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    Can you solve it? Are you a genius at gerrymandering?

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    Gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing the boundaries of political districts to favour certain parties or politicians.On Friday, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a new redistricting bill with a gerrymandered map that will heavily favour Republicans – and California governor Gavin Newsom plans to retaliate by doing the same in his state for Democrats.Irresepective of the politics of gerrymandering, however, the ruse conceals some interesting maths. Such as – given a certain distribution of voters, how do you draw a map that makes the minority party win the majority of districts?It’s exactly this question that underlies today’s puzzles.In each of the grids below, the challenge is to find the unique electoral map in which the minority colour wins the most regions. A region is defined as a contiguous block of cells that are joined either horizontally or vertically. (A region cannot contain any cells that are only connected diagonally, i.e. via a corner.) Winning a region means having the most cells in that region.The puzzles were conceived by Brady Forrest, a university student in Toronto, whose online alias is Deckard.ExampleDivide the grid into 3 regions of 3 cells each. Purple, the minority colour, must win the majority of the regions.To solve using pencil and paper, click here for a print out (and some bonus puzzles). To play on your screen, below each puzzle is a link to an interactive version.Puzzle 1: EasyDivide the grid into 5 regions of 5 cells each. Purple, the minority colour, must win the majority of regions.View image in fullscreenPuzzle 2: MediumDivide the grid into 5 regions of 10 cells each. Purple, the minority colour, must win the majority of regions. No ties allowed in any region.View image in fullscreenPuzzle 3: HardDivide the grid into 7 regions of 7 cells each. Blue, the minority colour, must win the majority of regions. No ties allowed for first place in any region.View image in fullscreenI’ll be back at 5pm UK with the solutions.NO SPOILERS Please discuss the maths of gerrymandering.Thanks to Deckard for sharing his puzzles. Thanks to Starwort for the interactive versions.I’ve been setting a puzzle here on alternate Mondays since 2015. I’m always on the look-out for great puzzles. If you would like to suggest one, email me.View image in fullscreenIn other Gerry-related news, here’s a fact from my new book, Football School Facts. Gerry Taggart (ex-Bolton) is one of only four Premier League players to have been sent off on their birthdays. The wrong sort of card! This curio and hundreds of others appear in the book, the latest in the long-running series I write with Ben Lyttleton for children aged 7 to 107. Football School Facts is full-colour, hardback, would make an excellent gift, and is available at the Guardian Bookshop. More

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      The battle over US history reveals our education system’s key flaw | Katherine Kelaidis

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      No part of the Trump 2.0 agenda has been more revealing to the ideological intentions of the administration than the sustained efforts that insist upon a “pro-American” version of history. It is an effort that has taken many forms, including a recent letter sent by the White House to the Smithsonian announcing that there will be a review of the national museums’ semiquincentennial plans to “insure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions”. It is only the latest move in a broader campaign to commandeer the nation’s historical memory, a campaign mirrored in statehouses and school boards across the country, where history curricula have become a central front in the culture wars.Unfortunately, the battle over the past – how we should understand it and, more importantly, how we should teach it – is a conflict for which most Americans today are woefully unprepared. That is because for more than two generations, the US educational system has systematically devalued the liberal arts in favor of vocationally oriented Stem education. By doing so, we have failed to accomplish the primary goal of education in a democracy: creating citizens capable of the difficult work of self-government. Of course vocational training and Stem education are vital to individual livelihoods and national prosperity. But when they become the sole focus of education, at the expense of the liberal arts, they leave citizens unprepared for the demands of democratic life.The liberal arts derive their name from the Latin ars liberalis, which literally means “the trade skills of a free person”. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, and more importantly their Enlightenment admirers, citizenship was a trade, a vocation that required particular skills, just like any craft. Among the skills a citizen needed were critical thinking, a command of rhetoric and historical literacy. Importantly, historical literacy does not just mean memorizing dates and facts, but the ability to evaluate arguments, weigh interpretations against evidence, and connect past to present.The decline of the humanities has also contributed to the collapse of empathy in American society. Literature and history, in particular, cultivate the ability to see the world through another’s eyes. Of course, empathy can be learned in other ways, but the humanities are uniquely powerful in diverse societies, where civic life depends on the capacity to empathize with those who are profoundly different from ourselves.This is why the Trump administration and its allies have zeroed in on history education. They know what the enemies of free and compassionate societies have always known: people who understand what lies in the pages of history are far harder to oppress and far harder to coax into cruelty.In the place of teaching history, they wish to place propaganda aimed at assuring that the critical thinking, compassion and perspective cultivated by real historical education are denied to America’s students. It is a kind of education American students have been denied for too long, which is why the American public is so vulnerable to this administration’s escalation.Public education in the United States was not initially created to give students “job skills”, as so many on both sides of the political aisle today would have you believe. Teaching the skills necessary for a particular occupation, undeniably essential to economic health, was long viewed as the responsibility of private business and industry, which directly benefited from a trained workforce. Publicly funded schools existed to assure that students would have the skills needed to participate as responsible citizens of the republic. For this reason, the liberal arts, including history, were at the heart of the curriculum.This began to change in the late 1950s, as cold war paranoia fueled a shift in educational priorities towards science, mathematics, technology and engineering aimed at preventing the US from falling behind the Soviet Union in these areas. These subjects, eventually branded Stem, would gain additional traction over the course of the next 60 years as changing economic winds seemed to suggest that career prospects in the rapidly expanding “technology” sector were the best assurance of a stable, if not prosperous, future. The fact that future employment prospects were even a consideration was evidence of another, less often articulated, change that was occurring.Our understanding of education was being shifted to a view in which every part of the curriculum must have an immediate economic utility. It was, whether anyone realized it at the time or not, a dangerous and unconsidered change to the fundamental goals of education that assumed the assurance of economic prosperity required more public attention – and public funding – than the safeguarding of political liberty.It was a gamble that has cost us dearly. The reason that so many of us have become increasingly susceptible to foreign propaganda, “fake news” and just plain bad arguments can be easily explained by the fact that much American curriculum simply fails to teach students how to think critically and deprives them of the important historical and geographic information that would allow them to spot when they are being deceived.One of the great ironies of our era is that the economic benefits of Stem-focused education have proven to be an illusion. It is now clear that within a generation, many non-research based Stem jobs (and plenty of the research-based ones) are likely to simply vanish in the face of AI. And a public without a liberal arts education may simply lack the imagination to work their way out of this radical reordering of the economy. We will have traded our freedom for prosperity and ended up with neither.But it is not too late. Maga’s assault on history can be the line in the sand – the moment we recognize what we have nearly lost. The surest way to defeat the dark forces now gathering in our politics is to make education once again serve its true purpose: preparing citizens for freedom. The liberal arts have always been at the heart of that mission. If we want to remain a free people, we must restore them to their rightful place at the center of American education.

