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  • Senate Rejects Competing Bills To Fund Government, Increasing Risk Of Shutdown On Oct. 1 – KXL

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate rejected competing measures on Friday to fund federal agencies for a few weeks when the new budget year begins on Oct. 1, increasing prospects for a partial government shutdown on that date.

    Leaders of the two parties sought to blame the other side for the standoff. Democrats accused Republicans of not negotiating with them to address some of their priorities on health care as part of the funding measure, even though they knew Democratic votes would be needed to get a bill to the president’s desk.

    Republicans said Democrats were making demands that would dramatically increase spending and were not germane to the core issue of keeping agencies fully running for a short period of time while negotiations continued on a full-year spending package.

    It’s unclear how the two sides will be able to avoid a shutdown. Republicans are planning on what amounts to a do-over vote on their proposal close to the deadline in the hopes that more Democrats will have second thoughts. Democrats are repeating their demand that Republicans sit down with them and work on a compromise.

    “The theater must end,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said after the vote. “Let’s sit down and negotiate.”

    Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., gave no indication of a change in course.

    “All it takes is a handful of Democrats to join the Republicans in keeping the government open and funded, and to ensure we have a chance to get the appropriations process completed in the way it was intended,” Thune said.

    House Republicans unify behind a short-term bill
    The Senate action came after the House earlier in the day passed the Republican-led funding bill. The measure would extend government funding generally at current levels for seven weeks. The bill would also add about $88 million in security funding for lawmakers and members of the Supreme Court and executive branch in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

    The vote was 217-212. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine was the lone Democratic member to support the bill. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., also said she tried to vote for the bill but was not recognized by the presiding officer. She was listed officially as not voting.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said he knew he had few votes to spare as he sought to persuade fellow Republicans to vote for the funding patch, something many in his conference have routinely opposed in past budget fights. But this time, GOP members saw a chance to portray the Democrats as responsible for a shutdown.

    “The ball is in Chuck Schumer’s court. I hope he does the right thing. I hope he does not choose to shut the government down and inflict pain on the American people,” Johnson said.

    President Donald Trump had urged House Republicans to pass the bill and put the burden on Democrats to oppose it. GOP leaders often need Trump’s help to win over holdouts on legislation.

    “Every House Republican should UNIFY, and VOTE YES!” Trump said on his social media site.

    Democrats press for action on health care
    Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said that in opposing the continuing resolution, Democrats were working to protect the health care of the American people. He said that with Republicans controlling the White House and both branches of Congress, “Republicans will own a government shutdown. Period. Full stop.”

    The Senate moved quickly after the House vote to take up the measure plus the Democratic counter. Both bills fell far short of the 60 votes required for passage.

    The Democratic proposal would extend enhanced health insurance subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, plus reverse Medicaid cuts that were included in Republicans’ big tax breaks and spending cuts bill enacted earlier this year.

    The Democratic measure actually received more votes than the Republican one due to absences. The 47-45 vote went strictly along party lines.

    “The American people will look at what Republicans are doing, look at what Democrats are doing, and it will be clear that public sentiment will be on our side,” Schumer said.

    The Republican measure gained 44 votes, including from Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. But 48 voted against it, including two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

    Uncertainty ahead as lawmakers leave Washington
    Both chambers of Congress are out of session next week because of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Senators will return on Sept. 29. House Republicans don’t plan to be back until October. They were advised by leadership Friday that no votes would take place on Sept. 29-30, as previously scheduled.

    The move by House GOP leadership essentially forces the Senate to approve the House-passed measure or risk a shutdown. Johnson said lawmakers have a lot of work to do in their districts.

    Most Democrats appear to be backing Schumer’s demand that there be negotiations on the bill — and support his threats of a shutdown, even as it is unclear how they would get out of it.

    “Look, the president said really boldly, don’t even talk to Democrats. Unless he’s forgotten that you need a supermajority to pass a budget in the Senate, that’s obviously his signal he wants a shutdown,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.

    While the Democratic measure to fund the government had no chance of passage, it does give Democrats a way to show voters their focus on cutting health care costs. Unless Congress act, tax credits going to low- and middle-income people who purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act will expire. That will mean a big increase in premiums for millions of Americans.

    “There are some things we have to address. The health insurance, ACA, is going to hammer millions of people in the country, including in red states,” said Sen. Angus King, I-Maine. “To me, that can’t be put off.”

    Republicans have said the tax credit issue can be dealt with later this year. They’re also using Schumer’s previous arguments against shutdowns to make the case he’s playing politics.

    “Democrats voted in favor of clean CRs no fewer than 13 times during the Biden administration,” Thune said. “Yet now that Republicans are offering a clean CR, it’s somehow a no go. It’s funny how that happens.”

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    Jordan Vawter

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  • Federal judge is ‘inclined’ to order Trump to restore $500 million in UCLA research grants

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    A federal judge Thursday said she was “inclined to extend” an earlier ruling and order the Trump administration to restore an additional $500 million in UCLA medical research grants that were frozen in response to the university’s alleged campus antisemitism violations.

    Although she did not issue a formal ruling late Thursday, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin indicated she is leaning toward reversing — for now — the vast majority of funding freezes that University of California leaders say have endangered the future of the 10-campus, multi-hospital system.

    Lin, a judge in the Northern District of California, said she was prepared to add UCLA’s National Institutes of Health grant recipients to an ongoing class-action lawsuit that has already led to the reversal of tens of millions of dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Endowment for the Humanities and other federal agencies to UC campuses.

    The judge’s reasoning: The UCLA grants were suspended by form letters that were unspecific to the research, a likely violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which regulates executive branch rulemaking.

    Though Lin said she had a “lot of homework to do” on the matter, she indicated that reversing the grant cuts was “likely where I will land” and she would issue an order “shortly.”

    Lin said the Trump administration had undertaken a “fundamental sin” in its “un-reasoned mass terminations” of the grants using “letters that don’t go through the required factors that the agency is supposed to consider.”

    The possible preliminary injunction would be in place as the case proceeds through the courts. But in saying she leaned toward broadening the case, Lin suggested she believed there would be irreparable harm if the suspensions were not immediately reversed.

    The suit was filed in June by UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley professors fighting a separate, earlier round of Trump administration grant clawbacks. The University of California is not a party in the case.

    A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, Jason Altabet, said Thursday that instead of a federal district court lawsuit filed by professors, the proper venue would be the U.S. Court of Federal Claims filed by UC. Altabet based his arguments on a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld the government’s suspension of $783 million in NIH grants — to universities and research centers throughout the country — in part because the issue, the high court said, was not properly within the jurisdiction of a lower federal court.

    Altabet said the administration was “fully embracing the principles in the Supreme Court’s recent opinions.”

    The hundreds of NIH grants on hold at UCLA look into Parkinson’s disease treatment, cancer recovery, cell regeneration in nerves and other areas that campus leaders argue are pivotal for improving the health of Americans.

    The Trump administration has proposed a roughly $1.2-billion fine and demanded campus changes over admission of international students and protest rules. Federal officials have also called for UCLA to release detailed admission data, ban gender-affirming healthcare for minors and give the government deep access to UCLA internal campus data, among other demands, in exchange for restoring $584 million in funding to the university.

    In addition to allegations that the university has not seriously dealt with complaints of antisemitism on campus, the government also said it slashed UCLA funding in response to its findings that the campus illegally considers race in admissions and “discriminates against and endangers women” by recognizing the identities of transgender people.

    UCLA has said it has made changes to improve campus climate for Jewish communities and does not use race in admissions. Its chancellor, Julio Frenk, has said that defunding medical research “does nothing” to address discrimination allegations. The university displays websites and policies that recognize different gender identities and maintains services for LGBTQ+ communities.

    UC leaders said they will not pay the $1.2-billion fine and are negotiating with the Trump administration over its other demands. They have told The Times that many settlement proposals cross the university’s red lines.

    “Recent federal cuts to research funding threaten lifesaving biomedical research, hobble U.S. economic competitiveness and jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on cutting-edge medical science and innovation,” a UC spokesperson said in a statement Thursday. “While the University of California is not a party to this suit, the UC system is engaged in numerous legal and advocacy efforts to restore funding to vital research programs across the humanities, social sciences and STEM fields.”

    A ruling Lin issued in the case last month resulted in $81 million in NSF grants restored to UCLA. If the UCLA NIH grants are reinstated, it would leave about $3 million from the July suspensions — all Department of Energy grants — still frozen at UCLA.

    Lin also said she leaned toward adding Transportation and Defense department grants to the case, which run in the millions of dollars but are small compared with UC’s NIH grants.

    The hearing was closely watched by researchers at the Westwood campus, who have cut back on lab hours, reduced operations and considered layoffs as the crisis at UCLA moves toward the two-month mark.

    In interviews, they said they were hopeful grants would be reinstated but remain concerned over the instability of their work under the recent federal actions.

    Lydia Daboussi, a UCLA assistant professor of neurobiology whose $1-million grant researching nerve injury is suspended, observed the hearing online.

    Aftewards, Daboussi said she was “cautiously optimistic” about her grant being reinstated.

    “I would really like this to be the relief that my lab needs to get our research back online,” said Daboussi, who is employed at the David Geffen School of Medicine. “If the preliminary injunction is granted, that is a wonderful step in the right direction.”

    Grant funding, she said, “was how we bought the antibodies we needed for experiments, how we purchased our reagents and our consumable supplies.” The lab consists of nine other people, including two PhD students and one senior scientist.

    So far, none of Daboussi’s lab members have departed. But, she said, if “this goes on for too much longer, at some point, people’s hours will have to be reduced.”

    “I do find myself having to pay more attention to volatilities outside of our lab space,” she said. “I’ve now become acquainted with our legal system in ways that I didn’t know would be necessary for my job.”

    Elle Rathbun, a sixth-year neuroscience PhD candidate at UCLA, lost a roughly $160,000 NIH grant that funded her study of stroke recovery treatment.

    “If there is a chance that these suspensions are lifted, that is phenomenal news,” said Rathbun, who presented at UCLA’s “Science Fair for Suspended Research” this month.

    “Lifting these suspensions would then allow us to continue these really critical projects that have already been determined to be important for American health and the future of American health,” she said.

    Rathbun’s research is focused on a potential treatment that would be injected into the brain to help rebuild it after a stroke. Since the suspension of her grant, Rathbun, who works out of a lab at UCLA’s neurology department, has been seeking other funding sources.

    “Applying to grants takes a lot of time,” she said. “So that really slowed down my progress in my project.”

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    Jaweed Kaleem, Daniel Miller

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  • Iowa Board of Regents adds mental health funding to fiscal year 2027 budget requests

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    The Iowa Board of Regents approved a $1 million request for mental health support finding to be added to its fiscal year 2027 appropriations request. (Photo by Brooklyn Draisey/Iowa Capital Dispatch)

    The Iowa Board of Regents approved appropriation requests from state universities to keep general university funding flat for the upcoming fiscal year but allocate money toward certain projects and initiatives, including a regent-introduced line item to address mental health.

    After hearing Thursday from university student governments about their plans for how funds would be used, student Regent Lucy Gipple introduced a motion to add a $1 million request to the fiscal year 2027 state appropriation ask, to go toward mental health support and resources.

    Regent Greta Rouse also supported the motion, saying that mental health is something both she and the students she’s interacted with are passionate about.

    “It’s very clear that … this money will be put into good goals,” Gipple said.

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    The University of Iowa, Iowa State University and University of Northern Iowa have requested their general university allocations from the state be kept steady for the upcoming fiscal year, but each institution proposed programs pertaining to health care, agriculture, technology and new tuition plans.

