A new national coalition, the Alliance for Higher Education, announced its launch Tuesday, promising to defend higher education from government interference.
The nonprofit’s mission is to protect higher ed’s role in fostering democracy by ensuring that colleges and universities have academic freedom, autonomy and opportunity for all students to learn and succeed, said Mike Gavin, the organization’s inaugural president and CEO. “Our goal—the joke I’ve been making—is to make things less bad,” Gavin told Inside Higher Ed. “But in the long run, what we want to see is” higher ed making good on its “democratic promises.”
One of the central justifications for universities is that they are needed to form citizens. Citizens need not just a fluency with the ideas that are contending for dominance in our democracy, but also an ability to assess them critically. This is especially true for the next generation of elites who will go on to exercise an outsized influence over national and international affairs.
This crucial role for academia raises some fundamental questions: How well are colleges and universities preparing the young to assume such powers? Are students being exposed to a broad range of intellectual perspectives that give shape to these controversies and illuminate the complexity of the issues at stake? To shine a light on these questions, we draw on a unique database of college syllabi collected by the "Open Syllabus" (OS) database.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said the University “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism had chilled free speech and debate on campus.
In rare and unusually candid remarks on a podcast released on Tuesday, Garber appeared to tie many of higher education’s oft-cited ills — namely, a dearth of tolerance and free debate — to a culture that permits, and at times encourages, professors to foreground their identity and perspectives in teaching.
“How many students would actually be willing to go toe-to-toe against a professor who's expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?” he said.
For the first time since the 2024 “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Princeton, Yuval Donio Gideon, head of the Public Diplomacy Department of the Consulate General of Israel in New York, met with University administrators and campus rabbis to discuss the experience of Israeli and Jewish students on campus.
Gideon met with Vice President for Communications and Government Affairs Gadi Dechter and Vice Provost for International Affairs and Operations Aly Kassam-Remtulla, two top Nassau Hall officials. He also met with Rabbi Eitan Webb, the co-director of Princeton University Chabad House, and Rabbi Gil Steinlauf ’91, the executive director of the Center for Jewish Life.
2025 was the worst year for campus censorship in decades, and that’s because it’s coming from every possible direction—especially the MAGAverse.
For most of my career, the biggest threat to free speech on campus came from inside higher education: the on-campus left (students, yes, but more importantly administrators) using the power of investigation and discipline to punish “wrongthink.” The right pushed, too, but those pushes overwhelmingly originated off campus. This makes sense, given that there simply aren’t that many conservatives in the student body, on the faculty, or—least of all—among administrators in higher education.
In 2025, what changed was the balance of power and the source of the pressure.
J.D. Tuccille
Reason
Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former.
After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
University of Oklahoma officials placed a graduate teaching assistant on leave Sunday after a student who was given a failing grade on a written assignment claimed she was discriminated against due to her religious beliefs.
Samantha Fulnecky, a junior psychology major at the university, submitted an essay response to an assigned article in a psychology class about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender. Her response focused on her interpretations of the Bible and the ways in which she disagreed with the article.
Hollis Robbins
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The reporting on the new Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression College Free Speech Rankings focuses on how things haven’t changed. The headline of Johanna Alonso’s excellent piece is “Students Report Less Tolerance for Controversial Speakers.”
To be clear, the issue of tolerance for campus speakers—and the physical safety of speakers and attendees—remains paramount, as last week’s violence made clear. But for me, FIRE’s study misses the single most profound change on college campuses: AI, and the reality that students are increasingly doing their intellectual exploration privately, not publicly.
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Top Republican politicians have fueled the ongoing national repression of higher ed employees and others who have allegedly made offensive statements about last week’s shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. But Texas governor Greg Abbott has taken the campaign to another level: going after individual students.
Abbott, who has more than 1.4 million followers on X, used that social media website to call for Texas State University to expel a student who appeared to mime Kirk’s shooting at a vigil for Kirk. Shortly after, university president Kelly Damphousse announced that a student in a “disturbing” video “is no longer a student at TXST.”
John Warner
Academic Freedom on the Line, Substack
Excerpt: I want to believe at this point that I am immune to shocks to the system when it comes to the current threats against academic freedom - after all, what could be worse than a major university (Columbia) agreeing to be overseen by a government minder in response to overt extortion - but a recent classroom incident at Texas A&M gave me pause and is an indicator of a problem that goes far deeper than a single authoritarian-minded president.
Emma Pettit
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Whether college students are confronted with the proper texts, ideas, and arguments is the subject of intense, often politicized debate. Critics on the right think the average undergrad is fed a steady diet of progressive fare and is starved of anything more moderate or conservative. But many professors say that’s an exaggeration, and that their classrooms are the site of constructive intellectual conflict.
