In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town.
While faculty at the state's public research universities-Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma-will keep their tenure, new teaching staff at the 23 affected colleges will shift to renewable contracts tied to "teaching effectiveness, student completion, job placement, and economic alignment."
The move to cancel gender studies is explicitly justified as a way to comply with Donald Trump's executive order of last year titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. That document makes the biological reality of sex a matter not of science but of law.
When I saw the Association of American Universities' rejection of the White House's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," I knew that the institutions invited to join the agreement were likely to reject it, too. At a time when organizational communication seems to be the province of PR firms, it is still true that a missive from a group representing some of our country's most prestigious research institutions carries substantial weight in U.S. higher education.
Public regional universities, which educate more than 54,000 students in the state combined, "shall not grant new lifetime tenure appointments," the order states. Instead, they may hire faculty under fixed-term, renewable contracts, and the renewals are dependent on professors' performance, student outcomes, "alignment with workforce and Oklahoma economic needs" and "institutional service." Faculty members at these institutions who already have tenure may retain it.
[As] part of the broader implementation of the recently updated System policy, we made the difficult decision to begin winding down Women's and Gender Studies academic programs, including the BA, BS, Graduate Certificate and the Minor,
The grants continue the Trump administration's funding of university programs labeled as civics, civil discourse, Western civilization, great books and other topics that many conservatives back. Earlier this month, the administration announced it awarded nearly $38 million in other grants to civil discourse efforts at universities. Now the NEH, which the Trump administration overhauled last year, says it's further fueling the spread of such initiatives.
Given the importance of local considerations, there are few universal policy prescriptions that can be recommended with confidence. Sadly, this complexity was overlooked in Saul Geiser's recent Inside Higher Ed essay entitled " Why the SAT Is a Poor Fit for Public Universities." My position is not that all, or even any, public universities should require standardized test scores. In fact, I share Geiser's view that a university's "mission shapes admission policy."
As police searched this week for the gunman responsible for a shooting rampage at Brown University, the Trump administration and its allies seized on the violence to cast the schoolas incompetent and ideologically hostile to conservatives - amplifying unfounded theories that a Palestinian student was responsible for the bloodshed and targeted ayoungRepublican. Their commentary added fuel to President Donald Trump's campaign to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on campuses, and to root out alleged antisemitism and anti-conservative bias from the nation's colleges and universities.
Yet a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces in spaces like The Atlantic (the newly published "Accommodation Nation"), The Chronicle of Higher Education ("Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?), The Wall Street Journal ("Colleges Bend the Rules for More Students, Give Them Extra Help") and, indeed, Inside Higher Ed itself ("How Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?") speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education.
The goal, Durham wrote, "is to uphold the letter and spirit of the law, but also to ensure we remain fiercely committed to free speech, academic freedom, and fostering an environment where everyone at WSU feels welcome to express their thoughts, engage different viewpoints, and learn from one another." She said that "we are learning from early and well-intentioned efforts at working within this new framework." The university didn't provide an interview or answer multiple written questions Tuesday.
In Japan, legal frameworks concerning sexual minorities, including transgender individuals, are insufficient, and societal discussions have not progressed. Without a clear vision for promoting understanding, gaining the understanding of students and parents requires a certain amount of time and careful dialogue.
The fortunes of the city of Berkeley and the university at the foot of its hills have always been intertwined. Today, UC Berkeley owns more than 400 acres of land in Berkeley and is its largest employer, accounting for nearly one in four jobs. Its students, faculty and alumni 63 Nobel laureates among them have made UC Berkeley into a world-class research institution and bolstered the city's reputation as a bastion of free speech and progressive values.
Mamdani's platform put forward a single policy proposal on higher education: a promise to work with state and city lawmakers to "massively invest" in the City University of New York, the city's public system of four-year institutions, community colleges and professional schools, which has consistently called for more funding. The goal is to support "infrastructure, pay staff and faculty a living wage, give free OMNY cards to all students, and make CUNY tuition-free for all students," Mamdani's platform read.
The Department of Education and its rule-making committee tasked with determining how to implement Congress's latest loan caps reached consensus Thursday, but that doesn't mean everyone involved was happy with the results-or that the policy proposal is guaranteed to be legally sound, some higher education experts say. The key focus of the regulations, which should be published to the Federal Register by early next year, was to determine which degree programs should be eligible for which level of loans.
The Trump administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education" continues to make headlines. Nine selective institutions were originally asked to agree to reduce transgender and foreign students' rights and make other changes in exchange for federal funding priority and other unspecified benefits. All of these universities either rejected the compact or gave noncommittal responses, while a few relatively unknown, non-research-intensive institutions have publicly expressed interest in signing.
The pact requires universities to cap enrollment of international students, commit to strict definitions of gender, freeze tuition for five years, conductmerit-based faculty hiring, and ban race and gender in admissions decisions. Several of the schools the Trump administration approached about the compact previously had funding disputes over changes in their research policy or DEI initiatives. Agreeing to the pact would have given the universities priority for grants and invitations to White House events.
As part of National Transfer Student Week, hundreds of college campuses are hosting public celebrations to uplift their transfer student communities, including many in our home state of California. While these celebrations are important to increase visibility and a sense of belonging, transfer students warrant our attention and support year-round. The data demonstrate why: While 80 percent of community college students nationally aspire to earn a bachelor's degree, just 17 percent of community college students in California reach that finish line within six years.
I appreciate the various points of view shared with me by many members of our community. Although USC has declined to join the proposed Compact, we look forward to contributing our perspectives, insights, and Trojan values to an important national conversation about the future of higher education.
In conservative states, a spate of recent laws gives legislators and governors more control over public higher education curriculum, take authority from faculty over educational policy decisions, and require the policing of faculty and programs for left-leaning bias. States exercising increasing levels of control over public colleges and universities are moving toward a regulatory environment for higher education more like that for public elementary and secondary schools.