    Brad Berg, board of regents chief business officer, said during the meeting the incremental funding requests from the three universities total $8.8 million in new appropriations. With the addition of $1 million for mental health, new funding will come in at just under $10 million if the Iowa Legislature approves the requests.

    Regent Robert Cramer said during the meeting board committees worked with university presidents to advise on what funding priorities they should target, leading to the decision to keep general funding flat in favor of asking for appropriations in specific areas.

    Regent David Barker, the only “no” vote on the board for including mental health funding, said during the meeting there may be people outside of the universities who may need mental health support more than students, and the board needs to consider its fiduciary responsibility to Iowa taxpayers.

    He commended the students on the “very well-thought-out proposal,” which has come before the board in past years, but pointed out that money allocated to this effort is money not spent on other efforts that may have a greater need.

    “We provide oversight over the universities, but our ultimate duty is to the taxpayers of Iowa,” Barker said.

    While she said she respected what Barker was saying, Rouse said the board is “here to advocate for students and the universities,” and lawmakers don’t have to fund the addition if they choose not to.

    If board members wish to support the institutions and their leaders, who presented to the board on retention rates and other data, Gipple said seeking this funding will do just that, as well as help students and hopefully avoid potential mental health crises.

    The UI’s retention rate has grown to 90.9%, university president Barbara Wilson said in her presentation to the board, after hitting its goal of 90% retention within three years instead of the projected five. She added the university admits 80% of its application pool.

    “I wouldn’t feel comfortable moving to do this if it wasn’t something I truly believed was necessary,” Gipple said.

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  • Democrats unveil funding alternative to counter GOP in shutdown brawl

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    Congressional Democrats released bill text Wednesday night for their own stopgap spending proposal as they dig in against a House Republican-backed measure that would fund the government until late November.

    The new Democratic proposal links funding the government through Oct. 31 to two of the party’s other priorities: health care assistance and placing limits on President Donald Trump’s ability to unilaterally roll back funds previously approved by Congress.

    The Democratic stopgap bill has virtually no chance of passing the Senate — much less getting to Trump’s desk before the end-of-the-month deadline to avert a shutdown. But it allows Democrats to rally behind a plan that will win a broad swath of support among their members in the House and Senate.

    “We invite Republican leadership to finally join Democratic leadership at the negotiating table, which they have refused for weeks to do, to prevent a shutdown and begin bipartisan negotiations to keep the government funded,” Congress’ top Democratic appropriators, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Washington Sen. Patty Murray, said in a joint statement.

    The Democrats’ bill would extend boosted Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies that will otherwise expire on Dec. 31. It also would reverse cuts to Medicaid and other health programs that Republicans enacted as part of their party-line megabill this summer.

    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hasn’t explicitly demanded that an extension of the expiring health care subsidies be attached to the stopgap bill, but Democrats also believe Congress can’t wait until the end of the year because Americans will need to make decisions about health insurance before that time.

    The bill contains several mandates for how the Trump administration can spend money, in an attempt to stifle the president’s moves to freeze, shift and cancel funding Congress approves.

    Under the measure, the president would be barred from carrying out his budget request while the government is running on a temporary funding patch. That includes increasing, reducing or eliminating funding unless Congress enacts those changes into law.

    The bill would also hamperTrump’s attempt this month to unilaterally cancel almost $5 billion. The president is planning to withhold the funding through its Sept. 30 expiration, but the bill would extend that date to thwart the cancellation of funding.

    This Democratic alternative comes after House Republicans unveiled their own funding proposal to punt the shutdown deadline to Nov. 21, which they want voted on their chamber floor by Friday. That offer also would include $30 million for lawmaker security and another $58 million in security assistance requested by the White House for the Supreme Court and executive branch.

    But Democrats have bristled over the GOP proposal because Republican leaders are, so far, not negotiating with them. Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent two letters to Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson requesting a meeting but said they had been ignored.

    “Donald Trump continues to push for a shutdown by not negotiating with us but are confident when the American people contrast these two proposals they are going to side with us,” Schumer told reporters Wednesday after the Democratic proposal was released.

    Thune opened the door Tuesdayto meeting with Schumer. But Democrats largely brushed off his comments, accusing Republicans of bending to Trump after the president said in a Fox News interview late last week that he didn’t need Democratic support. The Senate will need 60 votes to advance the spending deal, which will necessitate help from Democrats.

    Despite both Senate leaders now claiming they are willing to meet, as of early Wednesday evening nothing was on the books yet.

    Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.

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  • Donald Trump’s Assault on Disability Rights

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    Eight years ago, Sara Fernandez flew into Newark, New Jersey, on her way back from the Dominican Republic, where her boyfriend lived. As she was going through airport security, she heard a T.S.A. agent say to one of his colleagues, “Do I need to pick her up and put her through the scanner?” Fernandez has dwarfism; she identifies as a little person. She also happened to be a new hire in the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which oversees anti-discrimination enforcement for the Department of Homeland Security, including T.S.A. “The guy obviously didn’t know I worked for D.H.S.,” Fernandez recalled. He had made her feel “really awkward and uncomfortable,” but she didn’t want to get him in trouble, so she contacted T.S.A. and scheduled a phone call with him. “I wanted to be, like, ‘You upset me. Look at me. I’m a professional,’ ” she said. After their call, “he got some training. Moments like that can actually stick with a person more, because he got to hear it from me.”

    Fernandez was raised in Pittsburgh by adoptive parents, also little people, who’d met at an annual meeting of Little People of America. Her mom’s family was “historically Republican,” in a moderate, John McCain kind of way, Fernandez told me. Her dad had emigrated from Argentina and worked as an accountant. “I have a picture of us at his naturalization ceremony, with American flags,” she said. Her parents weren’t political, but they believed in equal rights and taught their daughter not to feel limited by her stature. Still, she recalled, “as a kid, I was very reserved, observant, anxious. I didn’t want anyone to notice me.” Fernandez earned degrees in law and social work, and entered federal service through the Schedule A program, which expedites the hiring of qualified candidates with disabilities. She started at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then went to D.H.S. in 2017, during the first Trump Administration. She married the man she’d been dating, who’s of average height, and gave birth to their son, a little person who’s now five years old.

    Being in a civil-rights office, Fernandez often thought about the laws that made her career possible. In the federal government, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of “a physical or mental disability,” and requires that “reasonable accommodations,” or tweaks to working conditions, be provided to disabled employees. (In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act extended this protection to workers in state and local governments and the private sector.) D.H.S. gave Fernandez an accessible parking spot, placed step stools in common areas of the office, and brought over the customized chair she’d used at the E.E.O.C. During the pandemic, when she was dealing with an autoimmune sickness, her supervisor allowed her to work from home. “It was the best environment I’ve ever worked in,” she said.

    Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden had issued executive orders to improve access and opportunities for civil servants with disabilities. The first Trump Administration also “prided itself on continuing efforts around disability hiring and retention,” Daniel Davis, a disability expert who recently left the Department of Health and Human Services, told me. More than a tenth of the federal workforce identified as disabled in fiscal year 2021 (the most recent data available), including a great number of disabled veterans. In the past decade, the over-all employment rate for adults with disabilities has risen from seventeen per cent to nearly twenty-three per cent, with a big jump since 2020. The pandemic that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and caused many others to become disabled also led employers to offer flexible schedules and remote-work arrangements that made it easier for disabled people to do their jobs.

    Fernandez’s office was at D.H.S. headquarters, at St. Elizabeths, a huge campus in Washington, D.C. that was once the grounds of the Government Hospital for the Insane. Not long ago, people with disabilities had been relegated to such institutions, often against their will. At the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, or C.R.C.L., Fernandez was part of a team that enforced anti-discrimination and language-access laws, led equal-opportunity trainings, and reviewed requests for accommodation for D.H.S. employees. In 2023, she appeared alongside Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, at a conference that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Rehabilitation Act. They posed for a photo—Fernandez wore a blue pleated dress, her hair down to her shoulders—that was later published in an agency newsletter.

    C.R.C.L. also set policies for, and handled complaints from, the public. Its jurisdiction was vast, ranging from the encounter Fernandez had at Newark Airport to much graver incidents: sexual harassment in immigration detention, neglect of wheelchair users in FEMA disaster recovery, racial bullying in the Coast Guard, assault by federal security guards.

    Last year a group funded by the Heritage Foundation set up a website, “DHS Watch List,” to publicize the names and photographs of immigration judges and bureaucrats it deemed “subversive.” It described C.R.C.L. as “a bastion for leftist [sic] who want to use the tools in the department to frustrate efforts to deport illegal aliens.” Fernandez was surprised by this characterization. C.R.C.L. was a law-enforcement agency within a law-enforcement department—so unprogressive, in fact, that friends in the disability community had asked how she could even work there.

    Early this year, when the Department of Government Efficiency started to push large-scale layoffs, Fernandez reassured herself that, because C.R.C.L. was mandated by the founding statute of D.H.S., its hundred and fifty or so employees would be protected. In late March, she learned otherwise. Her position, according to an e-mail from Human Resources, was being eliminated as “a result of the dissolution of Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.” The entire office was found to be “non-essential or not legally mandated,” as were two smaller offices that conducted oversight of the immigration-detention system and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A spokesperson for D.H.S. referred to the three as “internal adversaries.” Civil-rights mechanisms at Homeland Security were essentially wiped out. Fernandez would be put on paid administrative leave for sixty days, then terminated at the end of May. She packed up her office and left.

    One way to parse Donald Trump’s approach to disability is on the basis of his public comments. At a campaign rally in 2015, he mocked the hand movements of a disabled reporter. In his first term, he told aides that he didn’t want to appear with military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” In 2020, according to a memoir by Trump’s nephew, who has a disabled son, the President said, of people with serious disabilities: “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” And this year, after his second Inauguration, he said that Biden’s recruitment of “individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities” were partly to blame for an aircraft collision over the Potomac River that killed sixty-seven people.

    Fernandez had been so rattled by the general chaos in the Administration that her layoff initially came as a relief. Her husband, their five-year-old son, eight-year-old stepdaughter, and four dogs kept her more than occupied, especially when school let out for summer break. “Do you want some kids to live with you?” she joked to me one day, by text. “Mine are available.” After bedtime, she would go online to browse and exchange messages about crystals and rocks, which she’s collected her whole life. She posted closeups of blue lace agate and pink sugar amethyst on Instagram.

    But the relief soon curdled into worry. Her family relied on her salary and health insurance; her husband, who is Dominican and has a green card, took irregular freelance gigs as a construction worker, a personal trainer, a dance instructor, and an Uber driver. She would have to find a new job soon, but where? She had only ever been in the public sector, and by choice. “I want to do good work, but also, I want to move the world forward,” she said.

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    E. Tammy Kim

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  • Colleges add sports to bring men, but it doesn’t always work

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    SALEM, Va. — On a hot and humid August morning in this southwestern Virginia town, football training camp is in full swing at Roanoke College. Players cheer as a receiver makes a leaping one-handed catch, and linemen sweat through blocking drills. Practice hums along like a well-oiled machine — yet this is the first day this team has practiced, ever.

    In fact, it’s the first day of practice for a Roanoke College varsity football team since 1942, when the college dropped football in the midst of World War II. 

    Roanoke is one of about a dozen schools that have added football programs in the last two years, with several more set to do so in 2026. They hope that having a team will increase enrollment, especially of men, whose ranks in college have been falling. Yet research consistently finds that while enrollment may spike initially, adding football does not produce long-term enrollment gains, or if it does, it is only for a few years.

