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      ‘From all sides’: universities in red states face attacks from DC and at home

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      Days after the University of Michigan president, Santa Ono, announced that he was leaving his post to lead the University of Florida, his name was quietly removed on Wednesday from a letter signed by more than 600 university presidents denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” with academic institutions.As Ono is set to become the highest-paid public university president in the country, in a state that has often been at the forefront of the rightwing battle against higher education, the reversal, first reported on by Talking Points Memo, underscored the challenges of standing up against the government’s sweeping attacks on education in solidly red states.Many private colleges and universities have begun to push back against Donald Trump’s federal funding cuts, bans on diversity initiatives, and targeting of foreign students, while faculty at more than 30 universities, most of them public, have passed resolutions calling for a “mutual defence compact” – a largely symbolic pledge to support one another in the face of the government’s repressive measures. But in conservative states, where local attacks on higher education were in vogue before the US president took office, faculty trying to fight back find themselves fighting on multiple fronts: against state legislators as well as against Trump.Some have persevered, although for now that resistance has been limited to statements and resolutions calling on the universities themselves to put up a more muscular response. The faculty senate at Indiana University, Bloomington, voted in favor of a defence compact last month, days before Republican legislators passed a sweeping overhaul of the state school’s governance. In Georgia, Kennesaw State University became the first – and so far only – school in the US south to join the call for the solidarity pact, in part to protest the state scrapping a decades-old initiative to increase the college enrollment of Black men, which was pulled as part of the broader Trump-led crackdown on diversity initiatives. This week, faculty at the University of Miami in Ohio and at the University of Arizona – both states with Republican-majority legislatures – also passed resolutions in favor of mutual alliances among universities.The resolutions are nonbinding, as faculty senates play an advisory role at most universities, and so far no administrations have responded to the call. But the idea, those behind it say, is to send a message.“All universities in all states are under threat,” said Jim Sherman, a retired psychology professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, who proposed the resolution passed by faculty there. “If we don’t stand together and talk about what each of us is experiencing, how we’re dealing with it, and what the options are, then we’re standing alone, and that’s much more difficult.”Paul Boxer, a psychology professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, first came up with the plan to organize faculty in the “Big Ten” conference, a group of 18 large, mostly public universities, to put up a united front against the Trump administration. But schools outside the conference showed an interest, and the solidarity effort quickly outgrew the consortium to include other, mostly public colleges and universities across the country. Boxer also praised other collective initiatives that have since emerged, including by a group of “elite” universities quietly strategizing to counter the Trump administration policies, but called on more universities to publicly unite in their resistance.“A lot of the attention has been on Harvard, and the Ivy Leagues, and the universities that Trump has name-dropped, and I’m glad that Harvard did what they did, obviously, but they’re sitting on a $50bn endowment, and they can do things that we can’t in a public university,” Boxer said, referring to the university’s public defiance of Trump’s demands and a lawsuit it filed against the administration.Large state universities – particularly those in blue states with sympathetic legislators – had other advantages, Boxer noted, including strong connections to alumni in local government and the broader community.That is a harder case to make in Republican-controlled states – some of which, like Florida, Texas, Iowa and Utah – had essentially drawn up a blueprint for attacking diversity initiatives and academic freedom in the years leading up to Trump’s election. In Indiana, the recently passed measures, which legislators attached to a budget bill at the last minute, would establish “productivity” quotas for tenured faculty and end alumnis’ ability to vote for the university’s board of trustees, which would fall under the full control of the state’s governor, Mike Braun.“There is a lot of anxiety,” said Sherman. “If Indiana is any indication, red states might even be more under threat from their state legislatures than they are from the federal government.”Taking a public stance in a climate of growing repression is not easy, faculty say. In Florida, where Ono is headed, the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, was an early champion of the battle against diversity initiatives and said this week that he expects the incoming president to abide by the state’s mission to “reject woke indoctrination”.In Georgia, at a statewide faculty leadership meeting this week, scholars from across the state’s universities debated how to defend programmes supporting Black students, help international students facing visa revocations, and prepare to fight proposed state legislation that would impose further restrictions on diversity initiatives and criminalize the distribution of some library materials.“Faculty want to do something, they want to respond, but they also see the inevitability of their university system and their lawmakers doing it. There’s no stopping that train here in Georgia,” said Matthew Boedy, a professor at the University of North Georgia who also leads the state’s American Association of University Professors conference.“There are state-level attacks, there are federal attacks,” he said. “We are taking it from all sides.” More

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      ‘The universities are the enemy’: why the right detests the American campus | Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

