Nov 21
Dear All,
Please find a partial summary of some of the actions taken by the federal government as relates to Higher Education in general and CUNY in specific in the past week.
You can read this formatted at https://cunytracker.github.io/CUNYTracker/nov-21.html
Academic freedom
- Ky. Professor ‘Reassigned’ After Call for War on Israel Sues
The University of Kentucky law professor who was removed from teaching amid his calls for a global war on Israel to end its existence as a state is now suing his institution and the U.S. education secretary.
In his lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, Woodcock asks a judge to order the university and top officials to restore his normal teaching and other duties, allow him back into the College of Law building, end the university’s investigation of him, and pay monetary damages. But he also asks the judge to order Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “refrain from requiring or using” the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
His lawsuit alleges the state and federal actions are related to his “suspension,” saying the university’s tolerance of his speech “ended in summer 2025” after the federal government threatened to withdraw funding from universities and moved to enforce the IHRA definition. He also cited the passage of the state legislation that “enabled and pressured administrators to suppress speech critical of Israel and Zionism.”
- New Report: Civil Rights Law Weaponized to Chill Speech
https://www.aaup.org/news/new-report-civil-rights-law-weaponized-chill-speech
The findings in the report underscore how the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which passed in response to years of nonviolent civil disobedience against racial injustice—is being cynically used to squash political dissent and speech that advocates for the human rights of Palestinians. At the same time, the Trump administration appears to have completely halted investigations based on complaints of racial harassment.
The explosion in antisemitism investigations has been largely driven by a handful of pro-Israel and right-wing organizations; such groups were involved in 78 percent of complaints leading to investigations.
The report also analyzes the twenty-eight Title VI antisemitism lawsuits filed to date by pro-Israel groups against universities in federal courts. Although no case has yet resulted in a final judgment for plaintiffs, some have resulted in settlements implementing even more draconian policy changes than government investigations.
https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/2025-11/Discriminating-Against-Dissent_0.pdf
*Public Universities Don’t Want to Discuss the Compact
As the stated deadline to sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” arrived Friday, multiple universities have already rejected the deal while only a few institutions have expressed interest.
But among the public universities that were either formally invited to sign the compact or that participated in a call with the White House to provide feedback on higher education issues, none are willing to discuss their deliberations about the proposal or interactions with federal officials.
Some public universities, such as Arizona and Virginia, have rejected the compact outright, but others, like Arizona State, have noted they never received a formal invitation to join and therefore they have nothing to decline. But UT Austin has remained silent about whether it will sign the compact.
Freedom of expression
- FAU Reinstates 2 Faculty on Leave for Charlie Kirk Comments
After the right-wing activist was shot and killed Sept. 10 during an event at Utah Valley University, President Donald Trump and his allies sought to punish anyone who made public comments about Kirk that could be perceived as critical. Numerous universities fired or suspended professors, including three at FAU: Karen Leader, an associate professor of art history; Kate Polak, an English professor; and Rebel Cole, a finance professor.
While Leader’s and Polak’s comments criticized Kirk, Cole’s comments were directed at Kirk’s opponents. “We are going to hunt you down. We are going to identify you,” he wrote on social media, according to the Sun Sentinel. “Then we are going to make you radioactive to polite society. And we will make you both unemployed and unemployable.”
Polak remains on leave while Lawson continues to investigate her comments.
Visas
- NYTimes: New International Student Enrollments Plummeted This Fall, Survey Finds
The number of international college students enrolling in their American schools for the first time decreased by 17 percent this fall, according to data published on Monday. (Despite)
In a report on Monday, the Institute of International Education said that the overall number of international students on American campuses — including students who started in prior years — was nearly steady, declining about 1 percent from the last academic year.
But the downturn in new enrollments suggests that the United States could see steeper decreases in the coming years, as current students finish their studies or leave their campuses for other reasons.
The survey found a rise in new undergraduate students, reflecting a rebound from pandemic-era declines, but a 12 percent decrease among new graduate students. (The majority of international students in the U.S. are graduate students.)
(Also)
(And with a different slant)
Funding cuts
- As New Federal Research Funding Resumes, China May Already Be Outspending U.S.
China may have already overtaken the U.S. in research and development spending, ending a half century of American hegemony in financing scientific innovation, according to an American Association for the Advancement of Science researcher.
“We’re entering into uncharted territory,” said Alessandra Zimmermann, the association’s R&D budget and policy program project director, during last week’s Association of Public and Land-grant Universities annual conference.
