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The pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments that sprang up on many campuses in spring 2024 created unprecedented conditions for an aggressive crackdown on student speech. Unlike during previous protest movements, such as the Vietnam War, when most students took one side of an issue against the adult establishment, the pro-Palestinian movement pitted pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students—and faculty—against one another, fueling tensions that spilled into classrooms, dorms and quads.
That unrest collided squarely with President Donald Trump’s re-election and his second-term agenda, which included targeted attacks on both immigrants and “woke” higher ed institutions.
The Trump administration is expanding its efforts to dismantle the Education Department by moving its oversight of school safety grants and foreign funding for universities to other agencies, the administration announced Monday.
The Department of Health and Human Services is slated to take over work related to school shootings and student mental health programs. The State Department will be tasked to help the Education Department manage how the federal government monitors the flow of billions of dollars in foreign gifts and contracts to higher education institutions.
On Feb. 19, the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents approved new rules governing how faculty members can and cannot teach about “controversial” topics. FIRE is concerned that the guidance’s vague language, as well as the backdrop of censorship in Texas, will cause faculty to self-censor.
The official charged with carrying out the Trump administration’s higher-education agenda has a particular diagnosis for what’s ailing colleges.
“We are here because the value of higher education is in question by too many — and at the center of that is our quality-assurance system,” Nicholas Kent, under secretary of education, said in a Tuesday interview. “It is undeniable that accreditors are failing institutions, they’re failing students, and they’re failing taxpayers.”
Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, is the sort of highly selective institution that jockeys for the unofficial title of Harvard of the South. Recently, the university’s chancellor had a new idea: What if Vanderbilt was also in San Francisco? Maybe it could become the Harvard of the West too.
This new tactic, pioneered by Northeastern University a few years ago, is taking the satellite-campus concept to its logical extreme: the national-chain model of undergraduate education. If it works for Vanderbilt, other selective institutions are likely to follow.
Texas Tech leaders have somehow convinced themselves that race and gender are not legitimate topics to discuss in a psychology class. That’s absurd on its face: You can’t teach human behavior while treating basic dimensions of human identity as off-limits.
Will Crescioni, a lecturer in Texas Tech’s Department of Psychological Sciences, submitted his course materials for his honors-level psychology course the same day the Texas Tech system issued a memo ordering universities to review courses and ensure faculty do not “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain ideas related to race and gender. Just over a month later — and only two days before the semester began — his course was scrapped. His offense? Refusing to alter his course content.
