Excerpt: Wherever you get your news, whether it is Twitter or The New York Times, you might reasonably imagine that higher education is awash in political conflict. You might see with dismay that progressive students are intolerant, hysterical, and fragile; or, depending on your sources, that right-wing students platform the vilest, most bigoted media personalities in the name of free speech.
Excerpt: According to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), textbook publishers are attempting to indoctrinate Florida students by incorporating "woke" concepts into social studies textbooks — in violation of state laws prohibiting certain kinds of instruction on race and gender.
Seth Mandel
Commentary
Excerpt: David Piegaro fell down the stairs outside a Princeton University building and rolled painfully to the bottom. That’s when he was handcuffed and put under arrest for aggravated assault. The supposed victim was Kenneth Strother, the university’s head of security—who had, according to video of the incident and witness testimony—caused Piegaro to fall down those stairs. Strother was unharmed. Piegaro faced jail time.
On Tuesday, Piegaro was acquitted. On Thursday, Princeton revealed it still had some salt to pour into Piegaro’s wounds. The university honored Strother with its President’s Achievement Award for his “commitment to excellence and exceptional performance.”
David French
New York Times
Excerpt: On Monday, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, a Catholic law school, a letter that said, “It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I. This is unacceptable.”
Martin said that he’d begun an “inquiry” into the school and demanded to know whether it had eliminated all D.E.I. — which he does not define, but in right-wing circles tends to refer to any action at all designed to increase diversity or honor historically marginalized people — from the school and its curriculum. He also asked, “If D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”
Cathy Young
The Bulwark
Excerpt: Last month's annual conference of the Heterodox Academy, a group founded ten years ago by psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt to support intellectual diversity in academia, had to confront a cultural and political landscape drastically changed from previous years. “HxA,” as the group styles itself, is known for taking on threats to academic freedom and intellectual openness from the progressive (or, if you will, “woke”) left. But this is 2025, not 2015. Not only is Donald Trump in the White House again, but his second administration is waging an aggressive attack on the universities in a crusade against academic “wokeness.”
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: A university president took the platform he was given at the annual convening of Heterodox Academy, a viewpoint-diversity group, to tell attendees that their long-standing gripes had found “resonance” with those trying to destroy higher education.
Susan H. Greenberg
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Public colleges and universities in Texas have been asked to identify which of their students are undocumented so they can be charged out-of-state tuition, The Texas Tribune reported. The move follows a district court ruling earlier this month that prohibits students who are not legal residents from paying in-state tuition.
In a letter to the state's public college presidents last week, Texas Higher Education commissioner Wynn Rosser wrote that “each institution must assess the population of students who have established eligibility for Texas resident tuition … who are not lawfully present and will therefore need to be reclassified as non-residents and charged non-resident tuition.”
Jacob Sullum
Reason Magazine
Excerpt: Mahmoud Khalil, the first target of President Donald Trump's crusade against international students he describes as "terrorist sympathizers," was released from custody on Friday after more than three months of detention. But the Trump administration is still trying to deport Khalil, a legal permanent resident, based on his participation in anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.
The official rationale for expelling Khalil is that he poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. That justification is alarmingly broad and vague, raising due process and free speech concerns that interact with each other.
Brendan Cantwell
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: A recent report from the consulting firm Deloitte confirms what everyone working in higher education already knows: Donald Trump “brings a layer of complexity to questions of financial sustainability for colleges and universities.” The administration’s dizzying range of punitive measures for academe comes at an inconvenient time: Our institutions are already grappling with diminished state support and a looming demographic cliff.
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Ever since Harvard and Columbia Universities refused to accede immediately to all of the Trump administration’s demands to change their policies, federal officials have cut off billions of dollars in funding and deployed other heavy-handed approaches to extract compliance.
But when the administration wanted to alter policies at the U.S. service academies, it simply commanded the changes. The orders were a reminder of how differently service academies operate compared to civilian institutions—and an early example of how the Trump administration could win its war against what it dubs DEI faster at these academies than at private or public state universities.
Scott Gac
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The email from faculty in our would-be 51st state up north confirmed what I’d been suspecting for months: though I’d been selected as the finalist for a Fulbright chair at a Canadian university, the U.S. Department of State refused to approve my file.