In a follow-up interview with Inside Higher Ed this week, Zimmermann said, “No one knows what it looks like when the U.S. is not the dominant spender because there is no analogue.” Even Germany before World War II is not a comparable example, “because that dominance was field-specific” in areas such as physics, while other countries dominated elsewhere, she said. There’s never been a country “as overwhelming in the ecosystem as the U.S. has been in R&D.”
- NYTimes: Justice Dept. Sues California Over College Benefits for Undocumented Students
The Justice Department sued California in federal court on Thursday, claiming that providing in-state college tuition to unauthorized students is illegal and discriminates against Americans from out of state who pay higher rates.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, is the latest action by the Trump administration against California. It is the third lawsuit filed by the Justice Department against the state in a week, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
- Science: Total NSF, NIH Funding Didn’t Plunge in Fiscal 2025
But both federal research funding agencies still reduced the number of new grants they awarded, Science reported. It wrote that NSF funded about 8,800 new research project grants, down from 11,000 in 2024, adding that an anonymous NSF staffer said this “was one of several changes designed to reduce the agency’s future financial obligations, in case Trump’s proposed budget cut is realized.” The analysis also found that the agency reduced from 2,600 to 1,100 “the number of new continuing grants, and ‘forward funded’ a number of existing continuing grants.”
Congress has yet to decide how much to fund NSF in the current fiscal year; most of the federal government is currently funded by a continuing resolution that expires Jan. 30, and the government could shut down again if lawmakers don’t pass appropriations bills by then. But Republicans from both chambers have indicated they don’t plan to cut $5 billion from NSF, as Trump has requested; in July, Senate appropriators put forth a cut of only $16 million, while the suggestion in the House was to slash the NSF budget by $2 billion.
NIH
- Hundreds of Cancer, Infectious Disease Trials Disrupted by NIH Cuts
More than 380 clinical trials and tens of thousands of participants were disrupted by cuts to grant funding from the National Institutes of Health this year, according to a research analysis published Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine.
The authors examined 11,008 clinical trials funded between Feb. 28 and Aug. 15 by active NIH grants and found that 383 of them—or 3.5 percent—had lost grant funding by Aug. 15. About 36 percent of those trials were completed, 34 percent were recruiting participants, 13.7 percent were not yet recruiting participants and 11 percent were active and no longer recruiting. That last group consisted of 43 trials that enrolled 74,311 participants combined.
Federal Agencies
DOE/OCR
- McMahon Defends Dismantling ED to Department Staff
To Education Secretary Linda McMahon, outsourcing education-related grant programs to other federal departments is just a “proof of concept” for her larger goal—closing the 45-year-old agency.
“Let’s move programs out on a temporary basis. Let’s see how the work is done. What is the result? What is the outcome?” she said in an all-staff meeting at the department Tuesday, shortly after publicly announcing six interagency agreements. “And if it has worked and we have proven that this is the best way to do it, then we’ll ask Congress to codify this and make it a permanent move.” (The meeting was closed to the public. All quotes are pulled from a recording obtained by Inside Higher Ed.)
A restructuring like the one in Tuesday’s announcement has been rumored for months, and the changes mirror recommendations outlined in Project 2025—a conservative blueprint that called for closing ED. (The education section of Project 2025 was spearheaded by Lindsey Burke, who is now the department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs.)
(Also)
NYC actions
- What Mamdani’s Win Might Mean for Higher Ed in NYC
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has promised to bring sweeping changes to New York City after a campaign that claimed national attention and rallied youth voters. Now college and university leaders, scholars, and students are speculating about what his win might mean for the city’s more than 120 higher education institutions.
The answer? It’s unclear.
Higher ed experts and leaders suspect he’ll be a champion for the City University of New York system, after a long track record of support, while private colleges and universities face a hazier future, given that he previously proposed removing wealthier institutions’ tax breaks. Some also believe, and hope, that he’ll act as a bulwark against interference from the Trump administration, which has heavily targeted higher ed.
Mamdani’s platform put forward a single policy proposal on higher education: a promise to work with state and city lawmakers to “massively invest” in the City University of New York, the city’s public system of four-year institutions, community colleges and professional schools, which has consistently called for more funding.
The goal is to support “infrastructure, pay staff and faculty a living wage, give free OMNY cards to all students, and make CUNY tuition-free for all students,” Mamdani’s platform read.