    Roanoke’s president, Frank Shushok Jr., nonetheless believes that bringing back football – and the various spirit-raising activities that go with it — will attract more students, especially men. The small liberal arts college lost nearly 300 students between 2019 and 2022, and things were likely to get worse; the country’s population of 18-year-olds is about to decline and colleges everywhere are competing for students from a smaller pool.  

    “Do I think adding sports strategically is helping the college maintain its enrollment base? It absolutely has for us,” said Shushok.  “And it has in a time when men in particular aren’t going to college.”   

    Women outnumber men by about 60 percent to 40 percent at four-year colleges nationwide. Roanoke is a part of this trend. In 2019, the college had 1,125 women students and 817 men. 

    This fall, Roanoke will have 1,738 students altogether, about half men and half women. But the incoming freshman class is more than 55 percent male. 

    Sophomore linebacker Ethan Mapstone (26) jogs to the sideline at the end of a drill. Mapstone said he hadn’t planned to play college football until Roanoke head coach Bryan Stinespring recruited him. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

    “The goal was that football would, in a couple of years, bring in at least an additional hundred students to the college,” said Curtis Campbell, Roanoke’s athletic director, as he observed the first day of practice. “We’ve got 97 kids out there on the field. So we’re already at the goal.”

    That number was 91 players as the season began, on Sept. 6 — and the Maroons won their first game, 23-7, over Virginia University of Lynchburg, on what Shushok called “a brilliant day full of community spirit and pride.”

    “Our students were out in force, side by side with community members spanning the generations,” he said via email. “In a time when we all need more to celebrate and opportunities to gather, it is easy to say our first football game since 1942 was both historic and invigorating.”

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    In the NCAA’s Division III, where Roanoke teams compete, athletic scholarships are not permitted. Athletes pay tuition or receive financial aid in the same way as other students, so adding football players will add revenue. For a small college, this can be significant. 

    Shushok said it’s not just about enrollment, though: He wants a livelier campus with more school spirit. Along with football, he started a marching band and a competitive cheerleading team. 

    “It plays to something that’s really important to 18- to 22-year-olds right now, which is a sense of belonging and spirit and excitement,” said Shushok, who came to Roanoke after being vice president of student affairs at Virginia Tech. Its Division I football team plays in a 65,000-seat stadium where fans jump up and down in unison to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as the players take the field. 

    The Maroons play in the local high school stadium — it seats 7,157 — and pay the city of Salem $2,850 per game in rent. The college raised $1.3 million from alumni and corporate sponsors to get the team up and running. 

    Roanoke College players gather on the sidelines during practice. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

    Despite the research showing limited enrollment gains from adding football, colleges keep doing it. About a dozen have added or relaunched football programs in the last two years, including New England College in New Hampshire and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Several more plan to add football in 2026, including Chicago State University and Azusa Pacific University in California. 

    Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

    Calvin University in Michigan recently added football even though the student body was already half men, half women. The school wanted to broaden its overall appeal, Calvin Provost Noah Toly said, citing “school spirit, tradition, leadership development,” as well as the increased enrollment and “strengthened pipelines with feeder schools.”

    A 2024 University of Georgia study examined the effects of adding football on a school’s enrollment.

    “What you see is basically a one-year spike in male enrollment around guys who come to that school to help be part of starting up a team, but then that effect fades out over the next couple of years,” said Welch Suggs, an associate professor there and the lead author of that study. It found early modest enrollment spikes at colleges that added football compared to peers that didn’t and “statistically indistinguishable” differences after the first two years.

     ”What happens is that you have a substitution effect going on,” Suggs said. “There’s a population of students that really want to go to a football school; the football culture and everything with it really attracts some students. And there are others who really do not care one way or the other. And so I think what happens is that you are simply recruiting from different pools.” 

    Today, college leaders value any pool that includes men. Most prefer the campus population to be balanced between the sexes, and, considering the low number of male high school graduates going to college at all (39 percent in the last Pew survey), many worry about too few men being prepared for the future workforce.

    “ I don’t know that we have done a good job of articulating the value, and of programming to the particular needs that some of our young men are bringing in this moment,” Shushok said. “I think it’s pretty obvious, if you read the literature out there, that a lot of men are feeling undervalued and perhaps unseen in our culture.”

    Roanoke College President Frank Shushok Jr. in his office. Shushok said he brought football back to Roanoke to boost enrollment and create a livelier campus. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

    Shushok said that Roanoke’s enrollment-building strategy was not centered on athletics. The college has also forged partnerships with local community colleges, guaranteeing students admission after they complete their associate degree, and has added nine new majors in 2024, including cannabis studies. Shushok pointed out that while freshman enrollment is down slightly this year, the community college program has produced a big increase in transfer students, from 65 in fall of 2024 to 91 this fall.

    About 55 percent of Roanoke’s students come from Virginia, but 75 of the football team’s 91 players are Virginians. The head coach, Bryan Stinespring, a 61-year-old Virginia native, knows that recruiting territory, having worked on the coaching staffs at several Virginia universities in his career. 

    Related: College Uncovered podcast: The Missing Men

    When Stinespring took over as head coach in 2023, hoping to inspire existing students and potential applicants to join his new team, there was no locker room, no shoulder pads or tackling dummies, no uniforms. 

    “The first set of recruits that came on campus, we ran down to Dick’s, got a football, went to the bookstore, got a sweatshirt,” said Stinespring, referring to a local Dick’s Sporting Goods store. “These kids came on campus and they had to believe in the vision that we had.” 

    Students bought into that vision; 61 of them joined a club team last fall, which played four exhibition games in preparation for this year. The community bought in, too; 9,200 fans showed up to the first club game, about 2,000 of them perched on a grassy hill overlooking the end zone. 

    Linebackers Connor Cox (40) and Austin Fisher (20) look on from the sidelines. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

    Before Ethan Mapstone, a sophomore, committed to Roanoke, he was on the verge of giving up football, having sustained several injuries in high school. Then Stinespring called. 

    “I could hear by the tone of his voice how serious he meant everything he was saying,” said Mapstone, a 6-foot-1-inch linebacker from Virginia Beach. “I was on a visit a week later, committed two weeks later.”  

    To him, the football leaders at Roanoke seemed to be “a bunch of people on a mission ready to make something happen, and I think that’s what drove me in.” 

    Related: Even as women outpace men in graduating from college their earnings remain stuck 

    KJ Bratton, a junior wide receiver and transfer student from the University of Virginia, said he was drawn to Roanoke not because of football but because of the focus on individual attention in small classes. “You definitely get that one-on-one attention with your teacher, that definitely helps you in the long run,” said Bratton.  

    Jaden Davis, a sophomore wide receiver who was an honor roll student in high school, said, “ The staff, they care about all the students. They’ll pull you aside, they know you personally, they’ll send you emails, invite you to office hours, and they just work with you to do the best you can.” 

    Not everyone was on board with football returning to the college when the plan was first announced. Some faculty and administrators were concerned football would change the campus culture, said Campbell, the athletic director. 

    Sophomore wide receiver Jaden Davis poses for a photograph before the first practice of the season. Davis said the individual attention he could get from professors is what attracted him to Roanoke. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

    “There were just stereotypes about football players,” he said. “You know, they’re not smart, they’re troublemakers. They’re gonna do this and they’re gonna do that, be disruptive.” 

    But the stereotypes turned out to be unwarranted, he said. When the club team started, he said, “I got so many compliments last year from faculty and staff and campus security about how respectful and polite and nice our students were, how they behaved in the classroom, sitting in the front row and just being role models.”

    Payton Rigney, a junior who helps out with the football team, concurred. “All the professors like them because they say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’” she said.

    Like most Division III athletes, the Roanoke players know that they have little chance of making football a professional career. Mapstone said there are other reasons to embrace the sport. 

    “It’s a great blessing to be able to do what we do,” he said. “There’s many people that I speak to who are older and, and they reminisce about the times that they had to play football, and it’s very limited time.

    “And even though there’s not a future for it, I love it. It’s a Thursday, my only problem in the world is that there’s dew on my shoes.”  

    Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at (212) 678-4078 or mifflin@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about college football was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger higher education newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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    Miles MacClure

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  • Finding Sustainable Funding for Early Learning: How Khan Academy Kids Can Help

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    We know many district leaders are navigating a difficult moment. With ESSER funds ending and budgets stretched thin, you’re still working to meet ambitious literacy and math goals for your youngest learners. It can feel like a balancing act—supporting students and teachers while keeping costs predictable for the long term.

    Affordable Early Learning Programs That Fit Any Budget

    And as new features were introduced to support schools and district-level implementation, we were committed to ensuring cost would not be a burden for our partners. At $5 per student, Khan Academy Kids can fit into existing budgets, helping districts avoid the disruption of “start-stop” programs. That means students and teachers get consistent support year after year.

    As federal funding shifts, schools need programs that won’t disappear when grants expire. That’s why we designed Khan Academy Kids to be both affordable and sustainable. The mobile app is, and will always be, available at no cost to both families and teachers, with no in-app advertising. 

    For just $5 per student, districts receive:

    • A web-based teacher dashboard accessible via laptop computer with insights to guide instruction
    • District-level reporting to track engagement
    • Family resources to support learning at home
    • Professional learning and teacher support at no extra cost

    Our goal is simple: to be a partner you can count on.

    Funding Sources for Early Literacy and Math Programs

    Here are some of the most common ways schools and districts are making Khan Academy Kids part of their plan:

    • Title I – Many schools use Title I funds to support supplemental academic programs. Khan Academy Kids builds strong early literacy and math foundations, especially for students who need extra support.
    • Title II – Because a Khan Academy Kids Partnership includes professional learning, districts can use Title II funds, focusing on the included professional learning and teacher effectiveness outcomes that come through partnership.
    • Title III – For English learners, Title III can support programs that strengthen vocabulary and language development. Khan Academy Kids offers language-rich activities that help students build confidence.
    • Title IV, Part A – These grants give schools flexibility to provide well-rounded educational opportunities. With literacy, math, and executive functioning activities, Khan Academy Kids supports the whole child.
    • State Literacy Initiatives – Many states are investing in early literacy aligned to the science of reading. Khan Academy Kids helps districts align with these benchmarks in a cost-effective way.
    • Local Budgets – Because the cost is so low, some districts are able to fund Khan Academy Kids directly from curriculum, early childhood, or technology budgets.
    • Philanthropy & Local Foundations – Some districts partner with local education foundations or nonprofits to fund enrichment or supplemental programs.
    • Community & Business Partnerships – Financial support from your school’s Parent Teacher Association (PTA) or local businesses, especially for early learning and family engagement.

    Learn how Khan Academy Kids can fit into your district’s foundational literacy and math strategy >>

    How Schools Use Federal & State Grants for Early Learning

    1. Start Inside Your School/District
      • Ask your curriculum director if there are discretionary funds for digital learning, early literacy, or supplemental curriculum. Many schools have small budgets for classroom innovation.
      • Check with your Title I coordinator (if you’re in a Title I school). Title I funds often support supplemental reading and math programs.
      • Professional development budgets (Title II) may also apply, since Khan Kids includes free PD.
    2. State Department of Education Websites
      Most states maintain pages for literacy initiatives, early learning, or classroom grants.