      Katherine Kelaidis is a research associate at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England More

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      Trump administration to restore $6.8bn in education funds after multi-state suit

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      After a multi-state lawsuit over Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to freeze more than $6.8bn in education funding to US schools, the Trump administration has agreed to restore the funds for a range of educational services, including after school and summer learning, teacher training, and support for English-learners.The administration did not give a clear explanation as to why it had withheld the congressionally-allocated funds, though a spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget had indicated that review found instances of federal education money being “grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda”.Following a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of California and 22 other states, as well as the governors of two states, the administration released some funding. On Monday, California attorney general Rob Bonta announced that the states secured an agreement to have the funding fully restored.“The Trump administration upended school programs across the country when it recklessly withheld vital education funding just weeks before the school year was set to begin,” Bonta said. “Fortunately, after we filed our lawsuit, the Trump Administration backed down and released the funding it had previously withheld … Our kids deserve so much better than what this anti-education administration has to offer, and we will continue to fight to protect them from this president’s relentless attacks.”In their lawsuit, states accused the administration of holding back money illegally, as the US constitution gives congress the rights to appropriate funding, and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 bars the president from unilaterally withholding funds designated by congress.The delayed funds, which were frozen just weeks before the start of the school year this year, had left many communities and school districts uncertain if they would be able to sustain programs. The withheld funds affected after-school and other programs attended by about 1.4 million children nationwide, according to the nonprofit group Afterschool Alliance. Most of the programs benefit low-income families.The funds also covered programs to retain teachers, especially in low-income school districts.Since taking office, Donald Trump has pushed to reshape public education in the US to fit more closely with his rightwing political and social beliefs.He had repeatedly threatened to withhold federal funds from states over policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports. It has also separately threatened or cancelled for sex ed over mentions of transgender people from educational materials.The administration has also pushed states to disqualify immigrant students from discounted in-state tuition reserved for state residents. More

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      When immigration shows up at daycare: crackdown in DC terrifies families and workers