The mayor-elect also highlighted ways he might go about this investment, including by advocating for the New Deal for CUNY, legislation that would cover students’ remaining tuition after other aid programs and increase the system’s faculty-to-student ratio.
The Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s faculty and staff union and a longtime proponent of the New Deal for CUNY, is celebrating his win. The union endorsed Mamdani and encouraged members to vote for him.
James Davis, president of PSC, said that as an assemblymember, Mamdani was “very consistent and vocal in support of CUNY students and the CUNY system over all.”
Institutional assaults
University of California
- Judge: Trump Administration Can’t ‘Blanket’ Deny UC New Grants or Demand Payout
A judge ordered federal agencies Friday to end their “blanket policy of denying any future grants” to the University of California, Los Angeles, and further ruled that the Trump administration can’t seek payouts from any UC campus “in connection with any civil rights investigation” under Titles VI or IX of federal law.
The ruling also prohibits the Department of Justice and federal funding agencies from withholding funds, “or threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment or Tenth Amendment.” In all, the order, if not overturned on appeal, stops the administration’s attempt to pressure UCLA to pay $1.2 billion and make multiple other concessions, including to stop enrolling “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” and stop “performing hormonal interventions and ‘transgender’ surgeries” on anyone under 18 at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.
The administration’s targeting of the UC system came to the fore on July 29. That’s when the DOJ said its months-long investigations across the system had so far concluded that UCLA violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its response to alleged antisemitism at a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment.
(More on this “investigation” follows:)
- NYTimes: ‘It’s a Culture Now of Fear’: A Year of Chaos Inside the Justice Department
(This extremely important story is much more than this point, but…)
Trump-appointed leaders in the Civil Rights Division began directing career attorneys to investigate the University of California system for antisemitism and employment discrimination. These investigations were overseen by Leo Terrell, a former Democrat turned Fox News commentator selected by the president to head his multiagency task force on antisemitism. They marked a new stage in the escalating attack on college campuses by the administration, which had already canceled billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, and opened investigations into 60 universities for what it described as a failure to protect Jewish students.
Ejaz Baluch, Civil Rights Division: The way we did investigations drastically changed. Normally, line attorneys investigate cases and follow the facts and law on a nonpartisan basis. If we discovered a law was violated, we recommended a lawsuit to the leadership of the division. It was bottom up.
That process turned upside down. It was outcome driven. The prime example I saw was the investigation into the U.C. school system about allegations of antisemitism on campus. In March, Andrea Lucas, who Trump appointed to be acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, filed what’s called a Commissioner’s Charge, which is essentially a complaint of employment discrimination. It was my section’s job to investigate it. We were told: “You have 30 days to do an investigation and give us a Justification Memo” — which is what we write after we conclude there is a legal violation.
Multiple teams of attorneys went to Berkeley, U.C.L.A., U.C. Davis and U.C.S.F. Mostly they didn’t find sufficient evidence to bring suit. The teams were so scared that in real time, every day, they were summarizing and reporting up to office management, back to Michael Gates, the deputy assistant attorney general, to create a paper trail for how they were not finding evidence.
Ejaz Baluch: The only school, it became clear, where there might be a violation was U.C.L.A. One colleague said, “We have to feed something to the wolves.” The team concluded that the complaint process at the school was broken. Some professors we interviewed really did suffer on campus. They were harassed by groups of students.
But the D.O.J. demand letter to U.C.L.A. asked for $1 billion in damages. We thought, $1 billion? They are making that up out of thin air. There is no way the damages we found added up to anything like that amount.
(Also)
University of Virginia
- The Plot Against Jim Ryan
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-plot-against-jim-ryan
I am sharing my own account, which you will see differs in significant parts from the account of RectorSheridan and Governor Youngkin. …
The trouble began, as Ryan sees it, back in March, months before that “unreasonable” four-hour deadline was put to him. The office of Gov. Glenn Youngkin had drafted a resolution for the board to vote on, directing the university to dissolve its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office. What passed was a relatively mild measure, in Ryan’s view, but Youngkin, a Republican, trumpeted it on Fox News as a blow to the once-popular diversity apparati that were quickly being dismantled nationwide: “DEI is dead” at UVa, the governor told the network.
Accounts differ about what happened next, pointing to what appears to have been an eroding and contentious relationship between Ryan and several members of the Board of Visitors, specifically Rachel Sheridan and Porter Wilkinson, both Youngkin appointees who were soon to hold positions of leadership as rector and vice rector, respectively.