Yet for all the disagreement about college teaching, what texts students actually engage with is something of a black box. A new working paper from professors at Claremont McKenna and Scripps Colleges attempted to peer inside it, by examining how three political and moral controversies — racial bias in the criminal-justice system, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are taught.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Jim Ryan’s decision last month to step down as president of the University of Virginia in the face of pressure from the Trump administration drew renewed attention to the political appointees steering the public institution who will pick the next campus leader.
Multiple onlookers blamed Ryan’s resignation at least partly on the university’s Board of Visitors, which has been dramatically reshaped over the last three-plus years by Republican governor Glenn Youngkin’s appointments. Since taking office in 2022, Youngkin has stocked the board with former GOP lawmakers, Republican donors and members of the Jefferson Council, a conservative alumni group that called for Ryan’s ouster.
Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe
City Journal
Excerpt: In recent months, Ivy League universities have changed their tune on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Under pressure from President Trump, these institutions have renamed DEI departments, scuttled unpopular programs, and assured the administration that they are following the law. As Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff explained in February: “Just as we do not exclude anyone at Cornell for reasons irrelevant to merit, neither do we . . . hire or promote employees, award chairs or tenure, or make any other merit-driven decisions at Cornell based on race, ethnicity, or other attributes.”
Kotlikoff’s statement was unequivocal, but according to a trove of internal documents we have obtained, it was also untrue.
Exponent Summer Staff
The Exponent
Excerpt: About 3:15 p.m. Friday, Purdue sent an email to The Purdue Exponent stating the university will no longer facilitate distribution of the papers on campus.
According to the email sent by Purdue’s Office of Legal Counsel, the university cited the end of a licensing contract from 2014, albeit the university and The Exponent operated under that agreement for 11 years since its expiration. The university also cited its policy on institutional neutrality, which had been updated in June 2024. The Exponent will still continue to publish and print its newspaper.
Sarah Viren
New York Times
Excerpt: In January 2024, Maura Finkelstein finished teaching her first classes of the semester, unaware they would be her last as a professor. This was on a Wednesday at Muhlenberg College, a campus stippled with red doors meant to represent both hospitality and the college’s Lutheran roots.
It made sense. For months, students, alumni and strangers had been complaining about Finkelstein. They started a Change.org petition the previous fall, demanding that she be fired for “dangerous pro-Hamas rhetoric” and “blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.” As evidence, the petition, and its 8,000 signers, had offered up screenshots of Finkelstein’s posts: a photo of her, on Oct. 12, in a kaffiyeh, a kaffiyeh-patterned face mask and a tank top that read “Anti-Zionist Vibes Only.”
Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The Trump administration is planning to implement a policy that would require all student visa applicants to undergo social media vetting, according to a cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Politico reported Tuesday. All new student visa interviews have been paused in preparation for the new policy.
“The Department is conducting a review of existing operations and process for screening and vetting of student and exchange visitor (F, M, J) visa applicants, and based on that review, plans to issue guidance on expanded social media vetting for all such applicants,” the memo reads, according to a copy published in full on social media by independent journalist Marisa Kabas.
Why is 27 percent of Harvard’s total student body foreign when there are hundreds of thousands of bright young Americans who could fill those spots instead?
Of all the questions raised by the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement on Thursday that it would no longer issue visas to foreign students at Harvard (a move that has now been temporarily blocked by a judge), that’s the one that is the most existential. It forces us to ask: What—and who—are American universities actually for?
Solveig Lucia Gold
City Journal
Excerpt: All eyes are on the Ivy League as the Trump administration takes on the universities that have most conspicuously accepted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars while flagrantly violating civil rights law. Though Columbia has capitulated in part to the administration’s demands, it remains to be seen what effect Trump’s demands will have on other Ivies’ policies. In fact, we may not know for years, since the handful that can afford to resist (Harvard, Princeton) will not go down without long, drawn-out legal fights.
Graham Parsons, professor philosophy at the USMA at West Point
New York Times
Excerpt: It turned out to be easy to undermine West Point. All it took was an executive order from President Trump and a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dictating what could and couldn’t be taught in the military and its educational institutions.
Katherine Mangan
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Four years ago, the University of Virginia Board of Visitors endorsed a call to double the number of underrepresented faculty by 2030 and to develop a plan for building a student population that better reflected the state’s racial and socioeconomic diversity. The university’s president, James E. Ryan, said the move signaled that “becoming a more diverse, equitable place is both the right and the smart thing to do.”