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      In 2021, JD Vance, then a candidate for Ohio senate, gave a provocative keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference. Vance’s lecture was an indictment of American higher education: a “hostile institution” that “gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in this country”. The aspiring politician did not mince words before his receptive rightwing audience: “If any of us wants to do the things we want to do … We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.” The title of Vance’s keynote was inspired by a quote from Richard Nixon: “The universities are the enemy.”The Maga movement, of which Vance, the vice-president, is now at the forefront, has been unabashedly on the attack against campuses, professors and students. Donald Trump characterizes colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics”, and student protesters as “radicals”, “savages” and “jihadists” who have been indoctrinated by faculty “communists and terrorists”. He has already delivered swift vengeance against campus protesters and non-protesters alike with visa terminations and deportations. This administration has gleefully withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to force colleges to crack down on student dissent.While Vance paid homage to Nixon and other forebears on the right, he failed to acknowledge that his political lineage had been fighting the university as an enemy for more than 100 years. In fact, reactionary backlash is a feature of two main milestones in the academy’s history: the democratization of admissions and the diversification of curriculum. Trump and Vance’s attacks are part of a longer history of rightwing backlash that follows each time college becomes more democratic.Before the universities were the enemyFor the first 300 years of US higher education, starting with the founding of Harvard College in the 1630s, the academy was a realm exclusive to the Christian elite. Only an extreme few attended the colonial and antebellum colleges, which were meant as sectarian educational clubs for the sons of the landed gentry. Boys of the Protestant ruling class attended college to socialize, form lifelong friendships and business partnerships, and even link their families legally through intermarriage of their sisters. Young men were exposed to the liberal arts and Christian theology, to be sure, but college was just as much a place to meet other boys like themselves and to be steeped in the cultural norms of their religious denomination and social class. This three-century tradition has been slow to change, and when it has, colleges have met fierce opposition from those who have benefited from the status quo.Throughout this time, the only people of color or women who appeared on campus were the wives and daughters of the faculty, maids, cooks, laundry workers, servants and enslaved people. By the 1830s and through the end of the century, segregated colleges were established for white women, and free men of color (until the founding of Bennett College and Spelman College, women of color had to “pass” as white to attend women’s colleges), but these institutions were not meant to rival or even resemble the standard colleges. The curriculums were vastly different from the liberal arts instruction of Harvard and Princeton – for girls, lessons were about homemaking and Christian motherhood; for children and adults of color, the practical vocations. Still, college-going by anyone was a privilege. Even at the turn of the 20th century, less than 5% of Americans went to college, and many fewer completed a degree.Backlash against who gets inThe right’s first rumblings about the college as enemy occurred during the 20th century, as the nature of the campus began to change for the modern era. The right’s grievance at the time was focused on who was admitted. By the 1920s, European immigrant students were starting to matriculate in east coast campuses, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania. The oldest and most prestigious colleges, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, sought to severely limit enrollment of the “socially undesirable”, especially Jews, to preserve the campus for old-stock Protestants. A combination of antisemitism and reactionary backlash to the era’s progressivism led rightwingers to cast a suspicious eye on the campus, where all of the decade’s new social science seemed to be emanating. Christian fundamentalists, terrified by the science of evolution, also decried the sinister academic classroom.By the 1930s, wealthy industrialists joined the chorus of college skeptics. The Franklin Roosevelt administration had assembled its famous “brain trust” of academics whose calculus was needed to pull the nation out of the Great Depression. But industry titans who refused to tolerate Roosevelt’s planned economy responded by creating free-market thinktanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that produced rival economic white papers in defense of capitalism. Academic departments, AEI’s existence proved, were not the only place where experts could create knowledge. In fact, the right’s thinktanks would become their signature tool for churning out partisan disinformation such as climate crisis denial and race pseudoscience throughout the 20th century.By the time the second world war ended, Congress needed a way to ensure a smooth economic transition as a mass of veterans returned to the job market. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, AKA the GI Bill, allowed more than 1 million returning soldiers to delay workforce re-entry by a few years as they entered the classroom. To the horror of many free-marketeers and social elites, the GI Bill in effect doubled the national population of college students, thus diversifying the campus by class, age and in the case of wounded veterans, physical ability (though not by race or gender).Backlash against what gets taughtOn the heels of the democratizing GI Bill, the McCarthyite purge of more than 100 academics for their prewar affiliations with the Communist party has become legend. At the same time, Joseph McCarthy’s young admirer William F Buckley Jr produced his 1951 opus, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, arguing that socialist professors had run roughshod over the campus, indoctrinating students in Keynesian economics and atheism. The academy, to McCarthy, Buckley and their followers, had transformed into a hotbed of anti-Americanism. The right’s understanding that higher education could not be trusted was now well developed: too many people were entering college and learning the wrong lessons.Following the McCarthy attacks came the storied 1960s, when the campus continued democratizing its admissions and curriculum. Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965 allowed for greater access to student loans and work-study programs. This allowed additional generations of working-class students to matriculate, especially more people of color, who demanded to see themselves in their lessons. The creation of Black studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies and similar disciplines throughout the 1970s followed militant strikes by student protesters. At the same time, anti-Vietnam war unrest challenged their institutions’ commitments to cold war weapons development. For the right, this was but more evidence of the college as a radicalizing institution.Increasingly, the liberal center began to agree with the notion that the campus had radicalizing potential. The 1980s and the 1990s marked the bipartisan obsession with culture wars, with the campus as its apparent locus. To the benefit of the right, popular debates about political correctness and identity politics in effect drew attention from austerity measures that had sucked resources away from higher education since the Reagan years. Through the 2000s and 2010, the right revved up its offensives against campus antiwar movements, attacking faculty and students who spoke out against the “war on terror” and protests to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. By the 2010s, in the aftermath of the Great Recession’s deep cuts to higher education, conservative attacks shifted back to campus social crusades as the right railed against the Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, and ginned up moral panics over safe spaces, trigger warnings and cancel culture.Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, conservative rhetoric cast colleges and universities as deeply politicized, inefficient and anti-American. From the 1920s to the 1980s, this generated popular notions that the college should be reformed back to its previous role as a selective space for class reproduction. Since the 1980s, the purpose has been to delegitimize the academy to get mass buy-in to defund, privatize and eventually abolish public higher education. The goal is to return colleges to a carefully constructed environment not to educate all, but to reproduce hierarchy (especially if it can be done for profit).This has not been an exclusively American process. Autocrats around the world have cracked down on the academy, journalism and venues of arts and culture for the last 100 years. These are places where ideas are shared and traditional conventions are challenged. Crushing them is central to consolidating authoritarian power. Today’s international rightwing leaders want to control higher education, just as they want dominion over all other social, cultural and political institutions. For the first time, a US president is finally willing to deliver the right’s century-old goal.

      Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, PhD, is a historian of US colleges and universities. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America and host of the weekly American Campus Podcast More

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      Trump blocks grant funding for Harvard until it meets president’s demands

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      The US Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school accedes to a list of demands from the Trump administration that would effectively cede control of the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university to the government.The news was delivered to Dr Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a deeply partisan letter from Linda McMahon, the education secretary, which she also posted on social media.“This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided,” McMahon wrote.The main reason for the crackdown on Harvard is the school’s rejection of a long list of demands from the Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce, prompted by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. McMahon also accuses the university of “a systematic pattern of violating federal law”.As Garber explained in a message to the Harvard community last month, the university decided to sue the federal government only after the Trump administration froze $2.2bn in funding, threatened to freeze an additional $1bn in grants, “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.The government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university”, Garber wrote.In its lawsuit against the Trump administration, Harvard said the government’s funding cuts would have stark “real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff [and] researchers” by ending crucial medical and scientific research.The text of McMahon’s letter, much like a Truth Social post from Donald Trump, is littered with all-caps words. “Where do many of these ‘students’ come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country – and why is there so much HATE?”“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus,” McMahon claims.The university recently published its own, in-depth investigation of allegations that Gaza solidarity protests had crossed the line into antisemitism, and a second that looked at anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.But McMahon’s letter is not mainly about the claim that Jewish students feel unsafe at Harvard – a view the school’s president, who is himself Jewish, has some sympathy with – but is filled with extended diatribes about a series of other grievances, including: the supposed far-left politics of Penny Pritzker, a member of the university’s governing board who previously served as US commerce secretary during the Obama administration; the complaints of Harvard alumnus and Trump supporter Bill Ackman; what McMahon calls the “ugly racism” of Harvard’s efforts to diversify its student body; complaints about what Fox News has termed a “remedial math” course which is intended to address gaps in new students’ math skills following the Covid pandemic; accusations that the Harvard Law Review has discriminated against white authors; and two brief fellowships the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health offered to the former mayors of New York and Chicago, Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot.In language that seemed to echo Donald Trump’s own, McMahon told Harvard’s president that De Blasio and Lightfoot, who were recruited to share their experiences of bringing universal pre-kindergarten to New York, and leading Chicago through the pandemic, are “perhaps the worst mayors ever to preside over major cities in our country’s history”.“This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation,” McMahon wrote.“Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni,” McMahon wrote. “You have an approximately $53bn head start.” More

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      The way universities can survive the Trump era? Band together in an alliance | David Kirp

