Tag: Events

Former Harvard University president Larry Summers will resign from his faculty position at the end of this academic year and will remain on leave until then, a university spokesperson confirmed to The Harvard Crimson on Wednesday. The decision is the latest of Summers’s efforts to scale back his public commitments after the extent of his longtime friendship with the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was revealed.

In a statement to the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, Summers said the decision was “difficult” and that he was “grateful to the thousands of students and colleagues I have been privileged to teach and work with since coming to Harvard as a graduate student 50 years ago.”

“Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” he said.

Summers corresponded with Epstein for years after his 2008 conviction, at one point seeking advice about how to pursue a younger colleague and calling Epstein a “very good wingman.” Over the last several months, Summers has also stepped down from his teaching role at Harvard and resigned from the OpenAI Board of Directors. The New York Times declined to renew his contract with the Opinion section, the Center for American Progress ended his fellowship and Summers stepped away from an advising role at the policy research center Budget Lab at Yale University. In past public remarks, Summers has said he is “deeply ashamed” of his actions and takes responsibility for continuing to communicate with Epstein after he was convicted of soliciting sex from a minor in 2008. Summers has not been implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes.

Also Wednesday, Harvard placed mathematics professor Martin Nowak on paid administrative leave while the university investigates his ties to Epstein, the Crimson reported. The university previously sanctioned Nowak in 2021 for facilitating Epstein’s presence at Harvard. The sanctions were lifted in 2023.

Richard Axel, a professor of pathology and biochemistry at Columbia University, announced Tuesday he would step down from his role as co-director of the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute to “focus on research and teaching in my lab.” He will also resign from his role as an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Axel first got to know Epstein in the 1980s, The New York Times reported. In a 2007 New York magazine profile about Epstein, Axel described him as “extremely smart and probing” and said, “He has the ability to make connections that other minds can’t make.” Axel also had dinner with Epstein and helped the children of Epstein’s associates try to gain admission to Columbia. Axel has not been implicated in any criminal activity.

“My past association with Jeffrey Epstein was a serious error in judgment, which I deeply regret,” Axel wrote in a statement. “I apologize for compromising the trust of my friends, students, and colleagues. I recognize the problems this has caused, and I will work to restore this trust. What has emerged about Epstein’s appalling conduct, the harm that he has caused to so many people, makes my association with him all the more painful and inexcusable.”

Also in recent weeks, Bard University announced it had opened an external investigation into the communication between Epstein and university president Leon Botstein. The university is also delaying a New York gala celebrating Botstein.

The Justice Department sued the University of California system Tuesday, alleging it has tolerated antisemitism to such an extent that it’s created a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli employees at UCLA, violating federal law banning employment discrimination.

The case continues the Trump administration’s targeting of the campus through allegations that it failed to properly respond to pro-Palestinian protests that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which sparked the recent Israel-Hamas war. The administration previously cut off research funding for UCLA, but lost in court.

“Swastikas, calls for the extermination of Jews and the Jewish state of Israel, antisemitic violence, and open harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff: this was the grim scene at the University of California Los Angeles,” the new lawsuit begins. It says “the general atmosphere of antisemitism was, and remains, so severe and pervasive that UCLA’s own official Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias concluded that the University’s failures to protect Jewish staff and faculty constituted a hostile work environment.”

The DOJ already concluded, last July, that UCLA violated other laws—the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—in its response to alleged antisemitism at a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment. Multiple federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, promptly began freezing funding; UC estimated it lost $584 million.

The Trump administration further demanded that UCLA pay $1.2 billion and make other concessions, including that it stop enrolling “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” and cease “performing hormonal interventions and ‘transgender’ surgeries” on anyone under 18 at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.

But after UC researchers sued, U.S. District Court judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered almost all of the frozen funding to be restored. In November, Lin further ordered federal agencies to end their “blanket policy of denying any future grants” to UCLA and ruled that the administration can’t seek payouts from any UC campus “in connection with any civil rights investigation” under Titles VI or IX. Lin also prohibited the DOJ and federal funding agencies from withholding funds, “or threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment or Tenth Amendment.”

Now, the DOJ has sued in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California under Title VII, a different law that bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Among other things, it’s asking a judge to force the UC system to pay damages to Jewish and Israeli employees and “modify and enforce its anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation policies and procedures to effectively prevent and correct antisemitic discrimination and retaliation at UCLA.”

Mary Osako, UCLA’s vice chancellor for strategic communications, noted in a statement that the university has taken “concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies, and combat antisemitism,” including hiring a dedicated Title VI/Title VII officer within the Office of Civil Rights.

“We stand firmly by the decisive actions we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms, and we will vigorously defend our efforts and our unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive environment for all members of our community,” she wrote.

In a statement, Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote that “allegations of antisemitism must be taken seriously, but this lawsuit comes amid a broader pattern in which the federal government has increasingly weaponized antisemitism to pressure and reshape higher education institutions towards a far right agenda, including through prior federal attacks on UCLA. Civil-rights enforcement should protect people from discrimination without becoming a vehicle for political overreach that undermines academic freedom, shared governance, and the independence of universities.”

Beginning this summer, professors at Florida’s 28 public colleges must use a state curriculum framework to teach their introduction to sociology courses. Aligned with the state-sanctioned sociology textbook, the framework requires that the courses do not “include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or one that “is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

Jose Arevalo, executive vice chancellor for the Florida State College System, shared information about the framework with representatives from 26 Florida colleges during a call on Jan. 20, according to an email summary of the call provided to Inside Higher Ed. The Florida Department of Education distributed teaching materials, including an instructor’s manual and textbook, and requested that institutions submit their current introduction to sociology syllabi, “including detailed assignment schedules, topic calendars, or modules to show course coverage.”

“The framework serves as a baseline—institutions can add to it but should avoid subtracting key elements or adding content that risks violating state statutes,” Arevalo wrote in the email. “Much of the framework language can be copied directly into syllabi, with supporting exercises and textbook chapters provided.”

All state colleges received the written guidance this week, according to Robert Cassanello, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida and president of the United Faculty of Florida union.

“People in the union are really upset,” he said. “They see this as a threat to academic freedom. They see the revised textbook through the Board of Governors’ approval as a censored text.”

Sociology professors at the state’s public universities have received similar instructions through a game of telephone, with instructions passed verbally from the Board of Governors to provosts, deans, chairs and then to faculty, several Florida faculty members reported.

“They’re doing their best to avoid creating standing for a lawsuit,” Cassanello said. “This is why everything is verbal with the Board of Governors.”

The seven-page written framework applies only to general education sociology courses taught at state colleges—not electives. The document bans nine discussion points from course content, including discussions that “state an intent of institutions today to oppress persons of color,” “that argue most variations between men and women are learned traits and behaviors,” and “that describe when, how, or why individuals determine their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”

The end of the document includes a “recommended course design,” written like a syllabus, that lays out seven units, suggested reading assignments and lecture topics. The guide to teaching “sociological phenomena” includes several contested theories about race and gender. For example, the framework states that while biological sex chromosomes determine different sex characteristics in men and women, they also determine “how females and males behave. This behavior is also influenced by the social relevance of these traits,” the framework says.

“So, in teaching this, one might point out that women and men with the same credentials enter different jobs such that certain jobs are occupied primarily by women (i.e., female-dominant) some are occupied primarily by men (i.e., male-dominant) and some have roughly the same number of workers who are female and male (i.e., non-gendersegregated),” the framework says.

The document also discusses limitations to personal freedoms as a historical phenomenon, not a present one. “Students will study scientific facts, including the demographic characteristics of individuals who lived during previous generations when specific freedoms were restricted” and “how things changed as those restrictions were removed over time,” the framework says.

