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“Overzealous enforcement could threaten free speech by, for example, indirectly chilling a professor from sharing their positive views of affirmative action policies or leading to investigation of a government grantee for a social media post expressing personal support for DEI initiatives,” the foundation wrote.
Or Hen, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of Kalaniyot, a faculty-led initiative focused on deepening ties between MIT and Israeli researchers, said that he has witnessed systemic failures in discipline for protesters and protection for Jewish students.
The rapid pace of the new Trump administration's efforts to abolish the U.S. Department of Education has caught many student advocates off guard and on the defensive while bringing praise from those supportive of less federal bureaucracy and more local control.
With cyberattacks on the rise, targeting individuals as well as institutions, campus IT managers have to be more vigilant than ever to protect their networks, especially given the physical and financial difficulties that shutdowns due to ransomware and other attacks can cause.
“The previous administration’s desire to cater to special interest groups has left women and girls vulnerable in the classroom,” said Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and the chair of the education and workforce committee, in a statement.
From a deeper look at looming demographic changes to the U.S. Department of Education eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives throughout the agency, here are the top-line figures from some of our biggest stories of the week.
“We want our first-generation students to know that they are just as capable, and sometimes that takes bringing the info to them in a designated space so that they don’t have to navigate the large university and unfamiliar lingo or jargon for themselves,” Dempsey says.
The White House's budget director recently told agencies to pause federal grants, loans and other aid so they can review their adherence to Trump's slew of orders since coming to office.
The new executive order, signed Monday, directs newly sworn-in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to review the Pentagon’s “actions taken in pursuit of DEI initiatives, including all instances of race and sex discrimination and activities designed to promote a race- or sex-based preferences system.”
In that period, “faculty and staff at institutions of higher learning across the country experienced increased scrutiny from college administrators and trustees, as well as Congress and the FBI, for their speech, their academic work, and their political activities.”
Higher ed officials and student advocacy groups warned throughout the day that the pause, in addition to a recent flurry of executive orders, would cause unnecessary disruption to the primary goals and functions of American colleges and universities and could jeopardize crucial scientific research.
Shapiro addressed the research center’s methodological error during a call Wednesday with reporters.The erroneous preliminary report found that first-year enrollment had declined by 5% — over 10 percentage points lower than what the final data showed.