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      Higher education is under attack from the person who inhabits the White House. Universities are being threatened with an array of punishments, including the cutoff of their federal contracts and grants, the loss of their nonprofit status and a tax on their endowment. The Trump administration is demanding a say in whom they admit, whom they hire and even what courses they teach.It’s a grim message – abandon your fundamental values, or else. The idea of an “existential moment” has become a cliche, but this situation warrants that grim description. Academic freedom, the lifeblood of higher education, is being threatened.How should these colleges and universities respond?Columbia University has learned the hard way that you can’t negotiate with an autocrat – give an inch and he’ll just come back for more. Harvard has been widely praised for saying “no” to Trump, and justifiably so. But Harvard couldn’t have done anything else. The demands were so outrageous that if the university had capitulated it might as well have closed its doors.The cutoff of $2.2bn in federal contracts and grants, as well as the threat to rescind the university’s tax-exempt status, will take a bite out of research, teaching and financial aid, if ultimately upheld by the courts. But Harvard is, far and away, the richest university in the world, with an endowment north of $50 billion. That’s larger than the gross domestic product of nearly 100 countries. With its deep pockets, it is uniquely situated to carry on, while its phalanx of best-in-the-nation lawyers do battle in the courtroom.Other schools in Trump’s sight include far less wealthy private universities like Northwestern, as well as flagship public universities like the University of California-Berkeley, which have a comparative pittance to draw on. If they say shut the door when Trump & Co. come calling, the consequences would doubtlessly be devastating. But the Columbia debacle shows that there is really no option.Universities compete on many fronts. They vie for contracts and grants, professors and students and endowment contributions. Because they fetishize prestige, they take aggressive action to boost their place in the US News pecking order.But in these desperate times such competition is a ruinous course. The only strategy with a prayer of succeeding is for universities – public and private, well-endowed and scraping by – to come together, making it crystal-clear that they won’t give in to assaults on academic freedom.That’s precisely what happened last week, when more than 200 college and university presidents signed a statement, issued by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which forcefully condemns the federal government’s “political interference” and overreach” for “endangering higher education.”Stanford, Chicago and Dartmouth are among the top-ranking schools that didn’t sign on. Perhaps their presidents believe that “duck and cover” is their best strategy. As Columbia – which did sign – can tell them, good luck with that.Higher education has long rested on its laurels, confident that Americans appreciate its intrinsic value, but that hasn’t been true for years. The just-issued statement of principle should be coupled with a full-throated campaign to make their case—to demonstrate the importance of universities and colleges in preparing the coming generation to contribute to society as well as carrying out essential, cutting-edge research.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe AACU manifesto makes a great start, but more is needed to win this war. Well-off universities need to come to the aid of their financially weaker brethren, underwriting essential and expensive legal support, when the anti-university forces come calling.“Nato for higher education” – a mutual defense pact is a long-shot approach, but it might just convince the bully in the White House to back off. The tariff mess is just the latest example of how the Mister “Art of the Deal” turns tail when confronted with strong opposition.What’s more, colleges and universities have no viable option – to borrow a line from Benjamin Franklin, they can “hang together or hang separately.”

      David Kirp is professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley and the author of The College Dropout Scandal More

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      Trump to address graduating students at the University of Alabama

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      Donald Trump will travel to heavily Republican Alabama on Thursday to speak to graduating students at the University of Alabama, where he is expected to draw some protesters despite enjoying a deep well of support in the state.The US president’s evening remarks in Tuscaloosa will be his first address to graduates in his second term and will come as he has been celebrating the first 100 days of his administration.The White House did not offer any details about Trump’s planned message.Alabama, where Trump won a commanding 64% of the vote in 2024, is where he has staged a number of his trademark large rallies over the past decade. It also is where Trump showed early signs of strength in his first presidential campaign when he began filling stadiums for his rallies.While the White House has described Trump’s speech as a commencement address, it is actually a special event that was created before graduation ceremonies that begin Friday. Graduating students have the option of attending the event, but it is not required.Former Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban is also speaking at the event.“As President Trump marks 100 days in office, there is no better place for him to celebrate all the winning than in Tuscaloosa, Alabama,” said the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey.Trump’s presence has drawn criticism from the Alabama NAACP and the University of Alabama College Democrats.College Democrats are countering with their own rally, calling it “Tide Against Trump” – a play on the university’s nickname. The event will feature onetime presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke of Texas and former US senator Doug Jones, the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Alabama.The NAACP said Trump’s policies are hurting universities and students, particularly students of color.“The decision for students of color, and really all students, should be to skip his speech and spend that time reflecting on how to make America a more inclusive nation,” said Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama NAACP.Trump’s visit to Alabama is his second trip this week. He held a rally in Michigan on Tuesday to mark 100 days in office.Outside of weekend trips for personal visits, Trump has not made many official trips since taking office on 20 January. He usually speaks to the public from the impromptu news conferences he holds in the Oval Office and at other events at the White House.After his stop in Alabama, Trump is scheduled to travel to Florida for a long weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort.Next month, he is scheduled to give the commencement address at the US military academy in West Point, New York. More

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      North Carolina helps kids earn college degrees in high school. It’s a lifeline for immigrant families