The state education department will likely roll out similar curriculum guidance for other areas of study in the future. In his email, Arevalo said the department is working with history professors on a general education curriculum for American history courses that “satisfy civic literacy requirements.” Results of this work could be disclosed as soon as April, he said.

Unclear Enforcement

The curriculum thinly veils the social politics of state education officials, said Katie Rainwater, a visiting scholar of global and sociocultural studies at Florida International University who has taught introductory sociology courses. Many top education decision-makers in Florida come from right-wing think tanks and colleges, including Hillsdale College, where Arevalo earned his Ph.D.; the Claremont Institute; and the Heritage Foundation.

“They’re very intentionally staffing the Department of Education office with these ultraconservative ideologues,” Rainwater said. “What we’re seeing is … people affiliated with this national conservative movement taking away the ideas that they don’t want students to be exposed to.”

The framework was developed by a “work group of sociologists,” Arevalo said in his email. It’s unclear whether it was the same sociology professors that created the state-approved textbook late last year. That group convened with four Board of Governors members and four faculty members, but Phillip Wisely, a sociology professor at Florida SouthWestern State College, was kicked out of the group by state education commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas for allegedly “advocating for gender ideology” in his sociology class. Wisely remains suspended from his teaching position, Cassanello said.

Florida Department of Education spokespeople did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment Friday.

It’s unclear how faculty members who don’t follow the written or verbal guidelines will be disciplined, but faculty say they’re certain there would be some kind of blowback for ignoring the rules.

Zachary Levenson, a sociology professor at Florida International University, said his department requested clarification from the provost on the rules and received no information.

“We wrote to the provost … and said, ‘Please tell us what we cannot teach, what we must teach, and what the sanction would be for violating this,’” he said. “She wouldn’t specify. She said … ‘There is no individual sanction that I can name’” and referred them to the guidelines in Florida state statute 1007.25, which outlines rules for general education and degree requirements.

He speculates that the punishment could be sanctions against the institution via the accreditor, or individual discipline. Levenson moved to Florida to teach only two and a half years ago, but he said he wants to stay in the state so that he can fight back.

“This is happening everywhere, but it’s first happening here,” Levenson said. “It was happening when I was teaching in Texas, in North Carolina, but not like this. So if we don’t nip it in the bud … it’s going to keep spreading around the country.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to every college and university president with the goal of continuing its efforts to curb voting among college students. This latest letter threatens colleges and universities if they participate in or use the data from the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, claiming that if they do so, they “could be at risk of being found in violation of FERPA.”

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is the federal law that protects the privacy of student education records and applies to any institution that accepts Department of Education funds. Like many of this administration’s actions, this letter is designed to have a chilling effect, since no determination has been made by the department that participation in, or use of, NSLVE studies violates any privacy statutes.

In existence since 2013, with more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide currently choosing to participate, the NSLVE is a study of student political engagement at higher education institutions. The NSLVE uses data that colleges and universities voluntarily provide to the National Student Clearinghouse, which matches student enrollment records with public voting files to determine whether students registered to vote and whether they voted—not whom they voted for. NSLVE, which is housed at Tufts University, then uses the de-identified data it receives to send a confidential report to participating campuses about their own students’ voting participation.

Under the guise of protecting student privacy, the Department of Education is weaponizing FERPA to try to get to the Trump administration’s goal of weakening voter participation, especially among college students, for political reasons. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon herself stated in the press release announcing the new guidance that “American colleges and universities should be focused on teaching, learning, and research— not influencing elections.” And the department admits in its guidance letter that its assessment that NSLVE is in violation of FERPA is based on a “preliminary analysis” and that ED merely has “concerns” about NSLVE’s use of data. The department does not conclude that NSLVE or the use of the NSLVE data violates any laws, including privacy laws.

The NSLVE primarily uses directory information—name, address and date of birth—which institutions may disclose without consent as long as they have given general public notice (including notice of the option to opt out of disclosure) at the beginning of the academic year. In addition, when other information is provided—such as gender, race/ethnicity and degree-seeking status—it is allowable because it falls under FERPA’s “studies exception.”

This exception allows information to be shared for studies that “improve instruction.” The NSLVE’s research is designed to enable colleges to improve civic education on campus—something that is a stated goal of this administration. Furthermore, NSLVE reports do not contain individually identifiable information and are only shared with the institution itself. It is for these reasons that the Department of Education, since the program’s inception more than a decade ago, has found this work to be allowable under FERPA.

It is critical for colleges to understand what this letter is saying—and what it isn’t. Students deserve to have their data protected, and the federal government has a critical role to play in safeguarding their data. It is the Department of Education’s obligation to use its resources to do so. It is paramount that the government ensures any actions taken by institutions put student privacy first. But alleging potential student privacy violations when there are none is a waste of resources and undermines what is really at stake.

As recognized by the Higher Education Act’s requirement that higher education institutions provide voter registration forms to all their students, colleges have an important role to play in promoting civic engagement and participation in democracy among students. As long as they are doing it in a way that is compliant with the data sharing allowed in FERPA, the federal government must not interfere with colleges’ participation in the NSLVE— especially with threats that are not backed up with legal findings. Insights from the NSLVE are critical to strengthening nonpartisan civic engagement for college students. Restricting use of the data in an election year is not about protecting students—but instead is harmful to them and to our democracy.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced this month that the Department of Defense will no longer send active-duty military for graduate-level professional military education at Harvard University. In a video announcing the decision on social media, he claimed that officers returned from Harvard with “heads full of globalist and radical ideologies.” He added, “We train warriors. Not wokesters.”

Before I begin, I will lay my cards on the table. I am a medically retired Air Force major from a traditional, conservative, Southern Baptist background in east Tennessee. At Harvard Kennedy School, I was elected executive vice president of the student government, which represents more than 1,000 graduate students. I say this not to posture, but because I believe this decision warrants a response from someone who was in those classrooms, not as an observer, but as a leader in the student body.

Politics aside, severing ties between the military and Harvard is a mistake. While at HKS, I had the opportunity to participate in most student organizations, meet with both student and administrator leadership, and drive many of the social and policy discussions (formal and informal) across the school. In each of these settings, military members were active participants: injecting keen insight, stimulating robust dialogue or voicing perspectives that no one else in the classroom had considered.

What troubles me most about Hegseth’s announcement is that he offered neither data, evidence nor metrics to support the claim that Harvard-educated officers graduate less capable. While invoking General Washington’s assumption of command of the Continental Army in Harvard Square or the number of Harvard-trained Medal of Honor recipients, Hegseth played to emotional appeal rather than demonstrable metrics or data that support his action. But gambling with our nation’s top officers’ professional education from a well-established world-class institution is a high-risk, low-reward proposition.

In July 2025, the Kennedy School launched the American Service Fellowship, the largest single-year scholarship in the school’s history, for at least 50 fully funded scholarships worth $100,000 to American public servants, with about half of awardees expected to come from military service. Dean Jeremy Weinstein said in the press release announcing the fellowship, “There’s nothing more patriotic than public service.”

Over the past decade, HKS has trained numerous active-duty, veteran and reserve members. The list of prominent leaders with military ties includes Hegseth himself, former defense secretary Mark Esper, Senator Jack Reed and U.S. representatives Dan Crenshaw and Seth Moulton. If Harvard truly “loathes” the military, then why is the institution investing millions to bring more service members to campus?

In justifying the decision, Hegseth also asserts that Harvard has partnered with the Chinese Communist Party in its research programs. A June 2025 investigation in The Wall Street Journal reported that a 2014 Shanghai Observer article referred to HKS as the CCP’s top “overseas party school,” as decades of Chinese officials have pursued executive training and postgraduate study at HKS. But rather than supporting Hegseth’s case, this fact undermines it. If China’s future leaders and officials are vying for access to Harvard’s faculty and resources, why would we voluntarily surrender our domestic infrastructure for future officer development? The proper response to a competitor’s investment in an institution is not to abandon it, but to double down instead.