      Examples:

      • “Literacy Grants” or “Early Childhood Education” sections on your state DOE site.
      • Some states (e.g., Michigan, Kentucky, Colorado) have dedicated grant portals where teachers can apply directly.
    3. Federal and State Literacy Grants
    4. Education Grant Directories
      • Grants.gov → Main federal portal (search “literacy” or “early childhood”).
      • Foundation Directory Online (Candid.org) → Many education foundations post grants here.
      • GetEdFunding.com (from Corwin) → Free searchable database of education grants.
    5. Local & Community Foundations
      • United Way often funds early childhood development, early literacy, and family engagement.
      • Local education foundations (usually connected to school districts) often provide mini-grants teachers can apply for ($500–$2,000 range).
      • Community foundations in your region (search “[Your City] community foundation education grants”).
    6. Grants and Microgrants for Teachers
      If you just need funding for a smaller classroom pilot:
      • DonorsChoose.org — You can set up a project for Khan Academy Kids licenses. Many donors (and even corporations) sponsor literacy-focused projects.
      • NEA Foundation Grants — The National Education Association offers grants for instructional materials and PD.
      • Fund for Teachers — Supports innovative teaching projects, including classroom resources.

    Your work is about giving students the best possible start—and we want to make that work easier, not harder. By keeping costs predictable and including professional learning, Khan Academy Kids is designed to be a steady partner, even as funding shifts.

    If you’d like to explore how Khan Academy Kids could fit into your district’s funding plan, we’d be glad to talk with you.

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    Megan Colburn

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  • Startup Behind Goldman Sachs’ First ‘A.I. Employee’ Valued at $10B After Peter Thiel Funding

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    Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led Cognition’s latest $400 million funding round. Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union

    Cognition AI, the San Francisco-based startup known for its A.I. software engineer Devin used by Goldman Sachs, has more than doubled its valuation to $10.2 billion after raising more than $400 million in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The deal, announced yesterday (Sept. 8), also drew participation from existing backers including angel investor Elad Gil, Lux Capital, 8VC, Neo, Definition Capital and Swish VC. The fresh financing marks a stark increase from the $4 billion valuation Cognition received earlier this year.

    Cognition was launched in 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yang. Wu, the company’s CEO, previously co-founded Lunchbox, an A.I. networking platform. The founding team also includes alumni of Scale AI, Google DeepMind and self-driving software maker Waymo, as well as a number of elite coders who medaled at the International Olympiad in Informatics, a global programming competition.

    Cognition’s flagship product is Devin, an A.I. software engineer. The company also made waves through acquisitions, most notably when it snapped up software firm Windsurf just days after Google hired away much of its leadership. While OpenAI had reportedly pursued Windsurf before complications with its partner Microsoft, Google in July struck a multibillion-dollar licensing deal for Windsurf’s technology and acqui-hired several top staffers. Cognition then acquired what remained of the company: its team, intellectual property and product.

    Even before the Windsurf deal, Cognition’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) had climbed rapidly—from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by this June, Wu said in a press release. Since the acquisition, ARR has more than doubled. “We’ll continue to invest significantly in both Devin and Windsurf, and our customers are already seeing how powerful the combination is together,” Wu added, noting that clients include Goldman Sachs, Dell and Palantir.

    Looking ahead, Cognition plans to expand the ways its users can leverage the combined power of Devin and Windsurf. “We’re looking forward to enabling engineers [to] manage an army of agents to build technology faster,” said Jeff Wang, Windsurf’s interim CEO since former leader Varun Mohan departed for Google, in a LinkedIn post. “It’s been quite an eventful last few months, and now it’s time to show what we’re made of.”

    Startup Behind Goldman Sachs’ First ‘A.I. Employee’ Valued at $10B After Peter Thiel Funding

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Denver Public Schools defies Trump administration deadline for removing all-gender bathrooms

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    Denver Public Schools has not complied with the Trump administration’s request that the district convert all multi-stall, all-gender bathrooms in its schools into separate facilities for female and male students by the agency’s Monday deadline.

    In a five-page response dated Sunday, DPS general counsel Kristin Bailey accused the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights of “intransigence,” a failure to adequately communicate and a “startling” lack of clarity surrounding the alleged Title IX violation levied against the school district.

    “We write to rebut the stated presumption that the District and the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) are at an impasse,” Bailey wrote. “We are not. In fact, as the District has shared throughout this Directed Investigation, we want to discuss resolution options with OCR, and at this stage, the District remains interested in doing so.”

    Education Department representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Denver Post on Monday.

    On Aug. 28, the Education Department announced that it had found DPS discriminated against girls by creating a gender-neutral bathroom at East High School and by adopting a districtwide policy allowing students to use facilities corresponding with their gender identities.

    DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero issued a statement the following day, vowing to protect Denver students and families from an administration hostile to the LGBTQ community.

    The department’s Office of Civil Rights said DPS’s all-gender restrooms violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, enacted to allow girls and women to participate in educational activities in school, including sports, without sexual harassment.

    The office gave the district 10 days to agree to a proposed resolution — which included converting all-gender restrooms back to single-sex facilities — or “risk imminent enforcement action.”

    The findings come after the Education Department announced in January that it was investigating DPS over the East High’s conversion of a girls restroom into a bathroom for all genders last academic year.

    The Denver high school created the gender-neutral bathroom at the request of students who wanted another facility, choosing to convert a girls bathroom because it was more cost-effective, district officials said.

    The all-gender bathroom has stalls that offer more privacy than other facilities, with 12-foot walls that nearly reach the ceiling and metal blocks that prevent people from seeing through.

    In response to the January investigation, East High recently renovated a boys bathroom into a second all-gender restroom — a move the district said it made to address any disparity. The district has two other all-gender facilities, at the Denver School of the Arts and the Career Education Center Early College.

    In the federal agency’s letter alleging DPS violated Title IX, the Education Department also said the Denver district created “a hostile environment for its students by endangering their safety, privacy and dignity” through its use of all-gender restrooms.

    The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to cut K-12 and higher education funding from schools with policies that the federal government calls discriminatory, particularly those that relate to gender identity, the LGBTQ community and race.

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    Elizabeth Hernandez

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  • ICE arrests climb in Colorado this summer, but people detained are less likely to have criminal backgrounds

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    Federal immigration arrests in Colorado surged this summer as the Trump administration charged ahead with its plans to mass-deport undocumented immigrants.

    But as arrests have spiked, law enforcement agencies increasingly have detained people without any prior criminal convictions or charges, internal data show.

    Between June 11 and July 28, ICE arrested 828 people in Colorado, according to a Denver Post analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley. That amounted to more than 17 arrests per day, a more than 50% increase from the first five months of the Trump administration, through June 10, a period covered in a previous Post story. The rate from this summer was also more than five times higher than the daily arrest average from the same time period in 2024.

    Of those detained over the summer, only a third had prior criminal convictions noted in the records. Another 18% had pending charges, indicating that nearly half had been neither convicted nor charged with a crime and that their only violation was immigration-related.

    That, too, is a shift: In the earlier months of President Donald Trump’s second term, two-thirds of the 1,639 people arrested in Colorado had either been convicted of a crime (38%) or charged with one (29%).

    “That tracks with what we would have expected (and) what we’ve been hearing from community sources,” said Henry Sandman, the co-executive director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. “The data and the reality disproves ICE’s talking points that they’re going after criminals. We’re seeing tactics increase. They’re trying to increase arrest numbers as high as possible, whatever the reason may be for detaining folks.”

    Steve Kotecki, a spokesman for Denver’s ICE field office, did not respond to a request for comment late last week.

    The data, obtained directly from ICE by the UC Berkeley researchers through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, offers the clearest look at immigration enforcement activities available, as ICE doesn’t post recent information online. For this analysis, The Post examined arrests that occurred in Colorado; arrests that were listed in the dataset as occurring in Wyoming but which took place in a Colorado city; and arrests lacking a listed state but which occurred in a Colorado town or county.

    The Post removed several apparent duplicate arrests and a similarly small number of arrests in the region that did not have a specific location listed. The analysis also included a handful of people who appeared to have been arrested twice in the span of several months.

    When listing a detainee’s criminal background, the data provides no details about the criminal charges or prior crimes. Illegally entering the country is typically treated as a civil matter upon first offense, but a subsequent entry is a felony criminal offense.

    More info about July operation

    The newly released data includes the same nine-day period in July during which ICE has said it arrested 243 immigrants without proper legal status “who are currently charged with or have been convicted of criminal offenses after illegally entering the United States.” The arrests, the agency said, all occurred in metro Denver.

    But the data published by the UC-Berkeley researchers does not fully match ICE’s public representations.

    During the same time frame, the agency arrested 232 people, according to the data. Most of those arrested during that time had never been convicted or charged with a crime, at least according to what’s in the records. Sixty-six people had a previous criminal conviction, and 34 more had pending charges.

    Kotecki did not respond to questions about the July operation.

    The Post previously reported that ICE falsely claimed that it had arrested a convicted murderer in Denver as part of the July operation. The man had actually been arrested at a state prison facility shortly after his scheduled release, state prison officials said last month.

    While ICE claimed the man had found “sanctuary” in the capital city — a shot taken at Denver’s immigration ordinances — The Post found that state prison officials had coordinated his transfer directly to ICE. He was then deported to Mexico, and information matching his description is reflected in the UC Berkeley data.

    It’s unclear if all of ICE’s arrests are fully reflected in the data, making it difficult to verify ICE’s claims. The researchers’ data is imperfect, experts have told The Post. The records likely represent the merging of separate datasets before they were provided by the government, increasing the likelihood of mistakes or missing data.

    Some arrests in Colorado were listed as occurring in other states or had no state listed at all. Other arrests were duplicated entirely, and researchers have cautioned that ICE’s data at times has had inaccurate or missing information.

    The anonymized nature of the data, which lacks arrestees’ names but lists some biographical information, also can make it difficult to verify. When ICE announced the results of the July operation, it named eight of the people it had arrested. Court records and the UC Berkeley data appear to match up with as many as seven of them.

    The eighth, Blanca Ochoa Tello, was arrested on July 14 by ICE’s investigative branch in a drug-trafficking investigation, court filings show. But it’s unclear if she appears in the ICE data, as she was arrested in La Plata County and no woman arrested in that county was listed in the data.

    To verify ICE’s July operation claims, The Post examined arrest data in Colorado and Wyoming, which jointly form the Denver area of operations for the agency. The Post also searched for arrests in every other state to identify any arrests that may have occurred in a Colorado area but were errantly listed under other states.

    Federal agents detain a man as he exits a court hearing in immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 30, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

    Feds demand higher pace of arrests

    The overall surge in arrests this summer has come as the Trump administration seeks to dramatically increase detentions and, eventually, the pace of deportations. In early July, Congress approved tens of billions of dollars in new funding for ICE as part of the tax bill.

    Nationally, immigration authorities had their most arrest-heavy months this summer, according to data published by researchers at Syracuse University. Immigration officials arrested more than 36,700 people in June, its highest single-month total since June 2019, during Trump’s first term. More than 31,200 were arrested across the country in July.

    The Trump administration has also set out to increase its detention capacity to accommodate the mass-deportation plans.

    As of late July, ICE planned to triple its detention capacity in Colorado, according to documents obtained last month by the Washington Post. That plan includes opening as many as three new facilities and the expansion of Colorado’s sole existing facility in Aurora.

    As of last month, that detention center housed 1,176 people, according to data published by ICE.

    DHS officers watch from the parking lot as protesters gather at the entrance to the ICE Colorado Field Office on Aug. 30, 2025, in Centennial. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)
    DHS officers watch from the parking lot as protesters gather at the entrance to the ICE Colorado Field Office on Aug. 30, 2025, in Centennial. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)

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    Seth Klamann

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  • Judge Reverses Trump Administration’s Cuts Of Billions Of Dollars To Harvard University – KXL

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    This Nov. 13, 2008 file photo shows the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Lisa Poole, File)

    BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday ordered the reversal of the Trump administration’s cuts to more than $2.6 billion in funding for research grants for Harvard University.

    U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs sided with the Ivy League school, ruling the cuts amounted to illegal retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of White House demands for changes to its governance and policies.