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      Daniel is a high school senior in rural North Carolina. Soon, he will graduate with a high school diploma, an associate degree and a paralegal certification from a local community college. He’s just 17, but he’ll be able to apply for positions at law firms and begin earning an almost $50,000 salary straight out of high school.“The early college program really set me up for success because even though I’m young, I’ll be able to help financially support my family,” said Daniel, a first-generation Salvadorian American who is only using his first name to protect undocumented family members. “I’ve done all of this because of support from my mother and family. I owe everything I’ve accomplished to them and I want to give back.”It’s been a long road for Daniel, who was accepted into a competitive Cooperative Innovative high school while still in middle school. These small, public high schools are located on North Carolina community college campuses, and they enable teens to simultaneously work toward completion of a high school diploma and an associate degree. It’s one of three paths that eligible North Carolina high school students can take as part of Career and College Promise (CCP): a free, statewide dual enrollment program established by the North Carolina state legislature in 2011, and that also facilitates college transfer or further technical education. The program helped Daniel get ahead of the curve, and so far it’s paid off. The teenager was just accepted into Vanderbilt University.According to North Carolina educators who spoke to the Guardian, dual enrollment is one of the state’s best kept secrets – especially for first-generation Latino students like Daniel.And because CCP is open to all qualified high school students, the program offers an extraordinary benefit to undocumented young people. As college students, undocumented immigrants are ineligible for most financial aid and otherwise considered “non-residents”, requiring them to pay out-of-state tuition at more than double the cost to residents. However, undocumented high school students participating in dual enrollment can attend up to four years of community college free of charge.But thanks to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant vision for the US, students from immigrant families are now afraid – and so too are North Carolina community college educators and administrators, who fear their schools will be targeted for their efforts to extend educational opportunities to Latino communities. For safety reasons, most of the students, educators and administrators who spoke to the Guardian chose to remain anonymous.Engines of equity and accessLatinos have been the fastest growing demographic in North Carolina since the 1990s, with young Latino citizens in particular accounting for much of the growth. Many of these young people are the US citizen children of immigrants or come from mixed-status families where only some family members have authorization to be in the US.But even with 30 years to adjust to shifting demographics, the education system in North Carolina was largely ill-equipped to serve Latino students – especially in rural communities where a large percentage of the state’s Latino population resides.One rural community college staff administrator responsible for Latino engagement has worked tirelessly over the last few years to reach students like Daniel, whom they helped usher through College and Career Promise. They see it as part of their job to spearhead efforts to bring bilingual programs and classes to their community college, hire members of the immigrant community to teach, and perform outreach at local Latino community events. They also work closely to problem-solve with individual students, whether that means referring an undocumented student to scholarship opportunities or walking a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) recipient through the process of obtaining employer-sponsored in-state tuition. Just a few short months ago, these were efforts the staff administrator would have trumpeted – but times have changed.“I am afraid it might call attention to us in a negative way,” they said. “I saw how parents were too scared to drive to schools in [North Carolina] … and how people knew which roads not to take due to the police presence. I don’t want to widely call attention to us as being immigrant-friendly when the goal of this administration is to quash that.”There are valid reasons to be fearful. The Trump administration’s targeting and defunding of institutions with DEI policies have led many to preemptively comply out of fear of losing federal funding, and now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) rescinded a previous policy warning against carrying out immigration enforcement in “sensitive locations”, schools are fair game for immigration raids. In recent weeks, hundreds of foreign college students have also had their visas revoked by the Trump administration, though it changed course and restored some students’ status after widespread media attention and court challenges.It was because of “serious concerns for the safety of students and the entire campus community” that officials from another North Carolina community college located in a mid-sized city initially spoke on the record, but later decided to remain anonymous. An administrator responsible for Latino student engagement there told the Guardian that when community colleges are forced to hide their efforts to make education more accessible, it also means hiding services from students and community members who need them the most.Alice Dolbow, a senior adviser at the North Carolina non-profit LatinxEd, issued an important reminder to schools now afraid to make these efforts public: helping immigrant and first generation students access higher education is “not against the law”. Her organization focuses on developing Latino education leaders in higher education.“I think many districts found themselves unexpectedly transformed by the increase in immigration,” Dolbow said. “Interestingly, community colleges are catching up at a much faster rate than our K-12 schools and our four-year universities. Programs like CCP are great for all students; they are engines of equity and access for all North Carolinians, including undocumented students. I want to be clear that any programs that happen to also help undocumented students access higher education are not ‘loopholes’. We are not ‘taking advantage of the system’. We are operating within the system and under the laws we have, and we are doing what the laws and system allow.”Latino students in the state – many of whom come from mixed-status families – are also a lifeline for North Carolina community colleges. Before 2020, community college enrollment in the state was on a slow decline. Then, 69,000 CCP students participated in dual enrollment during the pandemic. While community colleges don’t track the immigration status of students in the CCP program, it’s clear that more targeted outreach to the state’s young, growing Latino population can transform community college enrollment and the trajectory of Latino and immigrant families in the state.In many ways, community colleges are primed to serve immigrant communities. They offer flexible schedules; English classes for adults; continuing education; and curriculum programs that can lead to certificates, diplomas and degrees. In recent years, North Carolina has made considerable leeway to recruit Latino students of all kinds, in part, by hiring Latino educators to oversee Latino student engagement and outreach.