Consider what we are depriving our nation’s top military leaders of benefiting from. Harvard ranks among the top universities in national and global rankings, and Harvard’s Office of Technology Development reports approximately 391 new innovations, 159 U.S. patents issued and $53.7 million in commercialization revenue in fiscal year 2025 alone. As a prior procurement-contracting officer, these are big-deal numbers. They represent cutting-edge research and development that can rapidly accelerate our defense capabilities and technologies. I remain skeptical about an unfounded decision to deprive our top future military leaders of access to that caliber of institutional infrastructure and the opportunity to build interpersonal relationships with HKS’s scholars, policymakers and faculty.

Personally, given my preconditions—moderate conservative, white male with a Southern Baptist upbringing, east Tennessee native and ex-military—I did not face discrimination at Harvard. In fact, I was elected to the second-highest student position at HKS. I did not encounter wokeism outright (it almost seems archaic at this point). I can say I was not brainwashed or forced into indoctrination camps for expressing differing viewpoints whether in class or on paper. I found that I am not alone in this thought, either.

Former Indiana governor Eric Holcomb, a Republican, published an op-ed in The Washington Post titled “I was a red state governor. What I saw at Harvard surprised me.” The governor writes that he was warned by friends about “woke lions” but found open-minded, problem-solving–oriented students from all 50 states. Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, also a Republican, served as an Institute of Politics resident fellow at Harvard in fall 2024, when he led small student groups on bridging America’s political divide, which I attended. During my tenure at HKS, the Harvard Republican Club hosted Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Institute of Politics hosted Kellyanne Conway and Kevin McCarthy. In short, I find it difficult to characterize Harvard as an echo chamber.

When I think back to my tenure, I remember the many meetings with the dean of HKS and administrators. I remember a seasoned scholar almost obsessively driven to find common ground through constructive dialogue. I remember the vision committees navigating changes in policy, governance, technology and AI. The top student affairs administrators I met with on a weekly basis were genuine and empathetic individuals who wanted the best for student outcomes regardless of differing political or religious ideologies. I witnessed deep learning occurring with many service members, both senior and junior officers, in my classes and heard their sentiments of appreciation for their educational experience at Harvard.

Harvard makes an easy target, but a focus on easy targets makes for bad policy. This decision does not protect our military; instead, it reduces its capabilities. It deprives our best officers of access to the kind of rigorous, diverse, uncomfortable and intellectual environment that produces top strategic-level thinkers, not worse-off ones. Pulling our officers out of these environments does the very opposite of training resilient warfighters: It perpetuates a homogeneous environment and denies our future leaders exposure to world leaders. If we truly believe that we must cultivate the best minds and capabilities of the warrior class, then we should trust our officers, invest the resources and meet the challenge, not run from it.

Tennessee’s House Higher Ed Subcommittee chair has withdrawn his bill to end tenure in public universities after saying he “stumbled into a little bit of the history” and “got a little deeper than I thought I would.”

“It got me to thinking about political lines, pendulums, they’re always moving … I kind of think that way about tenure,” Republican Justin Lafferty told his subcommittee Wednesday in a brief but wide-ranging explanation for dropping the bill.

According to a video of the meeting posted on the state General Assembly’s website, Lafferty said he learned tenure goes back to the 1600s or 1700s, “a time when there weren’t that many highly educated folks,” so “it was very important to keep the best and the brightest.”

Though he didn’t use the words “academic freedom,” he echoed arguments for protecting it that proponents of tenure often use. Mentioning the Vietnam War era, Lafferty said, “In a controversial time, I kind of understand you want those protections in place to not lose the talent that you’ve been able to acquire.”

But he also suggested that he filed his bill in opposition to controversial faculty speech. He didn’t mention Charlie Kirk, but he complained about faculty speech regarding someone’s death and a “half a million” payout. (Darren Michael, a tenured theater professor at Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University, was terminated for reposting a news headline about Kirk but was later reinstated and paid $500,000.)

“With tenure now, the pendulum has swung so far that we can have state employees that we pay with our tax dollars—‘mock’ might not be the right word, but can certainly be very insensitive towards the death of another human being,” Lafferty said. “And as a Tennessean, I’m not comfortable with the fact that that person cannot be removed from a job.”

Lafferty withdrew his bill, but he may not be done targeting tenure. He said during the meeting that “we’ll maybe be back.” News Channel 5 reported that Lafferty said the bill likely didn’t have a path forward this year. He didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Thursday.

The National Institutes of Health director will become acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and President Trump will nominate the CDC’s former acting director to lead the National Science Foundation, a White House official confirmed to Inside Higher Ed. The NIH and NSF are among the largest federal funders of university research.

The official said NIH director Jay Bhattacharya will maintain his current duties while also leading the CDC “until a permanent CDC director is nominated and confirmed.” Jim O’Neill was dismissed last week from leading the CDC, a position he had only held since late August. The NIH is headquartered in Bethesda, Md., while the CDC is based in Atlanta.

“Both are eminently qualified for these positions, and the White House has confidence in them to deliver on the president’s agenda,” the official said.

Bhattacharya’s new duties leading the CDC come as the NIH continues to lack permanent leadership in many top posts. With last week’s ending of Lindsey A. Criswell’s directorship of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, 16 directors of the 27 institutes and centers that comprise the agency are in an acting capacity.

These NIH directors have departed for multiple reasons, including terminations by the Trump administration and resignations.

I often feel like the skunk at a garden party.

That’s not uncommon for journalists: Our job frequently requires us to ask hard questions and to say what others might be too polite to say (out loud, at least). I can’t blame it all on my vocation, though; I’m that way by nature, and this old dog isn’t changing.

Several times in the last couple years I’ve found myself at gatherings of college leaders that included representatives of highly selective, wealthy institutions. Without fail, during discussion of some higher education issue or another, one or more of them will refer to their own institution as “elite.”

That’s a record-scratch moment for me. Sometimes I can let it go, but at a Washington gathering hosted by an Ivy League university not too long ago, I couldn’t help myself. I had kept quiet for a few hours, but I couldn’t contain myself as participants (from what my colleague Rachel Toor calls “fancy-pants schools”) kept referring to themselves as “elite” while bemoaning why their relationship with the federal government had soured.

I started (rather obnoxiously, I’ll admit) by reading a definition of the word: “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.” I suggested, (dis)respectfully, that if we had some clear definition of “superior” that everybody could agree on, it might be reasonable to refer to the Yales and Amhersts and UVAs of the world that way.

But I’d posit that in higher education, there is no clear definition of “superior” or any other synonym of elite. Some colleges and universities are often perceived as the best because they’ve been around the longest, or because U.S. News and other rankers, with methodologies that usually favor wealth and selectivity and research output, have deemed them so. Or because my colleagues in the national media focus on them obsessionally at the expense of thousands of other institutions.

(As I wrote recently, I’m totally up for a rigorous discussion about how we might go about defining “best” or most valuable—those that do the most to help their students reach their educational goals they’ve set, say, or whose learners learn or develop the most during their time at the institution. Anyone interested?)

When we call a set of colleges and universities “elite”—and when people at those institutions refer to themselves that way—what are we really communicating?

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries define “elite” as “belonging to a group of people in society that is small in number but powerful and with a lot of influence, because they are rich, intelligent, etc.”

And Thesaurus.com’s top synonyms for the word are “exclusive” and “silk-stocking.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

There is nothing inherently wrong with exclusivity or with being influential, and goodness knows that the dozens of highly selective, usually wealthy, most visible and powerful colleges and universities that journalists and pundits frequently refer to as “elite” contribute enormously to our society. They generally do well by and for the students fortunate enough to get admitted, they produce important research and knowledge, they prepare leaders, and they deliver hefty economic benefits to society and their students. (I, it’s important to acknowledge, am one such individual beneficiary.)