- The 12-page letter is an excellent read:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26278550-jim-ryan-letter/
But the call for my resignation, right until the end, seemed so outlandish as not to be entirely believable. It also felt like a hostage situation, where the kidnapper threatens harm if you do not keep information about the demands confidential.
If the DOJ was sincerely threatening UVA if I did not resign, I think it’s important to recognize that that presented a difficult choice. What is not clear to me, however, is whether the threat was real, or whether the idea came from the Board members who spoke with the DOJ lawyers, our own lawyers, the Governor, or some combination of that group. Harmeet Dhillon [DOJ] emphatically and publicly stated, twice, that neither she nor her DOJ colleagues demanded my resignation or offered some sort of quid pro quo. This is not consistent with what I was told by Rachel and Paul, but I was never in the room when theseconversations took place.
Finally, as indicated earlier, the lines between policy and the law have been repeatedly blurred during this entire episode. The Board and University leaders set policy; the DOJ enforces the law. Too often, people within the DOJ and on our own Board have implied that if we were following policies that they did not favor, we were somehow doing something illegal. That is not the case, obviously. DEI, for example, is not itself illegal. One can do illegal things in the name of DEI, just like one can do illegalthings in the name of promoting viewpoint diversity. But diversity itself, including viewpoint diversity,is not against the law.
(Also)
- Virginia Supreme Court Declines Review in Board Picks Case
Earlier this year, the Privileges and Elections Committee rejected multiple board picks. Youngkin argued that it would take action by the full Senate—not just the committee—to block his appointments and that nominees should serve until rejected. State Democrats sued, and a Fairfax Circuit Court judge issued an injunction in July to prevent rejected board appointments from serving. State attorney general Jason Miyares, a Republican, challenged the ruling, and Virginia’s Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case last month.
“Supreme Court of Virginia has affirmed the Senate P&E Committees authority to reject gubernatorial nominations because MAGA rules don’t work in Virginia where we still have a rule of law that Youngkin and Miyares have to follow,” Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, a Democrat, wrote on X following the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision Monday morning.
Others
- Nearby ICE Raids Stoke Fear on North Carolina Campuses
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/11/21/nearby-ice-raids-stoke-fear-north-carolina-campuses
North Carolina campus leaders are urging international students and staff to take precautions and promising to protect student privacy amid a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte areas. But some students and employees fear campuses aren’t doing enough to protect them after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security boasted upwards of 250 arrests in and around Charlotte on Wednesday.
He [ provost, Warwick Arden] stressed that the university follows all federal laws—including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, so administrators shouldn’t release information about students or staff without consulting the Office of General Counsel. He also advised all international students, faculty and staff to “carry evidence of their immigration status with them at all times,” including their passports if they leave the Raleigh area.
Duke University administrators sent a similar message to students and staff on Wednesday, recommending that international students and employees carry travel documents “at all times” and promising to safeguard student privacy in accordance with federal law.
Sharon L. Gaber, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, released a memo on Monday, which was updated Thursday, reminding students and employees of the university’s protocols if they encounter anyone who identifies themselves as federal law enforcement. She urged them to call campus police, who “will work with the Office of Legal Affairs to review and verify any subpoenas or warrants that may be presented.”
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s interim executive vice chancellor and provost, James W. Dean Jr., also put out a message to students and staff on Tuesday,
Op eds
- NYTimes: ‘We Lost Our Mission’: Three University Leaders on the Future of Higher Ed
Sian Beilock [Dartmouth President]: I was very clear that I don’t believe a compact with a Republican or Democratic-led White House is the right way to effect change in higher ed. But I’ve also been very clear that I think we have work to do in higher ed to gain back the trust of the American people, and to make sure that we’re serving this country and the world in the best way possible.
Michael Roth [Wesleyan]: Oh, on the contrary. I think it’s given viewpoint diversity a bad odor because it’s being imposed on us, not because the federal government was looking for ideological diversity, but because they’re looking for loyalty. I think this initiative has as much to do with scientific research as the early [antisemitism] initiative had to do with protecting Jews. This is an extortionist move to try to hold institutions that are heavily dependent on federal funding, as research institutions are, to have leverage over them.