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      Early on Tuesday morning, as parents went to drop off their young children at a bilingual childcare center in north-west Washington DC, they received a message from the administrator saying that unmarked cars were parked directly outside.Shortly after 8am, federal agents in tactical vests arrested two people unaffiliated with the center, the administrator said.“While these activities are not connected to our program, we are closely monitoring the situation and taking extra precautions to ensure everyone feels safe entering and leaving the building,” read the message to parents, reviewed by the Guardian.Foram Mehta, whose son attends the daycare, said she had feared immigration raids there for months, but her fears escalated when Donald Trump sent national guard troops and federal agents to Washington two weeks ago. She said she was concerned about her own safety as a brown person, even though she’s an immigrant in the country lawfully, and also worries for her undocumented neighbors.She, and other Washington residents, including undocumented parents and caregivers, said they were avoiding parts of the city where federal agents have been reported, and she said her parents who are visiting were “strictly forbidden to go anywhere alone – even down the street to the grocery store”.In a city already upended by the second Trump administration’s mass firings of government workers, Trump’s decision to take over the city’s police force, send thousands of federal agents to Washington, and ramp up immigration enforcement has left many residents on edge and grappling with how to go about their lives in a city that no longer feels safe. The return to school for most public schools on Monday has cast that in sharp relief.The White House said on Friday that 719 people had been arrested since the start of the federal crackdown, with many hundreds of them immigrants in the country without legal documents. On the ground, that has looked like federal agents patrolling the streets for undocumented immigrants, setting up checkpoints at busy intersections, stopping delivery drivers and pedestrians, and detaining immigrants at their places of work.The crackdown has especially been affecting parents and caregivers as the new school year begins. Parents told the Guardian they were scared to send their children to school. Nannies are calling out or asking to be escorted to and from work. Daycares are having to implement new safety precautions.Once off limits for immigration enforcement and arrests, schools and daycares feel as if they are no longer safe for employees and for children, many Washingtonians said.Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. Last week, Ice’s acting director, Todd Lyons, told NBC that Washington parents should not expect to see Ice officers at schools on the first day Monday, but that they may come to school campuses in the future.“It’s gotten to the point where people are scared to be out and about,” said Amie Santos, a Washington resident who lives near the daycare. “Nothing about this is making DC safer.”For many Washingtonians, the potential targeting of people and institutions that care for small children has been especially alarming. Multiple people told the Guardian they were struggling with childcare, as so many who work as nannies or in childcare centers are immigrants.Claire, a mom who asked not to use her real name due to fears about her undocumented nanny, said her caretaker called out of work last week with short notice, saying she was concerned about reports of increased police and arrests.View image in fullscreen“She said there’s a very heavy police presence and she’s hearing all of these stories from other nannies and from friends and acquaintances that there are all of these checkpoints,” Claire said. “She said she and her husband are both staying home and not coming into work, either of them.”Claire gave her the week off and is working to figure out options to make her more comfortable to return to work this week, including offering to pick her up from her home.The nanny, who has been in the country for almost three decades, has a teenage child, and “she is so concerned about deportation – that something could happen to her and her husband – that she has asked if we would take care of her child if that were to happen”, Claire said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOther parents said they were driving their children to the neighboring state of Maryland to meet their nannies who live there, or that their nannies have been staying inside rather than venturing outside, or driving throughout the city rather than walking.In a neighborhood parents group, a mom on Tuesday shared a document template for parents to fill out and give to their nannies as they escort their children around the city.“In the event that [NANNY’S NAME] is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) or any other law enforcement authority, this letter affirms that [CHILD’S NAME] is my child and should be immediately returned to me, [HER/HIS MOTHER/FATHER/PARENT] and legal guardian,” the template reads. “Under no circumstance should [CHILD’S NAME] be taken into government custody or placed in foster care.”With the new school year beginning in the middle of Trump’s federal takeover, parents are also concerned about what might be happening at schools.Sebastien Durand, the director of facilities at a public charter school in north-west DC whose role involves student safety, said the school had engaged with families this week before the school year begins.“It was made clear to us that they are all extremely scared,” he said. “Quite a bit of them were actually asking if we can go back to a pandemic era-type of school where they didn’t have to come to school and we had to provide something remote.”He said he explained to them that legally they can’t do that, but the school decided to use its own funds to run buses from the closest Metro station to the campus for at least the next two weeks. The school is concerned about attendance, he said, especially with rates still lower than desired since the pandemic.For children that have already started the school year, the first week has been fraught. Santos’s five-year-old son started kindergarten on Monday at school in north-west DC. On the second day of school, there were unmarked police cars with agents who appeared to be in tactical gear parked in front of the school, she said. That evening, parents were told the school was enhancing security measures and all students, parents and caretakers would be required to wear colored lanyards with photo identification to enter school grounds. The school will also be running a bus for students and caretakers from the Metro to the parking lot.“As you can imagine, it’s been hard,” Santos said. “We had to talk to our son about what was going on, why there was increased security, the importance of kindness, that not everybody feels safe and welcome.“With kids going back to school, there are intimidation factors at play,” she added, “and it’s creating an aggressive environment that I don’t think is conducive to learning or to children.” More

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      Burner phones, wiped socials: the extreme precautions for visitors to Trump’s America