And it feels a little unfair to be kicking them while they’re on the defensive, which they are more than ever in the 40 years I’ve paid close attention to higher education.

But as the name of this column indicates, I’m raising this issue out of (tough) love. Yes, these institutions contribute enormously, but several aspects of how they operate have helped put them in their currently difficult spot (which has been made much worse by a Trump administration that is punishing these institutions for its own political, class-warfare reasons).

Among the reasons why the most highly selective private and public colleges and universities (appropriately) find themselves under scrutiny:

• Their benefits disproportionately accrue to the already privileged. Yes, most of them have made recruiting lower-income, first-generation and minority students a higher priority in the last 10 to 15 years than they had previously, and they (with help from organizations like the American Talent Initiative) deserve credit for doing so.

But the 2017 publication of the so-called Chetty data (more formally known as Opportunity Insights’ social mobility index), which reinforced years of work by the Pell Institute and others, showed that many of higher education’s best known institutions reinforce rather than combat a social order than advantages the wealthy and the white. While the Chetty study has been unreplicable, this recent graphic from James Murphy (focused on representation of low-income learners) speaks volumes.

While this is most problematic at selective private colleges, many public flagship universities have also been moving in the wrong direction on the accessibility front, as they chase wealthier out-of-state learners over working-class and transfer students from their own backyards.

• They often aren’t good citizens of higher education broadly. There are plenty of examples of wealthy institutions behaving in service of their less fortunate counterparts: Ivy League institutions like Brown, Princeton and Harvard have worked with historically Black universities, and Stanford’s Community College Outreach Program and Ed Equity Lab do great work with needy institutions and students, to name a few. And many creations of wealthy and selective universities have benefited the rest of higher education (and the world), like the internet.

But pursuing their own agendas, as they can reasonably be expected to do, often comes at the expense of the rest of higher education. Using their wealth advantage to eliminate loans for low-income students obviously helps those students fortunate enough to get one of their precious slots, but it also ratchets up the national financial aid competition in ways that are bad for other institutions. And right now, flagship universities around the country—seeing their international enrollments threatened—are increasingly picking off talented (and full-tuition-paying) domestic students from their regional public university peers.

Self-interest trumps good citizenship in other ways, too. Most highly selective and wealthy institutions are grudging participants, at best, in national associations of colleges, and they’ve bristled at accreditation, often arguing that they should be treated differently from other institutions.

As an old guy, I hold some historical grudges, particularly against the institutions that helped shape me. In one particularly galling moment from the Obama administration’s review of accreditation in 2011, a Princeton lobbyist, channeling then-president Shirley Tilghman, argued to a federal accreditation panel that institutions can learn best from those “with the same backgrounds and the same experiences in higher education.” (Princeton was upset that its accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, had dared to ask the university to prove that its undergraduate thesis requirement benefited its learners.)

Tilghman suggested that it made no sense for Princeton and its neighbor Mercer County Community College to be judged by the same accreditor. “It is a very fine community college,” Tilghman wrote. “It serves the student population it serves exceedingly well. But I have nothing in common with Mercer County Community College … There is so little that we have to say to each other, other than that we reside within the same county.”

The nation’s most powerful institutions have sometimes stood idly by when other colleges and universities have been under attack. Most said and did little to nothing when Ron DeSantis and other Southern governors targeted their states’ public universities with attacks on diversity, tenure and governance in the early part of this decade.

Of course, the critics eventually came for the Ivies and the other wealthy and most selective colleges and universities, and they’ve arguably been left with far fewer friends and defenders because of their arrogance and selfishness.

These institutions have disproportionate visibility and significance and power, and we all need them to thrive. They will be fine—beyond fine—but they have serious work to do to regain public confidence and trust.

One place to start would be to stop viewing themselves as superior to their peers and to more fully engage as parts of a larger ecosystem that benefits them as much as it does the community colleges and regional public and private colleges that successfully educate a far greater proportion of Americans than the “elite colleges” do.

Can we please stop using that term?

Last year, analysts projected a significant long-term budget shortfall for the Pell Grant program—the first in more than a decade—sending shock waves through Congress.

And while the Legislature tried to address it with a $10.5 billion Band-Aid, the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projection shows that even such an emergency action won’t be enough to prevent devastating deficits for the long-standing financial aid program that helps low-income students pay for college.

The report, released late Thursday evening, projects that by the end of fiscal year 2026, which ends Sept. 30, the Pell Grant program will be short $5.5 billion; that number skyrockets to $11.5 billion in fiscal year 2027 if Congress doesn’t make cuts or put in new money. And by 2036, the final year included in the CBO’s 10-year projection, the cumulative toll could reach up to $132 billion if Congress doesn’t up its spending to keep pace with inflation. (The 10-year deficit would be about $104 billion if adjusted for inflation.)

“A $100 billion 10-year projected shortfall isn’t just a wake-up call, it’s a fire alarm,” said Alex Holt, senior adviser for higher education at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Pell awards are already set for the 2025–26 academic year and many grants have already gone out the door, so Congress can’t address the shortfall by clawing back federal dollars, experts said. That means lawmakers will have to find the $5.5 billion before grappling with the larger long-term shortfall.

Without new money, students in future years could see changes to the maximum award, how many semesters they can use the grant for and when. The last time Pell faced a shortfall, Congress cut eligibility for the grant during the summer term, which was restored in 2017. And last year, when the CBO projected a $2.7 billion funding gap, the Trump administration proposed cutting the maximum award by more than $1,600 a year and blamed Congress for the program’s “chronic mismanagement.”

Any cuts to the program would be a blow for the more than seven million low-income students who rely on it, advocates say.

Higher education policy experts and student advocacy groups have warned about the looming consequences of a Pell Grant shortfall for years, but even they say that the scale of the CBO’s numbers came as a bit of a surprise.

“Most analysts and advocates were of the mind that the $10.5 billion that Congress generously provided in the [One Big Beautiful Bill Act] would make the program whole through fiscal year 2026,” said David Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges.

What this shows, Baime added, is that “substantially more appropriations will be needed” to keep the program afloat.

Holt added that Congress has largely avoided making tough choices related to Pell and now “the bill really has come due.”

“These one-year fixes are not sustainable. Congress made the program more expensive and now they either need to find a way to cut costs, find the money to pay for it, or both,” he said. “If you’re worried about low-income students, then you need to be worried about protecting Pell, and to protect Pell you need to get serious about how to pay for it.”

Increasing Demand on Pell

In the 2020–21 academic year, the Pell Grant went to 6.4 million students, costing $26.5 billion.

By this current academic year, about 7.6 million students received the Pell Grant, according to CBO, which would cost about $34 billion in discretionary funds. Yet Congress hasn’t substantially increased funding for the program beyond the one-time funding last summer.

The flat funding is in spite of Congress’s decision in 2020 to expand access to the Pell Grant program as part of the FAFSA Simplification Act. That expansion took effect in spring 2024, and a recent analysis found that 1.5 million additional students are now eligible to receive the maximum Pell Grant this academic year.

Starting July 1, that number will only increase more as students in short-term workforce training programs will be able to use the Pell Grant to pay for their classes as well.

Students in the short-term workforce programs won’t receive nearly as much in aid as the maximum $7,395 that students who are working toward a credential can access. However, experts worry Workforce Pell could exacerbate the shortfall.

It remains unclear whether and how the Congressional Budget Office accounted for new costs related to Workforce Pell; the regulations that specify which training programs and students are eligible have yet to be finalized.