Jennifer Mnookin [UW Madison]: I think that many universities, not all, but many, were for a period of time deeply focused on identity diversity, and really not so focused on viewpoint diversity or belief diversity. I think there’s a danger of a pendulum swinging too far in the other direction, and we need to worry about that. But I think universities should be spaces where ideas, and different ideas, embodied by people from different backgrounds, come together, and where it won’t always be comfortable, but where we will learn and do better from that engagement.
Roth: I do think this is a perilous moment for universities. I believe that Project 2025 makes very clear that the administration intends to capture higher education for ideological purposes. I do also believe that science can only be done at the level to which we’ve been accustomed through intense federal funding. But I would hate to see us pretend that the agenda of the White House, which is clearly laid out by its practitioners and by its officials, doesn’t exist.
(I stopped here with the Wesleyan president, but there is more for sure)
Coming attractions?
- A Planned Shake-Up at Montclair State U. Raises a Question: What Is a Department for?
Montclair State University’s controversial plans to restructure its academic departments into interdisciplinary schools elevates a debate about college bureaucracy and disciplinary coherence that normally gets little attention. The underlying question posed by the plan is this: What is the value of a department?
Earlier this week, the university’s draft plan to reorganize 15 disciplines in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences under four “schools” reached the pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The four new schools would each have a name that would be determined by faculty members and convey its broad focus. Current placeholder names include “the design and understanding of civic and social systems,” where majors like anthropology and political science will be housed, or “human narratives and creative expressions,” which will be the new home of English, philosophy, and foreign languages. In the process, the university may eliminate academic departments as a bureaucratic structure — along with department chairs.
The goal of Montclair State’s restructuring plan is to foster interdisciplinarity and make academic fields more relevant, says Jonathan Koppell, the university’s president, who is also a political scientist. Koppell says that enrollments in the college have been healthy, but driven almost entirely by psychology, while those in the humanities have been in decline.
“What we’re saying is that there is nothing inherently anti-disciplinary about organizing in a way that is not based on discipline-driven departments,” Koppell says in an interview.
(Yeah, you might guess there is a “but” coming next:)
The plan wasn’t universally perceived that way. Some faculty members see it as an attempt to reduce the power of academic departments, and perhaps even close liberal-arts programs. Jeffrey Miller, an associate professor of English, suggested as much in an interview with The New York Times and in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Miller accused university leaders of seeming “so eager to deny their students … the educational opportunities that many of the administrators themselves received.”
Reorganizations sweep through higher education periodically, particularly among institutions under pressure, and often with the rationale of reducing administrative costs or promoting interdisciplinary interactions, or sometimes to follow an emerging industry focus. Koppell came from Arizona State University, which has set up interdisciplinary programs and colleges. But in most instances, academic departments are often retained, and just shifted around.
(Also)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/nyregion/montclair-state-restructuring.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
AI misdeeds
- AI Killed the Take-Home Essay. COVID Killed Attendance. Now What?
https://stevenmintz.substack.com/p/ai-killed-the-take-home-essay-covid
(A long, insightful essay on the major changes in student behaviours and expectations that require a fundamental adjustment to how we teach.)
What has forced this reckoning? A convergence of disruptions that have destabilized every assumption on which traditional college teaching depends.
This semester, I realized I was teaching in a world I no longer understood, using methods designed for conditions that no longer obtained. The machinery of college teaching had broken, and I had been operating by sheer inertia, pretending it still worked.
Many students now regard class attendance as optional…
Reading loads and writing expectations have eroded…
The omnipresence of technology has fractured student focus in ways that are cognitively and pedagogically unavoidable…
The economic pressures reshaping student behavior deserve equal attention…
They approach college instrumentally because they must: the stakes are too high, the costs too crushing, to treat education as an end in itself…
And now there is AI—one of the largest disruptions to teaching and learning since the invention of print…
One more complication: Is this a temporary disruption or a permanent transformation? Are we seeing a COVID cohort effect that will eventually normalize, or a generational shift in how young people approach learning?
My instinct, based on limited evidence and much uncertainty, is that we are witnessing something more lasting. The forces that destabilized traditional teaching—ubiquitous technology, economic precarity, the erosion of shared reading culture, and now AI—are not temporary.
They are structural features of contemporary life. We should design our teaching for the world that exists, not the world we wish existed.
Again, some links are behind paywalls. The shortened wapo links are gift articles; the Chronicle links should be available through a CUNY library. I have online access to the WSJ articles through CUNY.
These digests are now archived at