“It is our job as community colleges to respond to the economic needs of the region, and it’s our job to educate the workforce that responds to those local economic needs,” explained the administrator from the mid-sized city. “If you have this growing population, it’s your job to serve them and by doing that, you are better serving your state.”There’s data to support the assertion. In 2018, the statewide network of 58 public community colleges that make up the North Carolina community college system partnered with population scientists to examine demographic shifts in the state. Latino student outreach was identified as a primary tool to increase community college enrollment and thus, help North Carolina remain competitive in the changing economy.The state has only three “Hispanic-serving Institutions” (HSI), defined in federal legislation as accredited, degree-granting public or private nonprofit institutions of higher education with 25% or more total undergraduate Hispanic full-time equivalent student enrollment. But that’s enough to rank North Carolina among the top 10 states in emerging HSIs, and each of North Carolina’s three existing HSIs are community colleges.‘College is … starting to feel impossible’Still, gaps in community colleges’ outreach, engagement and investment in Latino students become starkly visible when considering the experiences of undocumented students.Olivia, who is also using a pseudonym, is a North Carolina 18-year-old who benefited from dual enrollment as a high school student. After graduation, she’s struggled to pay the exorbitant cost of community college tuition as an undocumented student. Well-meaning community college administrators instructed her to apply for federal student aid, not understanding that her immigration status bars her from receiving it. Others referred her to scholarships she spent hours applying for, only to later learn the scholarships were only available to US citizens.“I feel like every year, I’ve learned about something different that I can’t do,” said Olivia, who came to the US when she was six months old. “I can’t legally work. I can’t get a driver’s license. I can’t leave the country. College is starting to feel like another thing that’s impossible. I’m starting to really worry that I have to give up on school.”Olivia’s dream is to be a pediatrician, but currently she can only afford one community college class a semester. To her parents, it appears as if she’s not working hard enough on her education.“But I’m working myself to the bone,” Olivia insisted. “I just feel like I’m not getting anywhere, and there’s a lot of pain in wanting to be something greater than you’re allowed to be.”Gabriela (also using a pseudonym) understands how hard it is to plan for the future when options are limited. When she was 14, she moved from El Salvador to North Carolina, where she became the first in her family to graduate from high school.CCP would have gone a long way to help the now 21-year-old toward her ultimate goal of becoming an elementary school teacher, but no one ever informed her of the program.Community college administrators who spoke to the Guardian said there are many challenges to getting the word on CCP out. Many high schools don’t have bilingual staff to inform parents of these opportunities. High school counselors tend to focus on advanced learning and programs for students who are headed to traditional four-year colleges instead of CCP.“As an adult, I’ve heard about all of these opportunities that would have made such a difference in my life. I’m 21 and starting from scratch,” said Gabriela. She is legally able to work in the US and has a job as a teacher’s assistant at an elementary school. Like Olivia, Gabriela has encountered administrators who were confused about why she didn’t qualify for in-state tuition. She told another administrator she was undocumented and that person later asked for her social security number.Working at a school only reinforces exactly what she wants to do professionally – and how that career path seems increasingly out of reach. Gabriela works at a school with many undocumented and mixed-status families. Under the Trump administration, many parents are afraid of participating in school life, fearful that something as innocuous as going on a field trip will require government-issued identification that they can’t provide and thus, potentially getting them on Ice’s radar.“I want to comfort them, but at any moment I know that I can be the one who is deported,” Gabriela said. “My work permit can be taken away at any moment, and what happens if I’ve enrolled in school? There are no good options. I want to remain hopeful, but I also feel like: do I really want to go back to school now? Putting myself through school will be such a sacrifice. What if I can’t do anything with my education?”North Carolina organizations such as UndocuCarolina and Pupusas for Education work to fill information and financial gaps in the state for undocumented students, Daca recipients and young people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). But according to Glenda Polanco, too many North Carolina students are forced to make “decisions about their future out of desperation”.Polanco is the program director of Pupusas for Education, which started in 2016 to provide scholarships to undocumented students through food sales and has since turned into a non-profit organization to support Latino students. Polanco, now 32, was able to take advantage of early college as a North Carolina high school student, but she didn’t understand at the time that college classes would no longer be free after she graduated high school. If not for an extraordinary act of kindness in the form of a North Carolina couple who paid Polanco’s way through university, college would have been out of the realm of possibility.Polanco acknowledges that she was “lucky”. but says she can still remember moments of sheer panic about the cost of school and her future as an immigrant with a temporary status.“With the young people we work with … there is this daunting, insanity-provoking question: why does it have to be this hard?” Polanco said. “I don’t really have a good answer for them, and the anxiety and depression that comes with that uncertainty takes a toll. There is a psychological impact on the immigrant community – including on our parents. They want to give us the world, but none of us can really say what’s going to happen tomorrow.” More