Some, like Baime from AACC, say the “overwhelming financial pressure” put on Pell is from the 2020 expansion, not Workforce Pell. But Ben Cecil, the deputy director of higher education policy at Third Way, a left-of-center think tank, says, “We can’t underestimate the effects of Workforce Pell on the projected shortfall.”

Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent addressed the potential shortfall during a talk at the Community College Legislative Summit earlier this week, noting that Pell has had bipartisan support but that the lack of new money could force some “hard decisions” at the Education Department. He added that ED wants to work with Congress to identify which areas should be cut versus gain more support and acknowledged that Workforce Pell is a wild card.

“We don’t know what the behavioral change will be, which makes costing this out a little bit of an imperfect science at the very beginning,” he said.

Kim Cook, CEO of the National College Attainment Network, a leading advocacy group for federal student aid, said the numbers for Workforce Pell are “soft,” compared to the “firm” numbers for FAFSA Simplification.

“FAFSA Simplification is doing exactly what we hoped for from a policy point of view—that more students are seeing this as a simpler form. The barriers are taken down. They’re completing the form, and they’re getting the aid for which they’re eligible,” she said. “Now the piece is that we have to call on Congress and the president who signed this into [law] to give Pell sufficient funding to keep that promise.”

But getting Republicans in Congress to support an additional $16 billion at minimum for the Pell Grant program could prove difficult, especially as lawmakers are looking to trim—not increase—federal spending. Congress has until Sept. 30 to pass a federal budget for fiscal year 2027.

Rep. Tim Walberg, the Republican chair of the House Education and Workforce committee, said in a statement Friday that the shortfall has been known “for some time,” and House Republicans want to make the program sustainable for future students.

“In reconciliation, House Republicans proposed targeted reforms to reduce the shortfall and encourage completion—a responsible approach that recognizes fiscal realities,” he said. “We will continue to advocate for concrete solutions to ensure Pell remains strong and focused on students with the greatest need.”

Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the House education committee, declined to comment.

Still, Cook remains hopeful. The Pell Grant has always been a bipartisan program that represents the core beliefs of American democracy, she said, and that should be the kind of leverage that’s needed to get lawmakers on board.

“We have a fundamental belief in this country that we should help everyone who wants to pursue higher education be able to afford it,” Cook said. “And I think every lawmaker—many of whom have been Pell Grant recipients like me—will look at the need for an educated workforce in their districts and their states and see that this is absolutely a program that demands their support.”

The Trump administration filed a lawsuit Friday accusing Harvard University of failing to comply with a federal investigation into whether its admissions processes are discriminatory.

The federal government alleged in a court filing that the Ivy League university has unlawfully withheld “information necessary to determine whether Harvard, which has a recent history of racial discrimination, is continuing to discriminate in its admissions process.” The Trump administration alleged in the lawsuit that Harvard “has slow-walked the pace of [document] production and refused to provide pertinent documents relating to applicant-level admissions decisions.”

The Trump administration said in the filing that it brought legal action “solely to compel Harvard to produce documents relating to any consideration of race in admission” and is not accusing Harvard of discriminatory conduct, seeking monetary damages or the revocation of its federal funding.

“The Justice Department will not allow universities to flout our nation’s federal civil rights laws by refusing to provide the information required for our review,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a DOJ news release. “Providing requested data is a basic expectation of any credible compliance process, and refusal to cooperate creates concerns about university practices. If Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it.”

Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in the same news release that the Department of Justice “will continue fighting to put merit over [diversity, equity, and inclusion] across America.”

Applicant data sought by the DOJ includes grade point average, standardized test scores, essays and extracurricular activities, disaggregated by race and ethnicity, according to the court filing, which also noted that the federal government’s initial requested deadline was April 25 of last year. Harvard provided hundreds of pages of documents in response but the court filing says it handed over “aggregated admissions data”—not “individual-level applicant data.”

A Harvard spokesperson denied claims of wrongdoing in an emailed statement.

“Harvard has been responding to the government’s inquiries in good faith and continues to be willing to engage with the government according to the process required by law,” the spokesperson wrote to Inside Higher Ed. “The University will continue to defend itself against these retaliatory actions which have been initiated simply because Harvard refused to surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights in response to unlawful government overreach.”

Friday’s lawsuit is the latest salvo from the Trump administration in a nearly yearlong fight with Harvard that has included efforts to cut off $2.2 billion in federal research funding and to prevent it from hosting international students. Harvard has managed to successfully fend off those efforts and sued the Trump administration last April. Harvard won that legal battle with the federal government last fall but remains in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, as the president and others have accused Harvard of permitting antisemitism, among other allegations.

Despite Harvard’s legal victory, rumors of a settlement have persisted for months. Any such deal would follow similar agreements struck with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Virginia, Cornell University and Northwestern University. 

However, while a deal has supposedly been in the works for months, Harvard reportedly has been resistant to pay a fine as part of any such settlement. Earlier this month The New York Times reported that the federal government had dropped its request for a fine as part of the settlement, only to be immediately countered by Trump, who demanded Harvard pay $1 billion.

Tim Pennington/Getty Images

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University has banned university-funded “identity-based Graduation Achievement Ceremonies,” the institution announced on its website. The Virginian-Pilot reported the news Thursday, though the university made the announcement Jan. 26.

“The decision aligns with guidance from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which states that federal civil rights law prohibits using race in decisions related to graduation ceremonies and cautions that such practices may be perceived as segregation,” the university said in its announcement. But it’s unclear what guidance it was referencing.

A year ago, the Office for Civil Rights told universities that identity-based graduations were illegal. “In a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history, many American schools and universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies,” the office wrote in a Dear Colleague letter. Some universities canceled similar ceremonies.

But, last April, a federal judge blocked the department from enforcing that guidance and, on Jan. 21—five days before Virginia Tech’s statement—the department gave up defending it.

A Virginia Tech spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that recognized student organizations can still use nonuniversity funds to host the events on campus. The university’s online statement said, “Student groups planning events for graduating seniors should contact the appropriate scheduling office, such as Event Services, by the end of January.”

In an email, the university spokesperson said, “Virginia Tech decided to end its graduation achievement ceremonies to ensure that we are compliant with the law. We will continue to seek ways to celebrate the academic accomplishment of all our students in ways that [are] consistent with current law and are open to all members of the university community.”

I’ve spent much of my career working as a college administrator. I’ve held senior roles, carried expansive portfolios, and had titles that critics of higher education increasingly cite as evidence of “administrative bloat.” I understand why those titles and the organizational charts behind them can feel alienating to faculty. They can reinforce an unhealthy sense of “us versus them” on campus.

But after years inside those roles, I’ve come to believe that title inflation is not the core problem it’s often made out to be. It’s visible. It’s frustrating. And it’s easy to blame. However, focusing solely on titles risks mistaking a symptom for the disease, and in the process, leaving the real cause of administrative overload unexamined.

That’s why Austin Sarat’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay asking, “How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?” resonated with me, even as I think it ultimately misdiagnoses the challenge. Sarat is right to be uneasy about what he calls the “vice presidentialization” of higher education. Titles matter. Hierarchies matter. And the proliferation of vice presidents deserves scrutiny.

But the growth of administrative titles is not what is hollowing out institutional capacity or widening the divide between faculty and administrators. It is what happens when leadership repeatedly avoids the more challenging work of setting priorities and enforcing limits.

Criticism of administrative growth in higher education is not new, and it is not entirely unfounded. Colleges and universities have undeniably expanded their administrative functions over time. But the ideas behind many of those roles are sound and, in many cases, essential. Retention matters. Financial aid matters. Student support, compliance and data matter. Investing in these functions improves student success. The problem begins with what happens after those roles are created.