    The ruling delivers a significant victory to Harvard in its battle with the Trump administration, which also has sought to prevent the school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.

    The government had tied the freezes at Harvard to delays in dealing with antisemitism on its campus, but the judge said the federally funded research had little connection to antisemitism. “A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” Burroughs wrote.

    The ruling reverses a series of funding freezes that later became outright cuts as the Trump administration escalated its fight with the nation’s wealthiest university. If it stands, it promises to revive Harvard’s sprawling research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.

    Beyond the courthouse, the Trump administration and Harvard officials have been discussing a potential agreement that would end investigations and allow the university to regain access to federal funding. President Donald Trump has said he wants Harvard to pay no less than $500 million, but no deal has materialized even as the administration has struck agreements with Columbia and Brown.

    Harvard’s lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university after it rejected a series of demands in an April 11 letter from a federal antisemitism task force.

    The letter demanded sweeping changes related to campus protests, academics and admissions. It was meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment on campus.

    Trump officials moved to freeze $2.2 billion in research grants the same day Harvard rejected the administration’s demands. Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in May that Harvard would no longer be eligible for new grants, and weeks later the administration began canceling contracts with Harvard.

    As Harvard fought the funding freeze in court, individual agencies began sending letters announcing that the frozen research grants were being terminated under a clause allowing grants to be scrapped if they no longer align with government policies. Harvard has moved to self-fund some of its research but warned it can’t absorb the full cost of the federal cuts.

    Harvard’s motion for summary judgment asked Burroughs to overturn the cuts and prevent future ones. It said the cuts did nothing to address antisemitism.

    Harvard President Alan Garber pledged to fight antisemitism but said no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

    The Trump administration denies the cuts were done in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the April demand letter was sent. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel contracts for policy reasons.

    “It is the policy of the United States under the Trump Administration not to fund institutions that fail to adequately address antisemitism in their programs,” it said in court documents.

    In a separate lawsuit filed by Harvard, Burroughs previously blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent the school from hosting international students. Trump has said the administration would appeal if she rules for Harvard in the fight over its federal funding.

    More about:

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    Jordan Vawter

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  • OPINION: College president fears that federal education cuts will derail the promise of student parents, student military veterans and first-gen students

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    As a college president, I see the promise of higher education fulfilled every day. Many students at my institution, Whittier College, are the first in their families to attend a university. Some are parents or military veterans who have already served in the workforce and are returning to school to gain new skills, widen their perspectives and improve their job prospects.  

    These students are the future of our communities. We will rely on them to fill critical roles in health care, education, science, entrepreneurship and public service. They are also the students who stand to lose the most under the proposed fiscal year 2026 federal budget, and those who were already bracing for impact from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” cuts, including to the health care coverage many of them count on. 

    The drive with which these extraordinary students — both traditionally college-aged and older — pursue their degrees, often while juggling caregiving commitments or other responsibilities, never fails to inspire me.  

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. 

    We do not yet know the precise contours of the spending provisions Congress will consider once funding from a continuing resolution expires at the end of September. Yet we expect they will take their cues from the president’s proposed budget, which slashes support for students and parents and especially hammers those already struggling to improve their lives by earning a college degree, with cuts to education, health and housing that could take effect as early as October 1.  

    That budget would mean lowering the maximum Pell Grant award from $7,395 to $5,710, reversing a decade of progress. For the nearly half of Whittier students who received Pell Grants last year, this rollback would profoundly jeopardize their chances of finishing school. 

    So would the proposal to severely restrict Federal Work-Study, which supports a third of Whittier students according to our most recent internal analysis, and to eliminate the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, which more than 16 percent of our student body relies upon. In addition, this budget would impose a cap on Direct PLUS Loans for Parents, which would impact roughly 60 percent of our parent borrowers. It would also do away with the Direct PLUS Loans for Graduates program.  

    These programs are lifelines, not just for our students but for students all across the country. They fuel social mobility and prosperity by making education a force for advancement through personal work ethic rather than a way to rack up debt. 

    If enacted, these proposed cuts would gut the support system that has enabled millions of low-income students to earn a college degree.  

    Higher education is a bridge. To cross it and achieve their full potential, students from all walks of life must have access to the support and resources colleges provide, whether through partnerships with local high schools or with professional gateway programs in engineering, accounting, business, nursing, physical therapy and more. Yet, to access these invaluable programs, they must be enrolled. How will they reach such heights if they suddenly can’t afford to advance their studies? 

    The harm I’ve described doesn’t stop with cuts to financial aid, loans and services. Proposed reductions also target research funding for NASA, NIH and the National Science Foundation. One frozen NASA grant has already led to the loss of paid student research fellowships at Whittier, a setback not just in dollars but in momentum for students building real-world skills, networks and résumés.  

    These research opportunities often enable talented first-generation students to connect their classroom learning to career pathways, opening the door to graduate school, lab technician roles and futures in STEM fields. We’ve seen how federal funding has supported student projects in everything from climate data analysis to environmental health.  

    Stripping away support for hands-on research undermines the federal government’s own calls for colleges like ours to better prepare students for the workforce by dismantling the very mechanisms that make such preparation possible. 

    Related: These federal programs help low-income students get to and through college. Trump wants to pull the funding 

    It’s particularly disheartening that these changes will disproportionately hurt those students who are working the hardest to achieve their objectives, who have done everything right and have the most to lose from this lack of investment in the future.  

    The preservation and strengthening of Pell, Work-Study, Supplemental Educational Opportunity grants and federal loan programs is not a partisan issue. It is a moral and economic imperative for a nation that has long been proud to be a land of opportunity.  

    Let’s build a system for strivers that opens doors instead of slamming them shut.  

    Let’s recommit to higher education as a public good. Today’s students are willing to work hard to deserve our continuing belief in them.  

    Kristine E. Dillon is the president of Whittier College in California. 

    Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org. 

    This story about education cuts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter. 

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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    Kristine E. Dillon

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  • Chuck Schumer faces new test amid Democratic fury

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    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, will be facing a political test when Congress reconvenes this fall as lawmakers will be considering a new funding bill to avoid a government shutdown.

    Newsweek reached out to Schumer’s office for comment via email.

    Why It Matters

    Democratic voters across the country have become increasingly frustrated with what they view as a feeble response from congressional leaders to President Donald Trump‘s agenda amid his second term in office. Democrats in Congress lack a majority in the House and Senate, limiting their ability to block his agenda from passing, but voters have pushed for stronger action from elected officials.

    Schumer faced a tsunami of Democratic backlash in March after he declined to block a Republican-led stopgap bill to avoid a government shutdown. Schumer and eight other Democrats voted in favor of a procedural motion to allow debate on the bill but ultimately voted against its passage. That vote, however, allowed it to pass the filibuster and become law, Democratic critics say.

    What To Know

    Congress has until October 1 to pass a series of bills to fund the government through fiscal year (FY) 2026. Republicans have slim majorities in both chambers—a 219-212 advantage in the House and a 53-47 advantage in the Senate—meaning any vote on the package may again prove to be a tight vote.

    This presents challenges for both parties—Republican leaders will have to appease both swing-district moderates and Make America Great Again (MAGA)-aligned conservatives

    However, Democrats like Schumer will also be facing a test as he seeks to appease the Democratic voter base, while also working with Republicans to get some concessions in the bills.

    In March, Democrats from across the spectrum expressed frustration with Schumer and other Democrats advancing the spending bill despite a lack of concessions made by Republicans to earn his support on the bill, which critics argued cut critical programs. Democrats called for Schumer to face a future primary or step down as party leader, which he has declined to do.

    Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Associated Press/Canva/Getty

    Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also a New York Democrat, sent a leader to GOP leadership urging a meeting to “discuss the need to avert a painful, unnecessary lapse in government funding and to address the healthcare crisis Republicans have triggered in America.”

    “The government funding issue must be resolved in a bipartisan way,” they wrote. “That is the only viable path forward.”

    In the past, Democrats largely compromised “out of a calculation that the blame for a government shutdown could land more on them than on the Republicans,” Grant Davis Reeher, professor of political science at Syracuse University, told Newsweek.

    “They run the same risk if they try to turn this new set of negotiations into a bigger fight over the Constitution and basic principles. That will appeal to the core base of their party, which wants to see more backbone, but it’s not clear how it play with the entire country,” he added.

    Reeher said that the Senate, where legislation generally needs to pass the 60-vote filibuster to end debate on a bill, presents Democrats a stronger chance of mitigating some of Republicans’ desires to cut spending.

    Democrats’ strategy on the legislation will largely depend on whether their goal is to mitigate future spending cuts or to walk back cuts already made to programs like Medicaid or public broadcasting, Reeher added, noting they would need to be more aggressive in the second strategy.

    Anne Danehy, senior associate dean and associate professor of the practice at Boston University’s College of Communications, told Newsweek that Schumer may be “stuck in a tough position,” and that how he communicates about his decision-making process and vote is critical.

    Democrats have two opposing philosophies on how to approach this sort of legislation, she said.

    One side of the party believes Democrats should not “give Republicans anything” to show they disapprove of the “dismantling of the federal government, Danehy said.

    “You have others like Schumer who are saying, ‘We don’t have a lot of choice here. We need to gain something or we lose everything, so we need to compromise or the American people could really suffer,’” she added.

    Danehy warned that more Democratic outrage on the matter would further break down the party’s influence, which should be a concern for leadership as negotiations on the spending bills begin.

    Reeher and Danehy questioned whether a more progressive Democrat could successfully primary Schumer in 2028 if he chooses to run again, even if he again faces outrage from parts of the base.

    “There’s been a lot of talk about a credible primary challenge, but I don’t see that happening or at least being successful. Senator Schumer is not Joseph Crowley; he remains very attentive to New York State issues and to local communities,” Reeher said. “He won’t look past a potential threat. And a credible challenger would be risking a lot in taking him on.”

    Others, however, have floated potential candidates like Representative Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez of New York who represents parts of the Queens and the Bronx in Congress, as a potential alternative candidate to Schumer in 2028—if she doesn’t run for president, that is.

    Some polls have suggested Ocasio-Cortez could have an early advantage over Schumer. A Data for Progress poll, which surveyed 767 likely New York voters from March 26 to March 31, showed Ocasio-Cortez leading Schumer 54 to 36 percent.

    But the primary is still years away, and the political landscape may change after the 2026 midterms when Democrats are hoping to reclaim control of the House and Senate. So, it’s quite unclear what issues may be at the forefront of Democrats’ minds come 2028.

    What People Are Saying

    Grant Davis Reeher, professor of political science at Syracuse University, also told Newsweek: “We’ve seen from polling that a lot of the Republican and Trump initiatives so far are not terribly popular, and that the public has some real concerns about some of the spending cuts, and the war on the federal workforce. Democrats should keep the focus on those things going into the midterms and not let the question of who is to blame for stalled negotiations on keeping the government running interfere with that focus. In that sense, I tend to agree with Senator Schumer.”

    Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NBC News host Kristen Welker on a Meet the Press interview in March: “I knew when I cast my vote against the government shutdown that there would be a lot of controversy. And there was. But let me tell you and your audience why I did it, why I felt it was so important. The CR [continuing resolution] was certainly bad…But a shutdown would be 15 or 20 times worse. Under a shutdown, the Executive Branch has sole power to determine what is, quote, ‘essential.’ And they can determine without any court supervision.”

    What Happens Next?

    Negotiations may begin over the coming weeks, and Congress has until October 1 to pass some sort of spending bill to keep the government open. Whether they will have to continue relying on temporary stopgap measures or can successfully pass the appropriations bills is yet to be seen.