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      Keith Serry was set to bring a show to New York City’s Fringe festival this year, but pulled the plug a few weeks out. After 35 years of traveling to the United States, he says he no longer feels safe making the trip.“The fact that we’re being evaluated for our opinions entering a country that, at least until very recently, purported to be an example of democracy. Yeah, these are things that make me highly uncomfortable,” said Serry, a Canadian performer and attorney.“You’re left thinking that you don’t want to leave evidence of ‘bad opinions’ on your person.”Serry is among a substantial cohort of foreign nationals reconsidering travel to the US under the Trump administration, after troubling reports of visitors facing intense scrutiny and detention on arrival.In March, a French scientist who had been critical of Donald Trump was refused entry to the US after his phone was searched. An Australian writer who was detained and denied entry in June said he was initially grilled about his articles on pro-Palestinian protests, and then watched as a border agent probed even the most personal images on his phone. He was told the search uncovered evidence of past drug use, which he had not acknowledged on his visa waiver application, leading to his rejection. German, British and other European tourists have also been detained and sent home.More than a dozen countries have updated their travel guidance to the US. In Australia and Canada, government advisories were changed to specifically mention the potential for electronic device searches.On the advice of various experts, people are locking down social media, deleting photos and private messages, removing facial recognition, or even traveling with “burner” phones to protect themselves.In Canada, multiple public institutions have urged employees to avoid travel to the US, and at least one reportedly told staff to leave their usual devices at home and bring a second device with limited personal information instead.“Everybody feels guilty, but they don’t know exactly what they’re guilty of,” said Heather Segal, founding partner of Segal Immigration Law in Toronto, describing the influx of concerns she’s been hearing.“‘Did I do something wrong? Is there something on me? Did I say something that’s going to be a problem?’”She advised travelers to assess their risk appetite by reviewing both the private data stored on their devices and any information about them that’s publicly accessible, and to consider what measures to take accordingly.US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has broad powers to search devices with minimal justification. Travelers can refuse to comply, but non-citizens risk being denied entry. CBP data shows such searches are rare; last year, just over 47,000 out of 420 million international travelers had their devices examined. This year’s figures show a significant increase, with the third quarter of 2025 reflecting an uptick in electronic device searches higher than any single quarter since 2018, when available data begins.“Anecdotally, it seems like these searches have been increasing, and I think the reason why that’s true is, undoubtedly, I think they are more targeted than before,” said Tom McBrien, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.“It seems like they are targeting people who they just don’t generally like politically.”Travelers who are concerned about their privacy should consider minimizing the amount of data they carry, McBrien said.“The less data you have on you, the less there is to search, and the less there is to collect,” he said. Beyond using a secondary device, he suggested securely deleting data, moving it to a hard drive or storing it in a password-protected cloud account.A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson rejected claims that CBP had stepped up device searches under the new administration or singled out travelers over their political views.“These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security,” the spokesperson told the Guardian in a statement.“Allegations that political beliefs trigger inspections or removals are baseless and irresponsible.”The statement acknowledged, however, that there had been heightened vetting under Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Under the leadership of the Trump Administration and Secretary Noem, we have the most secure border in American history,” it said. “This has allowed CBP to focus to actually vet and interview the people attempting to come into our country.”Alistair Kitchen, the Australian writer who was denied entry to the US in June, said the DHS’s denial of political targeting directly contradicts what he was told on arrival.Border officials “bragged actively that the reason for my targeting, for my being pulled out of line for my detainment, was explicitly because of what I’d written online about the protests at Columbia University”, he told the Guardian.While he doesn’t plan to return to the US under the Trump administration, Kitchen said that if he ever did, he would either not take a phone or bring a burner.“Under no conditions would I ever hand over the passcode to that phone,” he added. “I would accept immediate deportation rather than hand over the passcode. People should think seriously before booking travel, especially if they are journalists or writers or activists.”Various foreign nationals told the Guardian they are rethinking travel plans for tourism, family visits, academic events and work.Donald Rothwell, a professor who teaches international law at the Australian National University, says he no longer plans to accept speaking invitations to the US over fears of being detained or denied entry – which, he noted, could also trigger red flags on his record for future travel.He’s even considered traveling without a device at all, but is concerned his academic commentary in the media could be used against him regardless.“I might be commenting on matters that could be quite critical of the United States,” he said. “For example, I was very critical of the legal or lack of legal justification for the US military strikes on Iran in June.”Kate, a Canadian whose name has been withheld due to privacy concerns, said she has wrestled with complicated decisions about whether to travel across the border to see American relatives, including for an upcoming wedding. During a trip earlier this year, she deleted her social media apps before going through customs.Despite DHS assurances that travelers are not flagged for political beliefs, she said “it’s hard to believe things that this government is saying”.“It would be really nice to have trust that those kinds of things were true, and that these kinds of stories that you hear, while absolutely horrific, are isolated incidents,” she said.“But I do feel like in many ways, the United States has sort of lost its goodwill.” More

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      Texas killed in-state tuition for undocumented college students – what happened next?