Over time, administrators are assigned work that is only loosely connected or not connected at all to the responsibilities their titles suggest. Priorities proliferate. New initiatives emerge. New reporting requirements arrive from accreditors, legislators, donors and boards. Crises, real and perceived, demand immediate attention. Almost nothing is ever taken away. Each new priority is layered on top of existing work, often without clarity about duration, ownership or trade-offs. Vice presidents effectively become executives’ administrative assistants.

To understand an institution’s true priorities, don’t start with the strategic plan. Look instead at how administrators are actually spending their time. What you’ll often find is that people hired to do one essential job are doing five or six others instead. Much of that work is not merely peripheral; it is squarely outside the scope of the role. This is not a failure of individual administrators. It is a failure of organizational discipline.

I know many of the people filling these roles. I have been one of them. They are not avoiding faculty or students. They would love to spend some time in a classroom. They are not ignoring phone calls and emails out of indifference. Most of them are in it for the right reasons: the students and the national imperative of postsecondary attainment. If they are rarely in their offices at all, it is because they are being pulled into meetings, task forces and crisis response for issues far removed from their core responsibilities. Many work nights and weekends, skip vacations and still fall behind, not because they lack commitment but because the system virtually guarantees overload.

This is where Sarat’s critique falls short. It’s not that administrators take their titles too seriously. It’s that institutions take on too many priorities without making corresponding choices about what not to do. And while many of those initiatives might be “good,” too many of them fall outside the core scope of educating students. The result is not just administrative strain, but less institutional attention devoted to teaching and learning itself.

Our colleges and universities are under greater and more varied pressure than ever. They are being squeezed from every direction: demographic decline, rising costs, declining public investment, growing accountability demands and increasingly diverse student needs have made it impossible to continue operating as if capacity were unlimited. Yet too often, institutional “strategy” still amounts to adding priorities rather than choosing among them. What this moment demands instead is institutional redesign, a deliberate rethinking of structures, roles and work so that colleges and universities can focus on what matters most for today’s students.

Real strategy is not about what initiatives institutions adopt, but what they deliberately decide not to do. In a moment when today’s students need clearer pathways, stronger support and better outcomes, institutions do not have the luxury of letting work continue to creep in unchecked, or of trying to be all things to all people. When leaders avoid making those choices, the pressure doesn’t disappear. They push it downward and outward until adding people and titles becomes the default way to cope.

Eventually, something must give. When a vice president reaches the limit of what one person can reasonably manage, institutions rarely narrow the role or clarify boundaries. Instead, they add another layer: an associate vice president, an assistant vice president. Titles proliferate not because administrators crave status, but because institutions use people and titles as workarounds for unresolved leadership failures.

Ironically, this is precisely what deepens the divide Sarat worries about. When administrators are stretched impossibly thin, they become less present, less responsive and less connected to academic life. Faculty experience this as indifference or bureaucratic arrogance. In truth, it is structural misalignment. The distance is real, but it is produced by overload, not hierarchy.

Which is why the solution cannot simply be fewer vice presidents or humbler titles. It must start with presidents, boards and faculty leaders willing to exercise real leadership discipline. That means distinguishing between core academic work and aspirational initiatives. It means abandoning programs and committees as readily as launching them. And it means acknowledging an essential truth that higher education often avoids: Adding priorities without subtracting others is not strategic ambition—it is organizational debt.

The best administration is often invisible, not because it lacks value, but because it is doing its job so well that teaching and learning can take center stage. Centering students and their education should mean fewer symbolic fights over titles and more honest conversations about priorities, capacity and trade-offs.

Sarat is right to warn against importing corporate hierarchy into higher education. However, to address administrative bloat seriously, we must look beyond the organizational chart. The real question is not how many vice presidents a college needs. It is the number of priorities an institution is willing to abandon to serve its academic mission effectively. This is a test of leadership and discipline. We need to do a better job ensuring that our institutions are designed around teaching our students rather than running an ever-expanding business enterprise.

Green River College trustees announced this week they voted to terminate President Suzanne Johnson’s contract following a budget crisis that prompted campus wide cuts, KUOW reported.

The college’s budget deficit climbed to a projected $14.2 million last year, prompting Johnson to call for a hiring freeze and 5 percent cuts across every division, though a spokesperson told the NPR affiliate that Green River has since achieved a balanced budget. But Johnson was ousted amid the fallout when the board terminated her contract ahead of a scheduled no-confidence vote.

Faculty quoted in the report argued she was too slow to act on financial challenges and not transparent enough about the college’s budget squeeze.

The radio station noted that the Board of Trustees did not specify why Johnson’s contract was terminated and credited her with increasing bachelor’s degree offerings and enrollment at the public community college in Washington state, which she led for nearly a decade. Trustees praised her for leading the college through the coronavirus pandemic with “a steady hand while consistently demonstrating compassion, understanding, and care for our campus community.”

The board appointed vice president of college relations, George Frasier, as interim president.

For all his criticism and condemnation of higher education, Texas governor Gregg Abbott is proud of the state’s institutions. He’s designated billions of public dollars to fund them. Speaking to a crowd of 400 higher ed leaders at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s leadership conference in 2023, Abbott praised attendees for putting the state “on a trajectory of excellence in higher education.”

A high-quality higher education has many components, he said, but one of the most important elements “is having top-notch research universities to educate the next generation of innovative leaders needed by employers in the state.”

He told the crowd that the reason CEOs are choosing to call Texas home is because of the “premier workforce” universities are creating.

It’s puzzling, then, that as he’s championing the state’s research might, he has made it harder for institutions to attract the best academic talent in the world. Last week Abbott put a freeze until the end of May next year on public universities granting new H-1B visas without first obtaining written permission from the Texas Workforce Commission.

For nearly 40 years, universities have used H-1B visas to attract the best and brightest minds to their institutions. With 12 public, R-1 research universities, Texas has the second highest number of H-1B visa holders in the country, behind California’s colleges. Lawmakers allowed universities to be exempt from the national annual cap on H-1B visas because they recognized how important foreign academic talent is to the innovation economy and training the next generation of workers.

When Abbott announced the freeze, he cited reports of abuse of the H-1B visa program and said he wanted to ensure “American jobs are going to American workers.” But higher education isn’t using cheap foreign labor to avoid hiring American citizens. On the contrary, institutions are competing in a global marketplace against China, who introduced its own version of an H-1B visa last year, and English-speaking peers in the U.K., Canada and Australia to bring the best mathematicians, epidemiologists, economists and others to their campuses.

Abbott understands how important academic research is to the Texas economy. In 2023, he signed into law the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund meant to encourage the expansion of the semi-conductor industry in the state and “further develop the expertise and capacity of Texas institutions of higher education” in order to maintain the state’s position as “the nation’s leader in semiconductor manufacturing.”

In December, Abbott awarded $4.8 million from the fund to the Texas Quantum Institute (TQI) at the University of Texas at Austin to establish the QLab, a quantum-enhanced semiconductor metrology facility.

TQI co-director Elaine Li is a physicist from China. According to her UT Austin bio, she came to the U.S. after her professor at Beijing Normal University encouraged her to expand her horizons. She thought “What the heck? It might be fun,” and so she enrolled at the University of Michigan to get a Ph.D. She’s been at UT Austin since 2007.

I don’t know if Li was ever in the country on an H-1B visa, but her story is typical of so many other international researchers who come here—she’s smart, hungry and passionate about working on complex problems with the best minds in the world. Those are the type of talented people who help cultivate Abbott’s premier workforce in Texas. Fewer H-1B visa holders means fewer physicists advancing Texas’s semiconductor economy, fewer biomedical researchers at its health centers and fewer top-notch professors in its classrooms inspiring the next generation of innovative leaders.