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      American higher education is collapsing before our eyes | Frederico Menino

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      American higher education is living its RMS Titanic moment. The multi-trillion-dollar United States academic-scientific complex, led by the richest and most highly coveted universities in history, remains the envy of the world. “American University Inc” is one of the US’s top exports and among its most valuable stocks. Brands such as Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and so many others are revered worldwide as symbols of academic excellence, independent thinking, breakthrough innovation and prestige. No other university system in the world comes close to amassing as much capital – financial, human, cultural and social – as the mighty American one.Until now.For decades, American University Inc has cruised at full steam through prosperous and pristine waters. Until, in 2025, it hit a colossal iceberg – in this case, a ruthless dealmaker and Ivy League graduate returned to the White House for a vindictive mandate. What has unfolded since then was unimaginable even a few months ago: the once unsinkable ship of US higher education is suddenly making water.From California to New York, imposing cathedrals of higher learning are bleeding from a violent collision with an unbending obstacle. The founder of Truth Social is demanding nothing but absolute subservience from the US temples of truth-seeking.The first casualties of this titanic shock can be estimated by the tens of thousands. In the vulnerable lower decks of the ship, overburdened and highly indebted students, early career researchers and Visa holding scholars – whose sweat and undervalued labor power the steamship of US academia – are drowning in the cold invisibility of academic darkness. Middle Eastern studies programs, DEI initiatives, affirmative action policies and other long neglected passengers are helplessly descending to the bottom of the ocean. The magnitude of the president’s tariffs on US universities is so large and so unprecedented that it is hard to underestimate their devastating impact.In the upper chambers of the damaged ship, post-docs, untenured professors, mid-rank crew members and other second-class passengers are scrambling to find some sort of safety amidst the chaos. Meanwhile, Ivy League presidents, lavishly paid university executives and other distinguished first-class guests are gradually making sense of the tragedy while savoring their hors d’oeuvres. Some have rushed to flood the headlines of liberal media with a tsunami of alarming interviews and op-eds (like this one). As they take notice of the gravity of the impact, university leaders are trying to save their endowments by appealing to deep-pocketed donors and influential networks of lawyers, lawmakers and corporate barons. Other first-classers, for complete lack of shame, character or reason, are trying to cut deals with the iceberg.Despite the abysmal differences between the individuals and interests aboard, the existential questions in everyone’s minds are fundamentally the same: should I stay or should I go? Should I stay and try to save this ship, or should I jump out before it is too late?In a recent survey published by Nature, the world’s most popular scientific journal, an astonishing three out of four scientists working in US universities declared that they were considering to leave the country for better opportunities elsewhere.As they contemplate the majestic ship, now severely bruised and adrift, scientists, students and higher education professionals in the United States – many of them foreigners – are also thinking to themselves: what are we trying to save, anyways? What is this ship all about, after all? What makes US universities so special and worth fighting for?The answer is academic freedom.However, in this critical juncture of US higher education, academic freedom has little to do with abstract ideals, or with the utopian Latin mottos inscribed in the gates of so many American university campuses. The carcass of the steamship is now exposed, with its virtues and vices equally visible. The present moment is severe and it demands exceptional resolve. This is no graduation ceremony – the favorite annual ritual of US academia, where awkwardly dressed academic cadres regurgitate 17th century speeches on the freedom to think, learn, research and teach. This time around, rituals and poetic words alone won’t save the ship.For college students, academic freedom means, in practice, the freedom to learn, free of debt – a liberty that most American learners have long been deprived of. For young adults building the foundations of their professional and civic lives, academic freedom also means the liberty to express themselves fully, and the possibility to share educational spaces with classmates from diverse faiths, genders, ideologies, nationalities and purchasing powers. But even conservative observers such as David Brooks acknowledge that US universities – particularly the richest ones – have failed to address the pervasive impacts of inequality, social media and political radicalism on the education of young citizens.For professors of mathematics, literature or non-western arts and sciences, academic freedom means the freedom to teach unimpeded by censorship and systematic defunding. That freedom has also been persistently under threat long before the recent iceberg collision. As illustrated by Joshua Travis Brown in his newly launched book titled Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed, US colleges have too often abandoned their emancipating missions in exchange for profit margins.Likewise, for researchers of all disciplines, academic freedom means securing the basic material conditions for the performance of their daily truth-seeking enterprises: access to labs, libraries and opportunities to share and openly discuss their findings with peers. The US’s edge on that front still exists. But experts agree that the gap is narrowing. Attentive observers of the vast oceans of knowledge know that “academic shipyards” in Asia, Europe and many parts of the post-colonial world are catching up – and their stocks are rising.Of course, academic freedom also means the autonomy of universities to self-govern, free from the destructive interference of authoritarian governments. As Iveta Silova eloquently observed in a recent op-ed, the past experiences of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are only a couple of many stark reminders that when free universities bargain their autonomy, everyone loses.Without a doubt, everyone – academics or not – should take an unequivocal stand against the US government offensive on US universities. As a matter of principle, no one with the power of saving the sinking steamship should stand aside, with their arms crossed and their eyes closed. As a matter of practice, however, this is a moment of desolation for too many students and scholars in American academia whose plea have been silenced for too long. For them, staying and fighting may no longer be an option.