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      Ximena had a plan.The 18-year-old from Houston was going to start college in the fall at the University of Texas at Tyler, where she had been awarded $10,000 a year in scholarships. That, she hoped, would set her up for her dream: a PhD in chemistry, followed by a career as a professor or researcher.“And then the change to in-state tuition happened, and that’s when I knew for sure that I had to pivot,” said Ximena, who is from Mexico but has attended schools in the US since kindergarten. (The Guardian and its partner the Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is using her first name only because she fears retaliation for her immigration status.)In June, the Texas attorney general’s office and the Trump administration worked together to end the provisions in a state law that had offered thousands of undocumented students like Ximena lower in-state tuition rates at Texas public colleges. State and federal officials successfully argued in court that the longstanding policy discriminated against out-of-state US citizens who paid a higher rate. That rationale has now been replicated in similar lawsuits against Kentucky, Oklahoma and Minnesota – part of a broader offensive against immigrants’ access to public education.At UT Tyler, in-state tuition and fees for the upcoming academic year total $9,736, compared to more than $25,000 for out-of-state students. Ximena and her family couldn’t afford the higher tuition bill, so she withdrew. Instead, she enrolled at Houston Community College, where out-of-state costs are $227 per semester hour, nearly three times the in-district rate. The school offers only basic college-level chemistry classes, so to set herself up for a doctorate or original research, Ximena will still need to find a way to pay for a four-year university down the line.Her predicament is exactly what state lawmakers from both political parties had hoped to avoid when they passed the Texas Dream Act, 2001 legislation that not only opened doors to higher education for undocumented students but was also meant to bolster Texas’s economy and its workforce in the long term. With that law, Texas became the first of more than two dozen states to implement in-state tuition for undocumented students, and for nearly 24 years, the landmark policy remained intact.Conservative lawmakers repeatedly proposed to repeal it, but despite years of single-party control in the state legislature, not enough Republicans embraced repeal even as recently as this spring, days before the Texas attorney general’s office and the federal Department of Justice moved to end it.Now, as the fall semester approaches, immigrant students are weighing whether to disenroll from their courses or await clarity on how the consent agreement entered into by the state and justice department affects them.Immigration advocates are worried that Texas colleges and universities are boxing out potential attendees who are lawfully present and still qualify for in-state tuition despite the court ruling – including recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, asylum applicants and temporary protected status holders – because university personnel lack immigration expertise and haven’t been given clear guidelines on exactly who needs to pay the higher tuition rate.At Austin Community College (ACC), members of the board of trustees are unsure how to accurately implement the ruling. As they await answers, they have so far decided against sending letters asking their students for sensitive information in order to determine tuition rates.“This confusion will inevitably harm students because what we find is that in the absence of information and in the presence of fear and anxiety, students will opt to not continue higher education,” said Manuel Gonzalez, vice-chair of the ACC board of trustees.Policy experts, meanwhile, warn that Texas’s workforce could suffer as talented young people, many of whom have spent their entire education in the state’s public school system, will no longer be able to afford the associate’s and bachelor’s degrees that would allow them to pursue careers that would help propel their local economies. Under the Texas Dream Act, beneficiaries were required to commit to applying for lawful permanent residence as soon as possible, giving them the opportunity to hold down jobs related to their degrees. Even without legal immigration status, it’s likely they will still work – just in lower-paying, under-the-radar jobs.