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Vilda Westh Blanc
City Journal
Excerpt: Higher education accreditation is in crisis. Accreditation was once an important signal, giving parents and students useful information about the value of a college degree. Now it has been reduced to a political weapon wielded against those who deviate from progressive orthodoxy.
This year, six public university flagships—Texas A&M and the Universities of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—joined forces to create the Commission for Public Higher Education. CPHE focuses on a different model of accreditation. By focusing on real student achievement, job readiness, and research productivity, these universities aim to make accreditation a tool for competitive enhancement, not a bureaucratic straitjacket.
Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: In the nearly seven months since President Trump took office again, academic associations, faculty unions, researchers and other groups have used the legal system to push back on the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education and the federal government.
So far, district and appeals courts have largely suggested that the executive branch’s actions are unconstitutional and ruled in favor of university advocates, handing down preliminary injunctions, restraining orders and a few final judgments that have blocked the Trump administration’s goals. But based on the few cases that have reached the Supreme Court, some higher education experts worry the tide may be turning, and the high court’s conservative majority will ultimately side with the president.
Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman
The Hill
Excerpt: On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.
Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?” We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.
FIRE
Excerpt: FIRE is suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to challenge two federal immigration law provisions that give him unchecked power to revoke legal immigrants’ visas and deport them just for speech protected by the First Amendment.
One of our plaintiffs is the student-run paper The Stanford Daily, where writers on student visas are turning down assignments related to the war in Gaza because they fear reporting on it could endanger their immigration status. We are also representing two legal noncitizens who engaged in pro-Palestinian speech and now fear being deported.
Michael C. Bender
New York Time
Excerpt: When President Trump wants to rattle academia, he turns to his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And then Mr. Miller turns to May Mailman.
Ms. Mailman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, is the most important, least-known person behind the administration’s relentless pursuit of the nation’s premier universities. The extraordinary effort has found seemingly endless ways to pressure schools into submission, including federal funding, student visas and civil rights investigations.
Jaweed Kaleem and Michael Wilner
LA Times
Excerpt: Hours after the Trump administration demanded that the University of California pay a $1-billion fine to settle federal accusations of antisemitism in exchange for restoring frozen grant funding to UCLA, Gov. Gavin Newsom called the proposal “extortion” and said the state will go to court to protect the nation’s premier university system.
President Trump is “trying to silence academic freedom” by “attacking one of the most important public institutions in the United States of America,” Newsom said, adding that he would “stand tall and push back against that, and I believe every member of California Legislature feels the same way.”