It wasn’t a shock—race is at the center of my research. And I know that I am not alone in this Fulbright conundrum. But it was a gut punch. As a faculty member at a liberal arts institution, my access to external support is far more limited than that of colleagues at research institutions. When I am able to look past the personal sting, however, it’s easy to see the move as part of a broader effort—in the form of economic sanctions and ideological surveillance—to shape the expression of ideas and values in American higher education.
American Association of University Professors Press Release
Excerpt: As a result of public pressure and significant media attention generated by AAUP members’ collective action, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted on June 4 to tenure the remaining thirty-three faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences and professional schools, including the School of Law and the Kenan-Flagler Business School, who had been denied a tenure vote since the May 22 board meeting.
The board offered no explanation for this unprecedented large-scale delay, which was expected to violate faculty contracts.
Jonathan Chait
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The Trump administration is carrying out a brazen crackdown on academic freedom: deporting students for writing op-eds, withholding funds from colleges that defy his control, and justifying it all as a response to anti-Semitism. Who is to blame for this?
According to one popular theory on the left, the answer is liberals who have consistently supported free speech and opposed Donald Trump.
Juan Perez Jr.
Politico
Excerpt: President Donald Trump’s campaign against two of the planet’s best-known universities is laying bare just how unprepared academia was to confront a hostile White House.
Even as Ivy League schools, research institutions, and college trade associations try to resist Trump’s attacks in court, campus leaders are starting to accept they face only difficult choices: negotiate with the government, mount a painful legal and political fight — or simply try to stay out of sight.
John D. Sailer
City Journal
Excerpt: The challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline. If we can reconfigure the academic talent pipeline and ensure that those who believe in the classical mission of the university both choose academia and prosper in it, then the reform movement will succeed. If not, no list of policies, from securing campus free speech to dismantling DEI offices, will restore public trust in our universities.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Less than a day after having its ability to host international students revoked by the federal government, Harvard University successfully sued the Trump administration to block the move. A judge granted a temporary restraining order late Friday morning.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Thursday afternoon that the Trump administration had stripped Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification in a letter that vaguely accused Harvard of a “failure to adhere to the law.”
Kate Hidalgo Bellows and Katherine
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: In June 2020, as millions took to the streets to protest anti-Black racism, the president of the University of Virginia, James E. Ryan, created a small team with an ambitious agenda.
The university needed bold ideas, he told the new Racial Equity Task Force, and it needed them quickly.
Ellie Avishai
Quillette
Excerpt: On 8 November 2021, the founders of the University of Austin (UATX) announced the launch of their new project—a school where students would receive “an education rooted in the pursuit of truth.” Unlike Ivy League universities, where “illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life,” the school’s founding president declared, this would be a place “where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.” On a web page titled, Our Principles, UATX pledges that it will “renew the mission of the university, and serve as a model for institutions of higher education by safeguarding academic freedom and promoting intellectual pluralism.”
Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe
City Journal
Excerpt: Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.
While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.
Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: All the pieces of House Republicans’ plan to cut trillions in federal spending are now public, and if the package becomes law, colleges and universities could face crippling repercussions, higher education experts say.
“It is a full-out assault on the ability of students—especially low-income students—to access and afford higher education,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. “It will have a dramatically negative impact, not just on higher ed, but on the whole population.”
Ilya Somin
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: Yesterday, federal District Judge William K. Sessions, III, of the District of Vermont ordered the immediate release of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, whom ICE had detained and slated for deportation based on her anti-Israel speech.
In earlier posts on this topic, I have urged universities to file lawsuits challenging Trump's speech-based deportation policy, rather than letting students like Ozturk fend for themselves. I was happy to see that many schools (including my undergraduate alma mater Amherst College) filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit brought against the policy by the American Association of University Professors (the court recently issued a preliminary ruling in favor of AAUP, allowing the case to go forward). But universities should do more to protect their students.
Christopher Bao and Annie Rupertus
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Princeton asked all departments and University units to prepare “separate plans for 5 percent and 10 percent permanent budget cuts to be phased in over the next three years, with some actions to start later this summer” in an email sent to faculty and staff on Monday afternoon — the University’s most dramatic budgetary guidance yet following a tumultuous semester for higher education.
The email, sent by Provost Jennifer Rexford and Executive Vice President Katie Callow-Wright, explicitly acknowledged the potential for layoffs to be part of budget reductions. “Cuts of this magnitude to our budget cannot be achieved without changes to some operations and the associated elimination of some staff positions,” they wrote.