“It’s so short-sighted in terms of the welfare of the state of Texas,” said Barbara Hines, a former law school professor who helped legislators craft the Texas Dream Act.The legislation was first introduced in the state’s lower chamber by retired army national guard Maj Gen Rick Noriega, a Democrat who served in the Texas legislature from 1999 to 2009, after he learned of a young yard worker in his district who wanted to enroll at the local community college for aviation mechanics but could not afford out-of-state tuition.View image in fullscreenNoriega called the school chancellor’s office, which was able to provide funding for the student to attend. But that experience led him to wonder: how many more kids in his district were running up against the same barriers to higher education?So he worked with a sociologist to poll students at local high schools about the problem, which turned out to be widespread. And Noriega’s district wasn’t an outlier. In a state that has long had one of the nation’s largest unauthorized immigrant populations, politicians across the partisan divide knew affected constituents, friends or family members and wanted to help. Once Noriega decided to propose legislation, a Republican, Fred Hill, asked to serve as a joint author on the bill.The legislation easily passed the Texas house, which was Democratic-controlled at the time, but the Republican-led senate was less accommodating.“I couldn’t even get a hearing,” said Leticia Van de Putte, the then state senator who sponsored the legislation in her chamber.View image in fullscreenTo persuade her Republican colleagues, she added several restrictions, including requiring undocumented students to live in Texas for three years before finishing high school or receiving a GED. (Three years was estimated as the average time it would take a family to pay enough in state taxes to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition.) She also included the clause mandating that undocumented students who accessed in-state tuition sign an affidavit pledging to pursue green cards as soon as they were able.Van de Putte turned to Texas business groups to hammer home the economic case for the bill. And she convinced the business community to pay for buses to bring Latino evangelical conservative pastors from Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and other areas to Austin, so they could knock on doors in support of the legislation and pray with Republican senators and their staff.After that, the Texas Dream Act overwhelmingly passed the state senate in May 2001, and the then governor, Rick Perry, a Republican, signed it into law the following month.Yet by 2012, a new slew of rightwing politicians was elected to office, many philosophically opposed to the law – and loud about it. Perry’s defense of the policy came back to haunt him during the 2012 Republican presidential primary, when his campaign was dogged by criticism after he told opponents of tuition equity during a debate: “I don’t think you have a heart.”Still, none of the many bills introduced over the years to repeal the Texas Dream Act were successful. And even the current Texas governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican border hawk, at times equivocated on the policy, with his spokesperson saying in 2013 that Abbott believed “the objective” of in-state tuition regardless of immigration status was “noble”.By 2017, the same year Trump began his first term, polling showed a plurality of Texans in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students. More recently, research has indicated time and time again that Americans support a pathway to legal status for undocumented residents brought to the US as children.But arguments against in-state tuition regardless of immigration status also grew in popularity: critics contended that the policy is unfair to US citizens from other states who have to pay higher rates, or that undocumented students are taking spots at competitive schools that could be filled by documented Americans.The justice department leaned on similar rhetoric in the lawsuit that killed tuition equity in Texas, saying the state law is superseded by 1996 federal legislation banning undocumented immigrants from getting in-state tuition – over US citizens – based on residency.View image in fullscreenIn Texas, the sudden policy change is causing chaos. Even the state’s two largest universities, Texas A&M and the University of Texas, are using different guidelines to decide which students must pay out-of-state rates.“Universities, I think, are the ones that are put in this really difficult position,” said Luis Figueroa, senior director of legislative affairs at the advocacy group Every Texan. “They are not immigration experts. They’ve received very little guidance about how to interpret the consent decree.”Meanwhile, young scholars are facing difficult choices. One student, who asked to remain anonymous because of her undocumented immigration status, wondered about her future.The young woman, who has lived in San Antonio since she was nine months old, had enrolled in six courses for the fall at Texas A&M-San Antonio and wasn’t sure whether to drop them. It would be her final semester before earning her psychology and sociology degrees, but she couldn’t fathom paying for out-of-state tuition.“I’m in the unknown,” she said, like “many students in this moment.”