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  • Flagler Beach receives nearly $9 million for restoration efforts

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    Flagler County has received millions of dollars in federal funds to help fortify its coast by rebuilding dunes lost during Hurricane Milton.Flagler Beach received nearly $9 million in federal funds. The new dunes will stand about 14 feet tall, much larger than before. Construction will start in the Malacompra area and move north toward Marineland. The county’s coastal engineer stated that, because a similar project is already underway to the south, they were able to move quickly and are working to amend the current contract to retain the same contractors. She said it took a while to get these funds approved, but she is excited to have the engineers finally design these new dunes. Construction is scheduled to start on November 1 and is expected to take approximately three to four months to complete. The hope is that once this project is completed, the dunes will be able to withstand a Category 2 hurricane.

    Flagler County has received millions of dollars in federal funds to help fortify its coast by rebuilding dunes lost during Hurricane Milton.

    Flagler Beach received nearly $9 million in federal funds.

    The new dunes will stand about 14 feet tall, much larger than before. Construction will start in the Malacompra area and move north toward Marineland.

    The county’s coastal engineer stated that, because a similar project is already underway to the south, they were able to move quickly and are working to amend the current contract to retain the same contractors.

    She said it took a while to get these funds approved, but she is excited to have the engineers finally design these new dunes.

    Construction is scheduled to start on November 1 and is expected to take approximately three to four months to complete.

    The hope is that once this project is completed, the dunes will be able to withstand a Category 2 hurricane.

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  • Colorado’s legislature has filled a third of budget shortfall by slashing tax breaks. Here’s what comes next.

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    More than $250 million down, another $530 million to go.

    That’s how much of a projected $783 million state budget hole the Colorado legislature filled by the time a special session called to address the impact of the federal tax bill ended Tuesday afternoon — and the larger amount that still remains. Erasing the rest of the red ink will fall to Gov. Jared Polis, who plans to rebalance this year’s budget in the coming days through a mix of cuts to state funding and a big dip into the rainy-day fund.

    Over six days, the legislature’s majority Democrats fulfilled their part of a plan worked out with the governor’s office: to pass legislation that is expected to generate enough revenue to close about a third of the shortfall projected for the state’s budget in the current fiscal year, which began July 1. They ended tax breaks and found other ways to offset declining state income tax revenue, while leaving spending cuts largely for Polis to decide.

    “What we did here in this special session is soften the blow,” said Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat who chairs the legislature’s budget committee. “But when the federal government cuts $1.2 billion in revenue from the state with a stroke of a pen, after we’ve already cut $1.2 billion (from the budget) in the regular session, that’s a tough deficit to come back from in a way that doesn’t impact the people of Colorado.”

    The special session ended with 11 bills going to Polis for final approval. Five sought to fill the budget gap, largely by ending tax incentives for businesses and high-income earners.

    The single largest revenue-raising measure, House Bill 1004, will auction off tax credits that can be claimed in future tax years for a discount. Backers expected that bill to bring in an additional $100 million to state coffers this year, at the expense of about $125 million in future years.

    Together, those measures add up to $253 million in revenue to reduce the projected deficit — money that Democrats say represents averted cuts to Medicaid, schools and hospitals.

    “Colorado legislators stepped up and helped protect children’s food access and minimized the devastating cost increases to health insurance premiums across the state, to the best of our ability,” Polis, who signed two of the new bills earlier Tuesday, said in a statement.

    The legislature’s Joint Budget Committee expects to meet Thursday to hear Polis’ plan to address the remaining $500 million or so, including mid-year spending cuts. 

    As part of his call for a special session on Aug. 6, Polis announced a statewide hiring freeze. He said in an interview before the session started that he hoped to avoid cuts to K-12 education, but he has left all other options on the table, including Medicaid program spending. 

    The plan also factors in a significant use of reserves to offset some of the remaining gap.

    Partisan debates

    Over the past week, Republicans fought the Democrats’ bills, but strong Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers all but preordained the outcome. 

    “Not only did we increase taxes, we’re balancing the budget on the back of small businesses,” said Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican on the budget committee.

    One of the bills heading to Polis would erase a fee paid by the state to businesses for collecting sales taxes — an outdated subsidy, according to Democrats, and an unnecessary new burden now put on businesses, according to Republicans.

    Republicans said before the session that they’d likely challenge several bills in court over allegations that they violate provisions in the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights that require voter approval for tax increases. Kirkmeyer and Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican who’s also on the budget committee, said bills going to the governor that would eliminate some tax credits and allow the sale of tax credits against future collections seemed particularly vulnerable to a challenge under TABOR.

    Debate throughout the special session took a distinctly partisan edge. Democrats laid the cuts on congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump and called the federal tax bill a de facto theft of benefits from the poorest Coloradans to benefit the wealthiest.

    Republicans countered that the federal bill delivered much-needed tax cuts, and they said Democrats sought to yank those away instead of cutting partisan priorities.

    Legislators begin to gather in the Senate Chambers before the start of another day of the special legislative session at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on Aug. 26, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)

    Bills on wolves, artificial intelligence

    Other bills passed sought to respond to different aspects of the federal bill, formerly known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” as well as other priorities.

    Lawmakers stripped general fund money away from the voter-approved program to reintroduce wolves in the state, though releases are expected to continue this winter. They tweaked ballot language for a measure about taxes for universal school meals to allow that money to go to general food assistance, as well, if voters approve it in November.

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    Nick Coltrain, Seth Klamann

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  • CU’s Colorado Springs campus thought it could avoid Trump’s education crackdown. Here’s what happened

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    By BYRON TAU, The Associated Press

    COLORADO SPRINGS — Administrators at the University of Colorado’s campus in Colorado Springs thought they stood a solid chance of dodging the Trump administration’s offensive on higher education.

    Located on a picturesque bluff with a stunning view of Pikes Peak, the school is far removed from the Ivy League colleges that have drawn President Donald Trump’s ire. Most of its students are commuters, getting degrees while holding down full-time jobs. Students and faculty alike describe the university, which is in a conservative part of a blue state, as politically subdued, if not apolitical.

    That optimism was misplaced.

    An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of emails from school officials, as well as interviews with students and professors, reveals that school leaders, teachers and students soon found themselves in the Republican administration’s crosshairs, forcing them to navigate what they described as an unprecedented and haphazard degree of change.

    Whether Washington has downsized government departments, clawed back or launched investigations into diversity programs or campus antisemitism, the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs has confronted many of the same challenges as elite universities across the nation.

    The school lost three major federal grants and found itself under investigation by Trump’s Education Department. In the hopes of avoiding that scrutiny, the university renamed websites and job titles, all while dealing with pressure from students, faculty and staff who wanted the school to take a more combative stance.

    “Uncertainty is compounding,” the school’s chancellor told faculty at a February meeting, according to minutes of the session. “And the speed of which orders are coming has been a bit of a shock.”

    The college declined to make any administrators available to be interviewed. A spokesman asked the AP to make clear that any professors or students interviewed in this story were speaking for themselves and not the institution. Several faculty members also asked for anonymity, either because they did not have tenure or they did not want to call unnecessary attention to themselves and their scholarship in the current political environment.

    “Like our colleagues across higher education, we’ve spent considerable time working to understand the new directives from the federal government,” the chancellor, Jennifer Sobanet, said in a statement provided to the AP.

    Students said they have been able to sense the stress being felt by school administrators and professors.

    “We have administrators that are feeling pressure, because we want to maintain our funding here. It’s been tense,” said Ava Knox, a rising junior who covers the university administration for the school newspaper.

    Faculty, she added, “want to be very careful about how they’re conducting their research and about how they’re addressing the student population. They are also beholden to this new set of kind of ever-changing guidelines and stipulations by the federal government.”

    A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

    Misplaced optimism

    Shortly after Trump won a second term in November, UCCS leaders were trying to gather information on the Republican’s plans. In December, Sobanet met the newly elected Republican congressman who represented the school’s district, a conservative one that Trump won with 53% of the vote. In her meeting notes obtained by the AP, the chancellor sketched out a scenario in which the college might avoid the drastic cuts and havoc under the incoming administration.

    “Research dollars –- hard to pull back grant dollars but Trump tried to pull back some last time. The money goes through Congress,” Sobanet wrote in notes prepared for the meeting. “Grant money will likely stay but just change how they are worded and what it will fund.”

    Sobanet also observed that dismantling the federal Education Department would require congressional authorization. That was unlikely, she suggested, given the U.S. Senate’s composition.

    Like many others, she did not fully anticipate how aggressively Trump would seek to transform the federal government.

    Conservatives’ desire to revamp higher education began well before Trump took office.

    They have long complained that universities have become bastions of liberal indoctrination and raucous protests. In 2023, Republicans in Congress had a contentious hearing with several Ivy League university leaders. Shortly after, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned. During the presidential campaign last fall, Trump criticized campus protests about Gaza, as well as what he said was a liberal bias in classrooms.

    His new administration opened investigations into alleged antisemitism at several universities. It froze more than $400 million in research grants and contracts at Columbia, along with more than $2.6 billion at Harvard. Columbia reached an agreement last month to pay $220 million to resolve the investigation.

    When Harvard filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s actions, his administration tried to block the school from enrolling international students. The Trump administration has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

    Northwestern University, Penn, Princeton and Cornell have seen big chunks of funding cut over how they dealt with protests about Israel’s war in Gaza or over the schools’ support for transgender athletes.

    Trump’s decision to target the wealthiest, most prestigious institutions provided some comfort to administrators at the approximately 4,000 other colleges and universities in the country.

    Most higher education students in the United States are educated at regional public universities or community colleges. Such schools have not typically drawn attention from culture warriors.

    Students and professors at UCCS hoped Trump’s crackdown would bypass the school and others like it.

    “You’ve got everyone — liberals, conservatives, middle of the road,” said Jeffrey Scholes, a professor in the philosophy department. “You just don’t see the kind of unrest and polarization that you see at other campuses.”

    The purse strings

    The federal government has lots of leverage over higher education. It provides about $60 billion a year to universities for research. In addition, a majority of students in the U.S. need grants and loans from various federal programs to help pay tuition and living expenses.

    This budget year, UCCS got about $19 million in research funding from a combination of federal, state and private sources. Though that is a relatively small portion of the school’s overall $369 million budget, the college has made a push in recent years to bolster its campus research program by taking advantage of grant money from government agencies such as the U.S. Defense Department and National Institutes for Health. The widespread federal grant cut could derail those efforts.

    School officials were dismayed when the Trump administration terminated research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation, emails show. The grants funded programs in civics, cultural preservation and boosting women in technology fields.

    School administrators scrambled to contact federal officials to learn if other grants were on the chopping block, but they struggled to find answers, the records show.

    School officials repeatedly sought out the assistance of federal officials only to learn those officials were not sure what was happening as the Trump administration halted grant payments, fired thousands of employees and shuttered agencies.

    “The sky is falling” at NIH, a university official reported in notes on a call in which the school’s lobbyists were providing reports of what was happening in Washington.

    There are also concerns about other changes in Washington that will affect how students pay for college, according to interviews with faculty and education policy experts.

    While only Congress can fully abolish the U.S. Department of Education, the Trump administration has tried to dramatically cut back its staff and parcel out many of its functions to other agencies. The administration laid off nearly 1,400 employees, and problems have been reported in the systems that handle student loans. Management of student loans is expected to shift to another agency entirely.

    In addition, an early version of a major funding bill in Congress included major cuts to tuition grants. Though that provision did not make it into the law, Congress did cap loans for students seeking graduate degrees. That policy could have ripple effects in the coming years on institutions such as UCCS that rely on tuition dollars for their operating expenses.

