endowment of roughly $1.4 billion and a mission organized explicitly around equity and increasing college access and graduation rates.