      This story was originally produced by the Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education More

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      ‘We’re all going backwards’: dismay as Trump undoes Biden student-debt plan

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      When Faith, a 33-year-old in Burlington, North Carolina, went back to get her master’s degree in higher education administration in 2020-21, she hoped it would accelerate her career growth and maybe even help her get on the housing ladder.Now, Faith has federal student loan debts of $38,113, and a repayment schedule that is much more demanding than she realized so she feels like the program stalled her progress.“I wasn’t aware of the detriment it would have on my future,” she said. “You really don’t know the full scope of what you’re getting into [when taking out student loan debt] … I got my master’s specifically to progress in my career, but what I make now versus what I owe on the degree, it’s almost like it doesn’t make sense.”She added: “I always regret that decision.”Faith’s situation has been made worse by the Trump administration’s move to resume charging loan interest for borrowers under the Saving on a Valuable Education (Save) plan as of 1 August. Under the Biden administration, about 8 million people enrolled in the Save plan – a 2023 income-driven repayment plan for student debt – many of whose loans have been in forbearance since last year.Under Donald Trump, the Department of Education has effectively killed the Save plan, recommending people switch to another repayment plan for their federal student loans. Borrowers can still choose to forgo payments, but will see interest accruing on their loans and won’t make any progress toward student loan forgiveness.“To me that just looks like you’re digging me deeper into debt, so I felt like I had no other choice but to go ahead and change from the Save plan and start making those payments,” Faith said.Faith is one of scores of people who got in touch with the Guardian to share how they will be affected by changes to the Save plan. Her new repayment plan means she must find an extra $300 a month, on top of her rent of $1,200 (before bills and living costs), a financial challenge that feels “very overwhelming” and has put everything else on hold.“Luckily I don’t have any dependents … but all the people in their 30s around me, it feels like we’re all going backwards,” Faith said. “I’m scared for what the future looks like, especially as we get older. Does that mean, unlike our grandparents whose homes were paid off and who were free of debt, that we’re just going to be in debt?”Public school teacher Jennifer, a 34-year-old based in Portland, Oregon, with $63,419 in federal student loan debt, is also leaving the Save plan, but said her monthly payments almost doubled in her new repayment scheme from about $250 to $480.“I don’t understand why it’s so high,” she said – but she has to leave the Save plan in order to make progress towards loan forgiveness for public school teachers.Jennifer wants to have children in the next couple of years, but said she was “scared for my family plans” under such difficult financial pressures. Alongside teaching in public school, she babysits and runs a weekly bar trivia night in order to earn extra cash to make a living.“The [Trump] administration claims to be pro-family, but is screwing a lot of people over – including ones with families, including ones who want to build a family,” she said.After changes to the Save plan were announced, Jennifer was forced to ask her parents for financial support to help pay off her car loan, which felt difficult as a 34-year-old woman, the age her mother already had two children.“I’m really lucky to be in the position” to ask for help, she said, but added that “there’s so many Americans who don’t have access to generational wealth in that way, and so many teachers who don’t – and we wonder why the teaching field is so white, so unrepresentative. It’s so expensive to be a teacher.”Sedona, a 30-year-old lawyer in Seattle, Washington, who has federal student loans worth $170,848, will be staying in the Save plan, despite the loan interest resuming. She is “much more afraid of defaulting on private debt”, which is currently $22,413 in loans co-signed with her mother, she said.Despite Sedona earning a good wage as an associate lawyer, she and her partner still “live paycheck to paycheck” and already keep a hawkish eye on their finances. As a household they have cancelled most of their subscriptions, very rarely go on trips like to the movies or for nights out, and Sedona picks up sporadic gig work such as copy editing to supplement their income.“In my therapy sessions, we talk a lot about how so much of my anxiety and issues are tied to financial concerns,” she said. “It’s kind of like always sitting there, as this heavy weight.”Sedona feels that the Trump administration’s decision to in effect kill the Save plan aggressively punishes those already in often severe levels of debt, while it simultaneously gives lavish tax giveaways to wealthy individuals and corporations.One day Sedona and her partner would like to adopt or foster children but they currently cannot see a future in which it would be financially responsible to do so. “It feels like, when do I get to start living my life?” she said. “We’re a generation of people who feel jilted.”In Aurora, Colorado, 46-year-old Chris is also remaining in the Save plan. He said he had about $50,000 in outstanding student loan debts – down from $65,000 – that he accrued while studying a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management. He’s keeping his federal student loans in forbearance and paying the interest for as long he can, in order to prioritize paying other debts.“It’s not that I don’t intend to pay my students debts, I understood it was a loan like any other to be repaid,” he said, but the “repayment costs need to be able to fit in a budget that allows for personal and professional growth”.It feels to Chris as if the Trump administration wants to “keep those with [student] debt in it for as long as possible”.“My hope is that midterm elections will bring about government leaders that will undo this mess, that is where my vote will go,” he said. More

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      ‘Censorship’: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine

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      More than 115 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies.”The writers note that the issue’s censorship is also an example of “anti-Palestinian discrimination, obstructing the dissemination of knowledge on Palestine at the height of the genocide in Gaza”.The special issue of the prestigious education journal was planned six months into Israel’s war in Gaza to tackle questions about the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US, as the Guardian previously reported.“The field of education has an important role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been happening in Gaza,” the journal’s editors wrote in their call for abstracts – which came against the backdrop of the devastation of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, including the shuttering of hundreds of schools and destruction of all of the territory’s universities.More than a year later, the special issue was just about ready – all articles had been edited, contracts with most authors had been finalized, and the issue had been advertised at academic conferences and on the back cover of the previous one. But late in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education which publishes the journal, demanded that all articles be submitted to a “risk assessment” review by Harvard’s general counsel – an unprecedented demand.When the authors protested, the publisher responded by abruptly cancelling the issue altogether. In an email obtained by the Guardian, the group’s executive director, Jessica Fiorillo, cited what she described as an inadequate review process and the need for “considerable copy editing” as well as a “lack of internal alignment” about the special issue. She said that the decision was not “due to censorship of a particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic freedom”.The authors and editors flatly rejected that characterization, telling the Guardian that the cancellation set a dangerous precedent and was an example of what many scholars have come to refer to as the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom.“The decision by HEPG to abandon their own institutional mission – as well as the responsibilities that their world-leading stature demands – is scholasticide in action,” the dozens of scholars who signed the recent letter also wrote, using a term coined by Palestinian scholars to describe Israel’s “deliberate and systematic destruction” of Palestine’s educational system.“It is unconscionable that HEPG have chosen to publicly frame their cancellation of the special issue as a matter of academic quality, while omitting key publicly-reported facts that point to censorship.”Arathi Sriprakash, a professor of sociology and education at the University of Oxford and one of the letter’s signatories, told the Guardian that the special issue’s cancellation has mobilised so many education scholars “precisely because we recognise the grave consequences of such threats to academic freedom and academic integrity”.“The ongoing genocidal violence in Gaza has involved the physical destruction of the entire higher education system there, and now in many education institutions around the world there are active attempts to shut down learning about what’s happening altogether. As educationalists, we have to remain steadfast in our commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and learning without fear or threat.”‘Assault on academic freedom’The ordeal around the special Palestine issue played out against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s crackdown on US higher education institutions’ autonomy on the basis of combating alleged antisemitism on campuses.Harvard is the only university that has sued the administration in response to it cutting billions of dollars in federal funds and other punishing measures it has unleashed on universities. But internally, Harvard has pre-empted many of the administration’s demands, including by demoting scholars, scrapping initiatives giving space to Palestinian narratives and adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism that critics say is antithetical to academic inquiry.In conversations with the Harvard Educational Review editors, the journal’s publisher acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of the articles out of fears that their publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor at the journal said.Harvard is reportedly close to finalizing a settlement with the Trump administration along the lines of those reached by other top universities.Thea Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist of education at Barnard College and one of 21 contributors to the cancelled special issue, criticized the university’s handling of the matter as yet another sign of institutional capitulation.“If the universities – or in this case a university press – are not willing to stand up for what is core to their mission, I don’t know what they’re doing,” she told the Guardian last month. “What’s the point?”A spokesperson for the Harvard Graduate School of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest letter but in an earlier statement to the Guardian wrote that the publisher “remains deeply committed to our robust editorial process”.Last month, the free speech group PEN America also condemned the special issue’s cancellation as a “blatant assault on academic freedom”.“Canceling an entire issue so close to publication is highly unusual, virtually unheard of,” Kristen Shahverdian, the program director for the group’s Campus Free Speech initiative, said in a statement.“Silencing these scholarly voices robs academics, students, and the public of the opportunity to engage with their insights. It also sends a chilling message in the context of the Trump administration’s unrelenting pressure on Harvard University and mounting political interference in higher education, including efforts that target scholarship on Palestine.” More

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      Trump administration threatens to strip Harvard University of lucrative patents

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      The latest phase of the Trump administration’s offensive against Harvard University is a comprehensive review of the university’s federally funded research programs, and the threat to strip the school’s lucrative portfolio of patents.In a letter to the Harvard president, Alan Garber, posted online on Friday, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, accused Harvard of breaching its legal and contractual requirements tied to federally funded research programs and patents.Lutnick also said the commerce department has begun a “march-in” process under the federal Bayh-Dole Act that could let the government take ownership of the patents or grant licenses.“The Department places immense value on the groundbreaking scientific and technological advancements that emerge from the Government’s partnerships with institutions like Harvard,” Lutnick wrote.He said that carried a “critical responsibility” for Harvard to ensure that its intellectual property derived from federal funding is used to maximize benefits to the American people.Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Friday’s letter ratchets up White House pressure on Harvard, which it has accused of civil rights violations for failing to take steps dictated by the administration in response to accusations that student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza were antisemitic.Harvard sued in April after the administration began stripping or freezing billions of dollars of federal research money.In his letter, Lutnick demanded that Harvard provide within four weeks a list of all patents stemming from federally funded research grants, including how the patents are used and whether any licensing requires “substantial US manufacturing”.As of 1 July 2024, Harvard held more than 5,800 patents, and had more than 900 technology licenses with over 650 industry partners, according to the Harvard Office of Technology Development.Other universities faced with federal research funding losses have signed settlement agreements with the government, including Columbia University, which agreed to pay more than $220m, and Brown University, which agreed to pay $50m.Harvard’s president reportedly told faculty that a New York Times report that the university was open to spending up to $500m to settle with the government was inaccurate and had been leaked to reporters by White House officials.The bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act was sponsored by senators Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas and signed into law by Jimmy Carter near the end of his term.Carter said at the time it was important that industrial innovation promote US economic health, and the legislation “goes far toward strengthening the effectiveness of the patent incentive in stimulating innovation in the United States”.Many civil rights experts, faculty and White House critics believe the Trump administration’s targeting of schools for supposedly failing to address antisemitism is a pretext to assert federal control and threaten academic freedom and free speech. More