      Frederico Menino is the senior program officer of higher education at Open Society Foundations More

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      Hope as US universities find ‘backbone’ against Trump’s assault on education

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      Americans anxious about their country’s slide into authoritarianism found some solace in the past week over what appears to be growing pushback by American universities against Donald Trump’s assault on higher education.After a barrage of orders, demands and the freezing of billions in federal funds for research had elicited a mostly demure response from university leaders, some are starting to mount a more muscular defense of academic freedom. A statement denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” was signed by more than 400 university presidents, and the list is growing. Another, signed by more than 100 former university heads, called for a coalition of local leaders, students, labor unions and communities, across party affiliation, to “work against authoritarianism”.And Harvard became the first university to sue the administration over its threats to cut $9bn in federal funding should it not comply with a set of extreme demands to combat alleged antisemitism, demands that university president Alan Garber labeled “unlawful, and beyond the government’s authority”. The legal action followed several others brought by higher education associations and organisations representing faculty, including one by the American Association of University Professors challenging the administration’s revocation of student visas and detention of several international students, which 86 universities joined with amicus briefs.But Trump was not cowed, continuing his weeks-long assault on universities he has accused of being “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics”. Delivering on campaign threats, he issued a fresh set of executive actions on Wednesday targeting campus diversity initiatives and seeking to overhaul the accreditation system that has long served as quality check on higher education. And despite reports that the White House had made overtures to Harvard to restart talks about its demands – overtures the school has rejected – his tone suggested otherwise in a Truth Social rant in which he called the Ivy League school “a threat to Democracy” and “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution, as are numerous others, with students being accepted from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart”.But even as universities reposition themselves as defenders of free and independent inquiry, many are stepping up their measures to suppress pro-Palestinian discourse, issuing a flurry of warnings and punishments meant to avert a repeat of the mass protest encampments that sprung up across US campuses a year ago.View image in fullscreenThose measures, against protests and criticism of Israel in classrooms and other university settings, echo some of the demands made by the administration of various universities. While the government has gone much further – requiring, for example, the removal of entire academic departments from faculty control and “auditing” student and faculty’s viewpoints – universities have taken other measures slammed by faculty, students and free expression experts as draconian repression of legitimate political speech.This week, Yale University revoked the recognition of a student group that on Tuesday pitched tents on campus to protest a talk by Israel’s far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, while Columbia University, which has largely capitulated to the Trump administration’s demands, issued a warning to students planning to reestablish protest encampments it banned after last year’s protests.At Tulane University in New Orleans, seven students are facing disciplinary action over their participation at an off-campus pro-Palestinian protest (the university maintains the protest was organised by a student group it had banned). At Columbia, two Palestinian student activists have been charged with “discriminatory harassment” over what the university believes is their role in publishing an op-ed in the university paper, and two Instagram posts, calling for restrictions on the admission of former Israeli soldiers to the university.At Indiana University, a professor of Germanic studies became the first scholar to come under investigation under a new state law mandating “intellectual diversity” after a student accused him of pro-Palestinian speech in the classroom. And in Michigan, the FBI and local authorities raided the homes of several pro-Palestinian students on Wednesday, confiscating electronics and briefly detaining two students, as part of a state investigation into a string of alleged vandalism incidents, including at the home of the University of Michigan’s regent. While the university did not appear to be directly involved in the operation, student activists there noted that the raids followed its “repeated targeting of pro-Palestine activists” through “firings, disciplinary measures, and criminal prosecution”.“In order to give any meaning to free speech, academic freedom, equal rights, and the pursuit of truth and justice, universities have to make drastic changes to their conduct over the last year and a half,” said Tori Porell, an attorney at Palestine Legal, which has represented many students facing universities’ disciplinary action and in the last year received more than 2,000 requests for legal support. “That very conduct has put them and their students and faculty in danger. If universities are serious about standing up to Trump and putting their words into action, they will provide meaningful protection for their students, faculty, and staff.”View image in fullscreenSo far, the Trump administration has shown no signs it intends to slow down its attack on universities – with the education department warning 60 institutions that they are under investigation over alleged antisemitism. But Harvard’s lawsuit, and the first efforts at a unified response, set the stage for what is likely to become a protracted battle.“I think now that we’ve seen Harvard stand up and push back against the unwarranted government intrusion, that we’ll see more of this moving forward,” said Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which has been coordinating university presidents’ collective response to the administration’s actions.Advocates for academic freedom who had previously criticised universities for a weak response to the administration’s “bullying” welcomed Harvard’s suit but called on schools to use the opportunity to show a more consistent defense of free speech and academic freedom.“This legal challenge is a necessary defense of institutional autonomy and the first amendment,” said Tyler Coward, the lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), noting that the group had long been critical of Harvard’s “commitment” to freedom of expression, for instance after the university adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism that Fire warned would “chill” campus speech.“We hope this moment marks a turning point – away from a model of civil rights enforcement that enables government overreach and toward one that protects free speech, academic freedom, and due process.”But while students, faculty and advocates across the country expressed measured hope that some university leaders were starting to grow a “backbone”, they noted it was students and faculty who were leading the charge and mounting the pressure that forced university leaders to act.“The workers and the unions, faculty, students, staff are leading and developing the fight in how to respond to the Trump administration, and we’re sort of dragging the universities along with us, slowly,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, which has led faculty organising efforts on many campuses and filed four separate lawsuits against the administration over its attacks on universities.Wolfson noted that faculty continues to be critical of how universities are handling campus affairs, including pro-Palestinian speech, as well as their engagement with the Trump administration.“But nonetheless, the attacks on the university right now are not being initiated by the administrations of those universities, they’re being initiated by the federal government,” he said. “And so we must band together, where it’s possible, with our administrations to fight back.” More