In September, Trump raised the cost of an H-1B visa to $100,000, making it prohibitive for many colleges to recruit talented researchers. On the back of that decision, economists downgraded their predictions for the country’s economic growth because of the loss of foreign talent. That Texas doubled down on the restrictions by freezing new applications is short-sighted and economically risky. Abbott, up for reelection in November, may have scored a political win by stopping universities from recruiting foreign scholars, but the long-term consequences to the state’s innovation economy could outlast his time in office.

As the U.S. tightens visa restrictions for international students and slashes research funding—threatening its status as a global innovation powerhouse —it’s tempting to think American universities can simply go offshore to find new students or new funding. But the reality is far more complicated, particularly if the strategy is an international branch campus (IBC).

IBCs represent a paradox within global higher education, with some universities fully embracing the strategy and others outright rejecting the concept. Critics have dismissed IBCs as hollow replicas of their home institutions. Yet research shows that many have developed robust academic programs and even extensive research capacities. And, like the rest of the postsecondary universe, IBCs span a wide spectrum in terms of quality, purpose and impact.

The United States has led the world in establishing IBCs. The movement surged in the 2000s, a period of “gold rush”–like expansion driven by the pursuit of new revenue, visibility and rankings, but slowed dramatically over the past decade as political scrutiny and geopolitical tensions grew. In fact, until last year, we’d seen almost no IBCs of U.S. universities created since 2019.

Shifting policies and global dynamics are reigniting interest (and debate). Political concern contributed to the closure of Texas A&M University’s “profitable” branch in Qatar and heightened scrutiny of U.S. branches in China. Federal limits on international engagement and student visa delays and travel restrictions are causing some universities to once again look outward. Illinois Institute of Technology’s planned branch in India, Texas State University’s new campus in Mexico, and the University of New Haven’s forthcoming site in Saudi Arabia suggest momentum. Yet, as institutions turn toward IBCs as a hedge against domestic uncertainty, the path forward remains fraught with its own uncertainty.

Over 15 years studying international branch campuses (IBCs) through the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT), we’ve tracked the rise, fall and reinvention of IBCs on (nearly) every continent—Antarctica doesn’t have one yet. From governance breakdowns and cultural clashes to accountability gaps and student mobility shifts, we’ve learned that launching a campus abroad requires far more than institutional desire.

If your institution is considering joining this wave, here are six things you should know before you plant a flag abroad.

1. You’re Launching a Start-Up, Not a Clone

Opening an IBC is more akin to launching a start-up than expanding a franchise. Your institution needs to be ready to act like an international entrepreneur, taking on associated risks—otherwise, it’s not ready to run a campus abroad.

A report on successful IBCs that we coauthored found they required profoundly different leadership strategies than what you use on your mature campus back home. Building an IBC is not just duplicating your brand; it’s creating a new entity in a foreign regulatory, cultural and economic environment.

Take the case of Michigan State University’s now-closed Dubai campus or the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s closed campus in Singapore. These weren’t failures of vision but of execution. There was misalignment between institutional ambition, financial resources and operational capacity.

From hiring faculty to navigating construction delays or managing local political expectations to balancing dual accreditation systems, successful campuses tended to emerge from institutions that approached their IBCs as strategically distinct ventures—not mere clones of the home campus.

2. Local Alignment Isn’t Optional—It’s Everything

The data is clear: IBCs with strong host-country alignment, including government support, regulatory clarity and local partnerships, are far more likely to survive. Several Gulf-based campuses (like New York University in Abu Dhabi or Cornell University’s medical school in Qatar) succeeded because they were codeveloped with local governments and embedded in national strategies for higher education and economic growth. Others closed, like George Mason University’s Ras Al Khaimah (RAK) campus after disagreements with local officials over enrollment and revenue expectations. As we lay out in a recent article, lack of alignment is one of the greatest risks in these endeavors.

Building strong connections and communications is vital. IBCs established with a purely export mindset struggle to gain traction, enroll students or weather local shifting political winds. IBCs don’t start with the good will and reputation developed over decades like you have at home. Work is needed to build it with new partners. At the same time, your longstanding stakeholders at home need to be kept on board. Nevertheless, abrupt ends happen, such as with the National University of Singapore ending its partnership with Yale University or, as previously mentioned, the Texas A&M Board of Regents pulling the plug on the campus in Qatar.

3. Your “International” Students May Never Leave Their Country

IBCs increasingly serve place-bound learners seeking international credentials close to home. Our research shows that the majority of IBC students are either from the host country or region, a finding with implications for recruitment, student support and how institutions define mission and measure global impact.

Most models of international education are built around mobility—students crossing borders to pursue degrees abroad. But IBCs flip that paradigm: The institution crosses borders.

As we’ve explored in previous work, this shift complicates the definition of “international student.” For example, how do you classify a Korean student enrolled at a U.S. branch campus such as SUNY Korea, and who is being taught in English and earning an American degree? How about a Chinese student who does the same thing? Or a U.S. student who pursues an IBC degree at that same SUNY Korea branch campus? Distinguishing between domestic or international gets complicated fast.

Understanding this shift is essential for institutions considering a branch campus, not only to reach the right students, but to design a truly global learning experience that reflects their realities.

4. Your Governance Model May Not Survive the Flight

One of our key findings is that governance misalignment is a top reason IBCs flounder. Who oversees hiring? Curriculum? Budget? How is the decision made to open, and who decides when to close?

Governance challenges are underappreciated risks of IBCs. Recent work highlights how IBCs operate within multi-sovereign governance structures, with accountability to home regulators, host governments, multiple quality assurance agencies, local boards and internal university systems. These overlapping authorities often have different priorities, leading to conflicting mandates.

Consider the issue of academic freedom. How does an institution protect academic freedom abroad given that host countries’ sensitivities and restrictions need to be managed? Home campus structures may not be well-suited to the task, and completely distinct policies would push aside coherent institutional mission. What governance structures allow your university to thread the needle? Institutions must define how decisions are made, who is accountable, and how the IBC integrates into broader institutional planning right from the start, before a crisis.

5. Accountability Systems Don’t Travel

Traditional quality assurance systems are built on national sovereignty. But IBCs occupy a gray space: Their degrees are awarded in the name of the home university, their students are often local to the branch campus and their operations are subject to foreign regulators. This creates major accountability tensions. A campus may be accredited in the U.S. but fall short of host-country standards—or vice versa.

In our work on cross-border accountability, we argue for more nuanced models, acknowledging dual jurisdiction and adaptive frameworks rather than simply exporting home-country norms. IBCs require “fit-for-purpose” quality-assurance systems—ones that are context-specific and created in dialogue with host-country partners. Your U.S. accreditation may not serve as a global stamp of approval and won’t absolve you of meeting local quality criteria.

Too many IBCs have stumbled by assuming that U.S. accreditation equals global legitimacy, where really it is just one link in the value proposition.

6. It Can Work—But Only with Commitment, Capacity and Collaboration

Despite challenges and several closures, many IBCs have also repeatedly proven their worth. But this requires long-term institutional commitment, sustained investment, and a collaborative approach that aligns academic quality, local relevance and strategic vision.

Consider Georgia Tech-Europe, established in 1990. Beginning as a small graduate engineering program in Metz, France, it has become a globally integrated component of Georgia Tech’s research and teaching mission as well as home to an engineering lab funded by CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research). In fact, our research has shown that many IBCs have benefited from local research funding and successfully expanded universities’ international research collaborations. Success lies in deep faculty engagement, integration into European research networks, and consistency in institutional support over more than three decades.

Another, Temple University, Japan Campus (TUJ), established in 1982 and officially recognized by Japan’s Ministry of Education in 2005, is often highlighted as one of the most established American branch campuses abroad. TUJ offers U.S. degree programs taught in English and enrolls a highly international student body. It provides a full liberal arts and professional education experience. The campus has also become a hub for intellectual exchange in the region through its Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies, which regularly convenes global experts for lectures and symposia. With its strong institutional integration over time and diverse academic offerings, TUJ stands as a significant model of global engagement in higher education.

Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)—Nanjing Center offers another compelling example. Established in 1986 as a partnership with Nanjing University, one of the earliest U.S.–China higher education joint ventures, it has become a globally recognized hub for graduate education in international relations. The model is distinguished by its bilingual curriculum, shared governance with Johns Hopkins and Nanjing Universities, and a focus on fostering cross-cultural scholarship and policy engagement. Its success rests on decades of sustained collaboration, careful navigation of regulatory environments, and the cultivation of trust across institutional and cultural boundaries.

In these cases, and others like them, success was neither fast nor guaranteed. It required:

• Multi-year institutional buy-in beyond the presidency or provost’s office
• Faculty champions who shaped curriculum and governance with integrity
• Strong on-site leadership with operational autonomy and deep cross-cultural fluency
• Local partnerships with government, industry and communities to create shared value
• Financial models that prioritized mission and quality over short-term revenue generation
• Strategical meeting of a need that was not already being met by the host country—offering added value

IBCs can be laboratories for innovation, platforms for diplomacy and engines for capacity building. But that’s only if institutions are ready to treat them as deeply collaborative, institution-defining commitments—not branding exercises.

Conclusion

U.S. universities revisiting the idea of international branch campuses face a more consequential question than ever—not just where to go, but why? For as long as IBCs have existed, the tension between mission and money has shaped their success or failure. Getting the motivation right is critical in today’s volatile political climate, marked by rising restrictions on international engagement, shrinking research funding and growing skepticism of globalization.

IBCs conceived as a short-term financial fix or branding play will almost certainly falter. But when grounded in purpose, mutual learning, authentic partnerships and shared commitment to expanding access and knowledge, an IBC can be a vital part of a university’s long-term strategy and bridge an increasingly fractured world.

More than simply hedging against political uncertainty, opening an IBC requires defining what sort of institution and what kind of global actor a university aspires to be.

The College Board will prohibit students from wearing smart glasses—wearable, internet-connected computers that allow users to see a computer display in the lenses—while taking the SAT, starting in March 2026.

The organization has long banned any wearable electronics, such as Apple AirPods and Apple Watches, said Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president of college readiness assessments at the College Board. Such devices, as well as students’ phones, are taken away by the test’s proctor before the test begins; the rule outlawing smart glasses is just an extension of that existing policy.

Although the first smart glasses emerged in the early 2010s, the technology has risen to prominence in recent years, especially as companies such as Meta and Google have debuted artificial intelligence–enabled versions of the product. As they’ve become more common, professors have also raised alarm bells about whether they will be used for cheating; they fear that students will use them to scan tests and get fed the answers by AI in real time without detection.

At least one documented example exists of a student using smart glasses to cheat; a student in Tokyo was caught using his spectacles to post questions from a college entrance exam on the social media site X and received answers from other social media users.

An op-ed by professors at the University of Victoria in Canada also warned that the threat of smart glasses in the classroom goes beyond cheating. They also discussed them as a threat to academic freedom; the glasses could allow students to record their professors without their professors knowing they’re being filmed, allowing them to leak lectures or even create deepfakes, the professors said.

Outside of higher education, they have been criticized for violating people’s privacy as it has become increasingly common for social media content creators to secretly record their conversations with strangers via smart glasses and post those videos online.

SAT proctors are now trained to spot and take away students’ smart glasses if they spot them. Although the glasses look similar to a regular pair of spectacles, Rodriguez said most mainstream smart glasses brands have a distinctive look with thick, black rims, and when they’re in use, the camera on the front lights up.

“It’s a noticeable light, so if someone were taking a video, a photo, having someone talk to them through the glasses, etc., the light shines and that’s kind of like the dead giveaway,” she said.

Students will not be allowed to wear the devices even if they are prescription glasses, she noted. If students are unable to take the test without their smart glasses, they will be asked to return on a different day to take the test with a regular pair of glasses.

So far, Rodriguez said, she is unaware of any instances where students have been caught cheating with smart glasses in the SAT, but the step to ban the devices was taken preemptively.

“We have a really robust test security team here at College Board, coupled with, really, an industry-leading technology team. So, between those two, they’re always looking out to say, ‘what could be next? What’s the next frontier if you’re trying to gain an advantage on this test?’” she said. “They were monitoring the pre-launch announcements of these kinds of glasses and gadgets well before they hit the market, so we were ready.”

Texas A&M University is closing its women’s and gender studies program, effective immediately, to comply with a new system board policy that limits discussions of “race or gender ideology” on campus.

“[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,” Alan Sams, Texas A&M’s provost and executive vice president, wrote in a letter to faculty and staff Friday, according to a copy published by KBTX, a local TV news station in College Station, Tex. “This decision is based on the requirements of System policy and limited student interest in the program based on enrollment over the past several years.”

But free expression advocates and Texas A&M faculty decried the move, which they said was the result of an opaque process and represents another threat to academic freedom.

“Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas A&M has served generations of Aggies and advanced the core values of the institution throughout its history,” the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in a public statement. “The AAUP remains steadfast in its opposition to Interim President Williams’s draconian decision, which represents a threat to the entire university community by devaluing student degrees, undermining faculty governance, and diminishing its institutional reputation.”

Texas A&M first began offering women’s and gender studies courses in 1979 amid national growth of the academic discipline. According to the faculty who run the program, such courses are still relevant almost 50 years later.

“The program serves the university at a particularly critical moment in its history by bringing a long history of multidisciplinary research, curricula, pedagogy, and education infrastructure to an institution that is only recently, and under new leadership, recognizing the urgent need to work across disciplinary borders to address the problems and opportunities of twenty-first century community, culture, and society,” the program’s website states.

“Additionally, in a moment of incendiary dispute across cultural, social, and political difference, Women’s and Gender Studies remains a thoroughly informed, established, intellectual base working at the cutting edge of cultural and social research to address difference within community.”

At present, the program has 25 majors and 31 minors enrolled, according to an email Cynthia Werner, senior executive associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, sent to women’s and gender studies faculty. While a teach-out plan is in place to allow current students to complete their degrees or programs—meaning the university will still offer some courses in the discipline for up to six more semesters—“effective immediately, students will not be able to enroll in these curricular options,” Werner wrote.

The announcement comes after faculty and administrators reviewed 5,400 course syllabi “to ensure compliance with System policy,” Sams wrote. That resulted in the cancellation of six courses that were found noncompliant with the new system policy, though “in most cases, courses were confirmed or adjusted within departments without the need for further review.”

Although Sams did not specify which six courses were canceled, earlier this month the university asked faculty to remove course content related to feminism, queer cinema and even the ancient Western philosopher Plato, among other topics. At least one sociology course, Introduction to Race and Ethnicity, was canceled right before this semester started.

“From banning Plato in one class to culling materials related to race and gender from syllabi, and now ending a well-established interdisciplinary program, TAMU is staking out turf as the epicenter of higher education censorship nationwide,” Amy Reid, program director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn initiative, said in a statement. “Forcing faculty to restrict what they teach censors the knowledge accessible to students, paving the way for the American public university system to become a mouthpiece for the government. Limiting what can be taught in a university classroom is not education, it’s ideological control.”

Texas isn’t the only state that’s reviewing curricula and closing academic programs in an effort to limit discussions of race, gender, sexuality and other controversial topics on university campuses.

In 2023, New College of Florida’s trustees—including several appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a frequent critic of higher education—voted to wind down the university’s gender studies program. And statewide, faculty at universities across Florida have also been subject to ongoing syllabus reviews to ensure compliance with laws that aim to align university teaching with conservative ideologies and viewpoints.