    DEI and transgender issues hit campus

    To force change on campus, the Trump administration has begun investigations targeting diversity programs and efforts to combat antisemitism.

    The Education Department, for example, opened an investigation in March targeting a Ph.D. scholarship program that partnered with 45 universities, including UCCS, to expand opportunities to women and nonwhites in graduate education. The administration alleged the program was only open to certain nonwhite students and amounted to racial discrimination.

    “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news UCCS is included on the list” of schools being investigated, wrote Annie Larson, assistant vice president of federal relations and outreach for the entire University of Colorado system.

    “Oh wow, this is surprising,” wrote back Hillary Fouts, dean of the graduate school at UCCS.

    UCCS also struggled with how to handle executive orders, particularly those on transgender issues.

    In response to an order that aimed to revoke funds to schools that allowed transwomen to play women’s sports, UCCS began a review of its athletic programs. It determined it had no transgender athletes, the records show. University officials were also relieved to discover that only one school in their athletic conference was affected by the order, and UCCS rarely if ever had matches or games against that school.

    “We do not have any students impacted by this and don’t compete against any teams that we are aware of that will be impacted by this,” wrote the vice chancellor for student affairs to colleagues.

    Avoiding the spotlight

    The attacks led UCCS to take preemptive actions and to self-censor in the hopes of saving programs and avoiding the Trump administration’s spotlight.

    Emails show that the school’s legal counsel began looking at all the university’s websites and evaluating whether any scholarships might need to be reworded. The university changed the web address of its diversity initiatives from www.diversity.uccs.edu to www.belonging.uccs.edu.

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    The Associated Press

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  • Commentary: California has sued Trump 37 times. Here’s what’s at stake.

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    SACRAMENTO — Seven months into President Trump’s second term, California has filed 37 lawsuits against his administration and spent about $5 million doing it.

    Before you go off on a government-spending rant, let me drop this figure on you: For each dollar the state has spent in litigation with Trump, it has recouped $33,600 in funds that the federal government has tried to take away from the Golden State, according to Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.

    That, as he put it during a Monday news conference, is “bringing the receipts.”

    These aren’t dollars Californians were wishing for or begging for from the federal government — these are funds that have already been legally allotted to the state but which the Trump administration is attempting to stop for reasons petty, ideological or both. They pay for teacher training, immunizations, tracking infectious diseases, keeping roads safe, disaster recovery and on and on. And they are predominantly your tax dollars, being withheld from your state.

    “What we’re demanding is that we get the funding that’s already been legally approved and appropriated,” Bonta said.

    But as much as it’s about paying for the basics that keep California going, it’s also about protecting an inclusive and equitable way of living that defines the ethos of our state. Don’t tread on us! Californians get to spend our money how we see fit.

    “When you add it all up, you see the totality of what’s at stake: the California dream,” Bonta said. “The idea that every Californian, no matter how they look, where they live or how much money they have, can send their kid to school, go to the doctor when they’re sick and put food on the table and a roof over their heads.”

    Or as Gov. Gavin Newsom put it, it’s litigation not for the sake of suing, but to “defend, to stand tall, to hold the line in terms of our values, the things we hold dear.”

    It’s serious times, folks. Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t stand for LGBTQ+ rights, for immigrants’ rights, for women’s rights, for due process or even public schools. But so far, the courts have held, for the most part, to their responsibility to be a check on this unbalanced administration.

    Of course, lawyers win cases, sometimes regardless of facts. I want to give a shout out to our state Department of Justice. Bonta may be the state’s top lawyer, but there is a whole army of legal folks behind these lawsuits.

    The $5 million spent so far has been entirely in-house, Bonta said. This cash isn’t going to expensive outside counsel, but, as my colleague Kevin Rector points out, money that is funding the smart, talented attorneys and staff who work for taxpayers.

    More than a few of them were around during Trump’s first term, when the state was involved in more than 120 lawsuits against his administration. Many of those suits were about process — the haphazard, rules-be-damned way Trump seeks to implement his policies.

    Our California lawyers learned then that courts do in fact uphold law, and simply pointing out that rules have to be followed was often enough to stop Trump. While we now have a seasoned legal team that understands the weaknesses in what Trump is doing, the sort-of-funny part is that he’s still doing it. Few lessons learned, which is good for California.

    So far, these lawsuits by California have ensured that about $168 billion that Trump would have cut off instead continued to flow to California. Bonta said that in the 19 cases that have made it in front of a judge so far, he’s succeeded in 17, including winning 13 court orders directly blocking Trump’s “illegal actions.”

    He’s also secured wins outside of court, including when the U.S. Department of Education recently backed down after freezing school funding weeks before school is set to start. That funding, under threat of a lawsuit, has been restored.

    Bonta said that while the state is fighting every lawsuit with rigor, two are personal to him and “remain sort of the most important in terms of what they represent.”

    They happen to be the first two suits the state filed, shortly after Trump took office. The first was about birthright citizenship, and Trump’s bid to end it. It’s a case Bonta says is “very meaningful” to him.

    Bonta was born in the Philippines and immigrated to the United States when he was 2 months old, living in a trailer in the Central Valley town of La Paz, the home of the United Farm Workers. His parents left their country to avoid martial law as the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos gained power, and worked with civil rights leaders including Cesar Chavez once they settled here.

    So it makes sense that an executive order that would leave about 24,500 babies born each year in California without U.S. citizenship hits hard with Bonta.

    Bonta, along with attorneys general of several other states, filed that lawsuit the day after Trump took office, in response to an executive order he signed on Inauguration Day. So far, multiple courts have expressed deep skepticism of that order, and the idea that the Constitution and prior Supreme Court rulings should be ignored in favor of Trump’s position.

    The second case that Bonta takes personally is a multistate pushback on Trump’s sweeping halt of federal funding. That case put at risk about $3 trillion nationwide, including that $168 billion in California, about a third of the state budget.

    Coming up next is a challenge to the deployment of Marines and National Guard troops in Los Angeles. The Trump administration has been quietly removing those soldiers in recent days, perhaps in preparation for asking the court to drop that case, which seems like a loser for them. No troops, no case. We’ll see how it goes in a few days.

    “The Marines and the National Guardspeople arrived to quiet streets in L.A.,” Bonta said. “The president has been incredibly, in my view, disrespectful to these patriots. He’s treated them as political pawns.”

    The $5 million the state has spent so far on legal fights with Trump is part of $25 million the Legislature set aside earlier this year during a special session. Bonta said that even that will likely not be enough to keep the challenges flowing for the next three and a half years.

    Newsom, for his part, is all in and promised that Bonta “will not be in need of resources to do his job.” (And yes, I know it raises his profile for a 2028 presidential run.)

    As much as it seems ridiculous that we are setting aside this huge chunk of change for legal fees at a moment when we are facing a budget crisis, the cost of letting Trump run roughshod over our state is much higher. This is money well spent.

    Because it’s not just our federal funding at stake, it’s the California dream.

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    Anita Chabria

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  • OPINION: Trump is back. We’re still waiting on his plan for schools – The Hechinger Report

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    OK. I guess we’re doing this (again).

    It feels awful for lots of reasons, of course, but mostly it’s because the country chose political vibes over policy ideas. As a researcher who spends his days trying to find evidence-based ways to make schools better, I’m at something of a loss.

    See, whatever you thought about the Harris-Walz ticket’s particular proposals, the Democrats had things to say about education issues that genuinely shape children’s development: affordable early care and learning, access to nutritious school meals, funding for English learners, and more.

    President-elect Trump’s education platform was made of much vaguer stuff — mostly culture war vibes. For instance, conservatives are eager to get the government involved in biological screenings to determine if kids have the “correct” genitalia for peeing in a particular bathroom or playing on a particular sports team. Trump talks about schools secretly imposing gender transition surgery on children. Finally, it’s likely that the administration will try to voucherize more public dollars to support families sending their children to private schools.

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

    But, again, all of this is light on substance. It’s pretty hard to see how bathroom-usage policies will help kids recover from the pandemic’s academic consequences, or get more children ready for kindergarten, or more third graders ready to read on grade level. School voucher programs may give anxious parents public money to pay for private education, but there’s not much evidence that they help students or the public schools they’re leaving behind.

    Worse yet, some of conservatives’ K–12 ideas are at war with themselves. The Republican platform calls for federal defunding of schools teaching curricula that conservatives don’t like, but it also pledges — immediately afterward — to “veto efforts to nationalize Civics Education [sic].” So they’re promising not to nationalize how schools teach history, except when they don’t like how certain schools teach history.

    Now, there was a detailed conservative plan for federal K–12 education drifting around during the campaign. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes to “eliminate” and “redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government.” But Trump claimed to want nothing to do with it.

    Related: How would Project 2025 change education?

    Maybe he’s telling the truth — perhaps he’s realized that Project 2025 would significantly reduce his ability to enact any sort of affirmative education policy agenda. It would be harder to remake American schools in a Trumpian image without a federal Education Department, after all.

    Of course, that’s assuming 1) that Trump has given K–12 enough thought to work through that strategic calculus, and 2) conservatives actually have an affirmative agenda for making schools more effective, something that goes deeper than lines like this from their platform: “Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party so that they can do the job of educating our students that they so dearly want to do.”

    Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance

    Perhaps there’s a concrete, substantive plan for reforming Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act lurking in those words, and I just don’t have the right GOP decoder ring?

    So look, conservatives: You’ve got to figure something out. The country’s schools can’t afford another four years like the first round of President Trump’s leadership, which left U.S. public schools reeling.

    By 2018, the leadership at the Fordham Institute, the country’s most august conservative education policy think tank, was calling for Secretary Betsy DeVos to resign in the hopes that troubles from her first two rocky years could be sorted out by a replacement.

    In a January 2021 piece headlined “The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind,” the New York Times editorial board wrote, “The Department of Education lies in ruins at precisely the time when the country most needs it.”

    Related: Trump’s deportation plan could separate millions of families, leaving schools to pick up the pieces

    Please forgive me if this reads like I’m being overdramatic. Perhaps it’s my outmoded instincts as a Very Serious Beltway Policy Researcher; I still think about policymaking as an effort to actually solve big public problems.

    I’m a hidebound fossil that way. Of course, if you really want to own me, really want to prove experts like me wrong (again), you could shock everyone by setting aside the culture wars and giving substantive education reform a try.

    Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a founding partner with The Children’s Equity Project, and a father of three children currently enrolled in public schools in Washington, DC. The views here are strictly his own.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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    Conor P. Williams

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  • A community college could transform a region — and help itself grow. Will voters buy it? – The Hechinger Report

    A community college could transform a region — and help itself grow. Will voters buy it? – The Hechinger Report

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    LOCKHART, Texas — Sometime last year, Alfonso Sifuentes was on a bus tour as part of a chamber of commerce’s efforts to map out the future of the bustling Central Texas region south of Austin where he lives and works.

    There was chatter about why San Marcos, a suburb along one stretch of the Interstate 35 corridor, had little interest in a proposed expansion of Austin Community College into that area. Voters previously rejected the idea because of the property tax increase it would have required. As he swayed in his seat on the moving bus, Sifuentes, a businessman in the waste management industry who has long been involved in community development, thought about his hometown of Lockhart — like San Marcos just 30-some miles from Austin — and about the opportunities the college’s growing network of campuses could bring. Somewhere along the bus route, he made a declaration for all to hear. 

    “Well, if San Marcos doesn’t want it,” Sifuentes said, “Lockhart will take it.”

    This November, the college is coming to voters in the Lockhart Independent School District with a proposition to begin paying into the Austin Community College taxing district. In exchange, residents would qualify for in-district tuition and trigger a long-term plan to build out college facilities in this rural stretch of Texas, which is positioning itself to tap into the economic boom flowing into the smaller communities nestled between Austin and San Antonio.