On Tuesday, the board voted unanimously to rescind any such numerical goals as part of a sweeping effort to wipe out evidence of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The Trump administration had warned university officials, only the day before, that it had received complaints that the university wasn’t acting fast enough to carry through on its promise to “dismantle DEI apparatuses.”
Jorge Reyes
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: During her visit to campus last week, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor challenged students’ levels of civic engagement and willingness to move past political dogma. In response to a question about what citizens should do when they disagree with a court’s decision, she asked the large crowd of Princeton students: “Has everyone in this room read even one Supreme Court decision from beginning to end? How many of you can raise your hand?” Few hands went up.
Researchers Impacted by Federal Grant Terminations
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Billions of dollars in federal scientific research grants have been rescinded or suspended since the start of the Trump administration.
Below, 16 researchers across nine different research areas who have had their federal grants terminated since the start of the Trump administration share just a few of the thousands of stories behind these cuts.
Sara Weissman
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Federal immigration authorities arrested a Tufts Ph.D. student Tuesday as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to deport pro-Palestinian activists, The Boston Globe reported.
The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, is a Turkish national in the U.S. on a student visa. Her attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, told The Boston Globe she isn’t aware of any charges against her client. Ozturk co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper criticizing Tufts’ response to the campus pro-Palestinian movement, and her information had been posted on Canary Mission, a website that publicizes the identities of pro-Palestinian activists. Khanbabai initially didn’t know where Ozturk was taken and couldn’t contact her, the attorney said.
Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The Trump administration is pausing $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, apparently because the college allowed a transgender woman to compete in women’s sports three years ago.
The funding pause, announced Wednesday via a White House social media post, is not related to any investigation. Instead, the Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services stopped the $175 million as part of an “immediate proactive action to review discretionary funding streams,” a senior White House official said in a statement. The legality of the move isn’t clear, and officials didn’t specify what the paused funding was intended to be used for.
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.
Eliana Johnson
Washington Free Beacon
Excerpt: A research scholar at Yale Law School also moonlights as a member of a U.S.-sanctioned terrorist fundraising entity, according to web postings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Washington Post Staff
Washington Post
Excerpt: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos said Wednesday that the newspaper’s opinions section would now be focused on “personal liberties and free markets” and won’t publish anything that opposes those ideas. With the shift, opinions editor David Shipley has resigned, and The Post is searching for a successor.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” the billionaire Amazon founder wrote in an email to Post staffers that he also published on X. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
John Murawski
RealClear Investigations
Excerpt: Alarmed by academia’s dominant ideological ethos of social justice activism – particularly the holy trinity of race, sex, and gender – more than two dozen dissident groups have emerged seeking to rebalance the culture at leading public and private universities across the country, including Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, Williams, the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia.
They are expected to gain traction with Donald Trump back in the White House.
Chris West
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Excerpt: In an era where intellectual discourse faces unprecedented challenges, 23 states have taken decisive action to protect free speech on college campuses. Yet their efforts raise an important question: Why have more states not followed suit?
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has meticulously documented the implementation of campus free-speech legislation across the nation. Among these initiatives, North Carolina’s House Bill 527 stands as a model of comprehensive protection for academic freedom by supporting free-speech for all students and faculty, regardless of their political identity.
Michelle Goldberg
New York Times
Excerpt: Last year, Chris Rufo, the influential right-wing strategist who spearheaded the campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., initiatives, told me about his ambitions for a second Trump presidency. He hoped, he said, to see Donald Trump’s administration aggressively investigate Ivy League institutions that, according to Rufo, practice “rampant” discrimination against white, Jewish and Asian students and faculty members, particularly through D.E.I. programs, which aim to boost the representation of groups deemed underprivileged.
More broadly, he imagined a complete transformation of American academia.
Sophia Damian
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Excerpt: In a recent Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research survey, over 90 percent of college professors from public, private, two-year, and four-year universities said they strongly or somewhat agree that academic freedom in higher education is under threat. Moreover, 55 percent believe that academic freedom is under threat on their own campuses.
The survey further found that, due to this sense of declining academic freedom, many professors are self-censoring on topics such as Israel/Palestine, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and federal politics in general.
Rachel A. Cohen
The Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: I graduated from Harvard Law School in 2022. If I was enrolling now, I would learn far less.
Earlier this month, HLS released data showing that this year’s matriculating class — the first since the fall of race-based affirmative action — includes a mere 19 Black students, down from 43 the year before. By enrolling such a homogenous class, Harvard Law is providing a comparatively paltry educational experience to its students.