    Community colleges have long played a crucial role in recovering economies. But in Lockhart, ACC’s potential expansion could serve as a case study of the role colleges can play in emerging economies as local leaders and community members eye the economic growth on the horizon.

    That is, if they can convince enough of their neighbors to help pay for it.

    Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

    At the edge of two massive metropolitan areas — Austin to the north and San Antonio to the south — Caldwell County is dotted by quaint communities offering small-town living. While the streets in other small rural communities are lined by shuttered storefronts or sit in the shadow of industry long gone, local leaders pitch this as a place “where undeniable opportunity meets authentic Texas community.”

    Lockhart, the county seat, is revered as the barbecue capital of Texas with an established status as a day trip destination. About 30 miles southeast of Austin, its picturesque town square hosts a regular rotation of community events, including a summer concert series on the courthouse lawn and a series of pop-ups on the first Friday of the month featuring some mix of live music, receptions at a local art gallery, and sip and strolls and cheesecake specials at the antique store.

    The county’s population of roughly 50,000 residents is dwarfed by the big cities and the nearby suburban communities that often rank among the fastest growing in the country. But what the county lacks in population it makes up for with a relatively low cost of living, space to make room for industry, housing and, potentially, Austin Community College.

    The potential annexation is an example of how colleges are becoming more nimble and more responsive to both emerging economies and the needs of students, said Maria Cormier, a senior research associate for the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. But Cormier argues such expansions must be intentionally designed with equity in mind to envision multiple pathways for students so that, for example, students from marginalized backgrounds aren’t limited only to certificate-level programming. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

    Representatives of Austin Community College speak with community members to help them learn about the institution at an event in early October in Lockhart, Texas. Voters decide in November whether to accept a tax hike in exchange for the college expanding into their rural region. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report

    “These sorts of questions become important when colleges are proposing these kinds of expansions: To what extent are they thinking about longer-term pathways for students?” Cormier said.

    ACC already partners with Lockhart ISD on an early college high school that allows students to complete transferable college credit hours while earning a high school diploma, and proponents of annexation highlight the affordable higher education opportunities it would generally provide students in the Lockhart area. But their sales pitch emphasizes what it would mean to leverage ACC for the whole community. While the share of adults with a high school degree within Lockhart ISD’s territory is roughly aligned with the state, the share who have a bachelor’s degree — just 16.8 percent — falls to about half of the state rate.

    “An effort like this can never be wrong if it always is for the right reasons,” said Nick Metzler, an information technology manager and consultant who serves as the president of the Greater Lockhart for ACC political action committee, which formed to pursue the college’s expansion.

    Related: Five community colleges tweak their offerings to match the local job market

    First established in 1973, ACC has steadily grown its footprint in Central Texas through annexation. Though not commonly used, a provision of Texas education law grants a community college the ability to expand its taxing district by adding territory within its designated service area. Working within a service district roughly the size of Connecticut, ACC first expanded its reach in 1985 when voters in the territory covered by the Leander Independent School District, a northern suburb of Austin, agreed to be annexed.

    In the years since, neighboring communities in the Manor, Del Valle and Round Rock school districts followed with large majority votes in favor of annexation. ACC’s expansion into Austin’s southern suburbs didn’t begin until 2010, when annexation passed in the Hays Consolidated Independent School District.

    The collective initiative to bring ACC to Lockhart has been the topic of discussion for many years, but the current effort was formally triggered by a community-led petition that required locals to gather signatures from at least 5 percent of registered voters. Fanning out at youth sporting events, school functions and other community gatherings, PAC members met with neighbors who indicated their children would be the first in their families to go to college, if they could afford it. Others were adults excited by the prospect of trade programs and certifications they could pursue and the transformative change it could bring to their families as new industries move into Caldwell County.

    A billboard promoting Austin Community College in Spanish sits on a highway that leads to Lockhart, Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report

    “Those things would catch a lot of the individuals who couldn’t make it to four-year universities or couldn’t afford to go to four-year universities,” Metzler said. “That’s always been kind of where we as a community have kind of been lacking.”

    Lockhart also has an incentive for partnering with ACC: A recent assessment commissioned by the city identified the need to partner with a postsecondary institution for job training if it wanted to meet its economic goals and compete in its target business sectors, namely large-scale auto and electronic manufacturing, food processing and tourism. It also identified the lack of skilled administrative workers along with computer and math specialists as a challenge to reaching those goals.

    In the end, PAC members easily surpassed the threshold of the 744 signatures they were required to submit — they turned in 1,013.

    Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

    On the ballot now is a proposal for homeowners to trade $232.54 a year on average — a rate of $.1013 per $100 in property value — for in-district services. That includes a steep discount for in-district tuition that comes out to $85 per credit hour compared with $286 for out-of-district residents, though high school graduates from Lockhart ISD would also qualify for free tuition under a recently adopted five-year pilot program going into effect this fall.

    “We are very interested in providing access to high-quality, affordable education in our region because we think it’s a game changer for families,” Chris Cervini, ACC’s vice chancellor for community and public affairs, said in an interview. “We think it promotes affordability by providing folks a lifeline to a family-sustaining wage, so we are very bullish on our value proposition.”

    A flier provides information in Spanish about Austin Community College during a community event in early October in Lockhart, Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report

    The vote would also allow ACC to grow its tax base as it works to keep pace with its growing enrollment. When classes kicked off this fall, ACC was serving about 70,000 students across 11 campuses in the Central Texas region — an enrollment increase of 15 percent compared with a year earlier. The potential expansion comes as community colleges are adapting to a new state financing model based on student outcomes, including financial incentives for schools if students obtain workforce credentials in certain fields.

    The college proposed a three-phase service plan that would begin with expanded offerings in the area, such as evening classes, and eventually work up to a permanent facility tailored to match workforce needs, including demand for certificate programs to “reskill and upskill” for various high-demand careers. Cervini, who has been a main liaison with the Lockhart community, previously said the college was considering whether it could quickly deploy its resources into the community through mobile training rigs for HVAC and welding.

    Its timeline could be sped up now that the college has identified a historic building in the heart of downtown — the old Ford Lockhart Motor Company building — as its potential home. During a recent presentation to the Lockhart City Council, ACC Chancellor Russell Lowery-Hart told city leaders he appreciated that the site would represent the community’s history juxtaposed to “what we think the future looks like.”

    But ACC leaders said the issue ultimately has to play out in the community. There’s been no apparent organized opposition to the vote in Lockhart, and ACC officials say they’ve been engaged with local leaders who have been supportive in helping inform voters about the annexation process. The proposal recently picked up the endorsement of Lockhart’s mayor, Lew White, who commended ACC leaders for their outreach to the community about their offerings.

    “I think that’s what a lot of people have been asking for, and I think you’re really shaping your proposal for this fall election very nicely,” White said. “And I think it’s something that our community needs to get together and get behind and support.”

    Related: States and localities pump more money into community colleges than four-year campuses

    Even Lockhart ISD leaders frame the college’s pitch as an initiative with potential benefits extending well beyond the increased access it would offer students in the region.

    Overseeing a record 6,850 students in a district covering about 300 square miles, Superintendent Mark Estrada said education is essential to cultivating communities where residents can not only actively participate in the sort of growth Caldwell County is experiencing but benefit from it as well.

    “I think the real conversation and consideration is how would this benefit the educational attainment of the entire community, which currently is one of the lowest in Central Texas,” Estrada said. “The mid-career switches, people’s opportunity to have access to education to pursue a passion or career they’ve always been interested in — that’s a major consideration for the community. It’s a narrow look if we’re only looking at high school graduates.”

    In exchange for paying more taxes, residents in the Lockhart Independent School District would qualify for in-district tuition at Austin Community College, which would also build out college facilities in this rural stretch of Texas. Lockhart grads also qualify for free tuition under a recently adopted five-year pilot program taking effect this fall. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report

    Still, Caldwell County remains a conservative area in a conservative state where fighting property tax increases has become a favorite political calling card. Much of that debate has centered on funding for public schools, with the fight over school finance often falling to the question of whether older Texans, who are mostly white and less likely to have children enrolled in public schools, are willing to pay for the future of younger Texans, who are mostly Latino. Roughly 4 out of every 5 students enrolled in Lockhart ISD are Latinos.

    Voters in the area have shown at least some unwillingness to foot the bill for education-related expansions. In 2019, they rejected a $92.4 million bond proposed to address the significant growth in student enrollment Lockhart ISD had seen in the prior decade. The bond package would have gone toward making more room for more students through the addition of a two-story wing to the local high school, two new school buildings and renovations throughout the district. It also would have backed improvements to the district’s workforce preparation efforts, including a new agricultural science facility and additions to the district’s career technology center to allow more students to participate in auto repair classes and hospitality training. Opponents of the measure, 1,632 voters, won with 55 percent of the vote compared with 1,340 who voted in favor.

    This time around, proponents of annexation are hoping the eagerness they’ve felt in the community from those who signed onto the original petition — and those who come to see the broader benefits it could bring to the community — will translate to votes.

    In recounting the interest they fielded in the early days of their efforts collecting signatures, PAC members described one canvas of a local gym in a portion of the county that’s seeing some of the biggest growth but trails in terms of income. Some of the gym-goers were enthusiastic about the possibility of pursuing technical certifications but realized they weren’t registered to vote, a requirement of the signature collection process.

    They went out and got on the voter rolls. Then, they came back to put their names on the petition.

    Contact the editor of this story, Nirvi Shah, at 212-678-3445 or shah@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about Austin Community College was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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    Alexa Ura

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  • Melinda French Gates Launches $250 Million Fund—How to Apply | Entrepreneur

    Melinda French Gates Launches $250 Million Fund—How to Apply | Entrepreneur

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    In May, Melinda French Gates resigned as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and announced that she was dedicating $1 billion over the next two years to women’s organizations.

    On Wednesday, part of that vision unfolded — French Gates launched Action for Women’s Health, a $250 million fund for non-profits supporting women’s mental and physical health across the globe.

    “Women’s health continues to be an afterthought, and it’s impacting the health of our families, our communities, our economies,” French Gates said in a promotional video for the fund. “Thankfully there are so many amazing organizations around the world working to change that.”

    Melinda French Gates. Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

    Action for Women’s Health will help fund grassroots organizations tackling women’s health issues, French Gates explained. Each awardee will receive between $1 million and $5 million and undergo multiple rounds of review before securing the funding. Winners will be announced by the end of next year.

    Related: Melinda French Gates Reveals Her Next Move After Leaving Gates Foundation: ‘Set Your Own Agenda or Someone Else Will Set It For You’

    Here’s what the fund is looking for and how to apply.

    Who Should Apply

    Applicants must focus on women’s mental or physical health and meet four criteria: Be impactful, scalable, equitable, and feasible.

    Impact, for example, is measured by the non-profit’s demonstrated contributions. A score of 1 would be no contributions and an ineffective, impractical approach while a score of 5 would be earned through examples of contributions, and an approach with proven effectiveness.

    An organizational readiness tool is available to help applicants assess if they meet the requirements. The form goes through criteria like who can apply — individuals, for-profits, LLCs, and B-Corps are not eligible.

    It also asks if the non-profit’s central focus is women’s mental or physical health and if they have at least two years of audited financial records, in addition to other questions.

    How to Apply

    Action for Women’s Health is now accepting applications, due by January 10, 2025. Organizations have to register their intent to apply by December 3, 2024.

    Related: Melinda French Gates Says This Mindset Hack Helped Her Overcome Imposter Syndrome

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    Sherin Shibu

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