On February 20, Sarah Brown and Rick Seltzer hosted a live event to discuss Donald Trump’s first month in office. Sarah and Rick will lead a follow-up discussion dedicated to audience questions on Thursday, March 6; registration is free.
Watch a recording of the first event here. A lightly edited transcript is below.
Sarah Brown: Hi, everybody! Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m Sarah Brown. I’m a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m here with Rick Seltzer, senior writer at The Chronicle. How’s it going, Rick?
Rick Seltzer: I’m hanging in there. I’m looking forward to talking about pitchers and catchers and spring training this baseball season.
Brown: I myself am gearing up for my fantasy baseball draft. I’m sure a bunch of people here in the chat are as well. If you have any advice for me, let me know. I welcome all ideas, especially on first basemen.
We’re glad to have you joining us today. Rick is the author of our Daily Briefing. This is our subscriber-only newsletter that makes sense of the day’s higher-ed news in a digestible format. Many of you might already be subscribers. Many of you may not be. But this is the place where Rick has been making sense of the past month of the Trump administration every single day.
I’m The Chronicle’s news editor. So I have been leading the coverage decisions and the articles that you see appearing on our website.
We do not have all the answers. Far from it. But we have been doing a lot of reporting, and we thought it would be valuable to offer some initial insights and analysis about what we’ve seen so far from the Trump administration and what’s next.
So, Rick, I’m not gonna lie: I was naïve. I did not think the Trump administration was going to go after higher education on day one. I knew that Project 2025 existed. And The Chronicle Review published a really fantastic essay in March of 2024 articulating what’s in Project 2025 and basically saying: Hello, higher ed. Trump very well might get reelected. He and his allies have published this blueprint about how they’re going to overhaul higher ed and you should pay attention.
Can you tell us why higher ed is under attack right now?
Seltzer: I think there are several different reasons. Like many things, there’s no simple answer. First and foremost, it was an effective message that they ran on, and it resonated with a certain corner of their base and the Trump administration has made no qualms about trying to deliver on things it promised its base.
Maybe one of the reasons this resonated so much with the base is that a lot of the ideas they’re pursuing are not new in conservative politics. Republicans have long articulated goals like closing the Education Department. Certain cuts to federal funding, even research funding. There have been voices arguing for some of those things, and some of the other things that we’re going to talk about today. So that was all preloaded, if you will.
There’s a secondary question embedded in your question, which is: If this all existed on the right, why are we seeing it now? I think there are a couple of reasons. One, we’re seeing very emboldened actors. Whatever you think about President Trump, he does not have the same sense of constraints that other presidents have had in pursuing some of these goals. He has advisers or employees like Elon Musk on his side, who give him both financial heft to keep members of the legislature in line, but also this move-fast-and-break-things mentality that you saw him take to Twitter and is now playing up in the government. So you have folks who are empowered to change the system and change it fast before any opposition can bog things down. That speed is part of the strategy that you’ve seen the GOP or folks aligned with the GOP talk about for a long time.
Some of you who read The New York Times probably saw they surfaced a quote from Steve Bannon about starting out at “muzzle velocity.” It’s a similar theory to flooding the zone. You overwhelm the system. No one can focus on what you’re doing, and you can make changes before anyone can catch up. And frankly, education is a space where it is hard to make lasting changes. It’s been a lot of back and forth over the last decade and some parts of the system felt very much like they had to give. So you combine all of those things, and I think you have a recipe for what we’ve seen in the last month, even if it feels like it’s been a lot longer than a month.
Brown: It really does. Another thing that I’ve been thinking about is the precedent that was set even while Biden was still president. The House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, dragged several presidents of elite colleges before Congress and basically named and shamed them. And by and large, those presidents did not perform well in the public eye. Yes, those were a particular group of presidents representing an exceedingly narrow slice of our world. But it absolutely feels like it set the tone for what was coming.
Seltzer: I think that’s right. There are other precedents that we can talk about, too, depending on how deep into the weeds you want to get. We probably won’t go too far into them. I am not a lawyer. This is my full disclosure because a lot of things we’re talking about are thorny legal questions. But things like this recent Dear Colleague letter that tried to force institutions or threaten institutions to stamp out DEI on campus actually builds on some things that the Biden administration, or even the Obama administration, did from a legal perspective. It extends it, certainly. But you had this argument on the right to take the tools that Democrats have developed and use them to our own ends. And then you had this other precedent you talked about, which is college leaders, and maybe the idea of protest being discredited or cowed by congressional investigations.
We’re still in the aftermath of this very wrenching antiwar or pro-Palestinian protest movement. That is kind of hanging over campuses’ reactions. How much can they stand up for their own interests now, after they’re really trying to rebuild some sense of control, some sense of having it together before the public.
Brown: We’re going to get into that in a sec. I want to start by asking what was the first sign of how the Trump administration was going to approach higher-ed policy?
Seltzer: I think back to long before we knew for sure that it was going to be a Trump administration. May 2023, I think it was. I very distinctly remember writing a very small piece in the Daily Briefing about a campaign video in which then-candidate Trump talked about going after and firing radical accreditors. At the time you could make the argument that this was just red meat for the base.
Accreditation is exceedingly complicated, but also important. It is the gatekeeper that allows institutions to access federal financial aid. You don’t have accreditation, you can’t get paid for Pell Grants. You can’t get paid federal student-loan money. I don’t think you talk about a pressure point like that unless someone on your team has put a lot of thought into how you motivate change within the sector.
The other key point was when Linda McMahon was nominated to be the secretary of education. Again, there was an initial knee-jerk reaction to kind of dismiss this, saying, McMahon is a long-time Trump backer and they were just looking for a cabinet appointment for her. But the more you look at it, the more there’s an alignment there. Linda McMahon also chaired the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank that has done a lot of the intellectual work laying plans for what they were going to do. And she talked a lot about education. That alignment was another signal that while education and higher education is far from the only change that they are seeking, it was going to be a big part of the early package.
Brown: Yeah. And even once Trump was officially in office, he gave off these signals again. In his inaugural address, I remember him talking about the need to return to meritocracy, and this is kind of an age-old debate in higher education. But the way that Trump was talking about it felt like he was going against principles and ideals that built higher ed over the last 25 years or so: diversity, equity and inclusion programs, LGBTQ rights, protections based on gender identity. One thing that really did strike me in the executive orders that he signed is that he even went after Hispanic-serving institutions and tribal colleges, but not historically Black colleges. What did you think about that?
Seltzer: Yeah, I think one of the key insights of the Trump circle is that identifying some sort of a threat to a deeply held belief or a national identity or group identity can kind of knit together different constituencies. And the right actually has a lot of different constituencies it’s trying to hold together right now and higher ed’s a place that has sometimes willingly grappled with and sometimes been forced to grapple with the fact that it is an American institution that serves people from different racial, ethnic, gender backgrounds, and that makes it a very important institution to push, to change, to shape in the image of the society you want, if you are seeking to make major changes.
Brown: We can’t go any farther without talking about the funding freeze. It was, it felt, the first big shoe to drop. I remember the day that the funding freeze happened, I had a college president who was visiting us in D.C. We often have presidents visit us. If you are ever in D.C., we really encourage you to come by and chat with us. We want to hear from you. But I had a college president come by, and the meeting was at like 2 p.m. And only an hour before this meeting we had finally gotten information from the Education Department that the funding freeze did not apply to Title IV financial aid. There were several hours when this president was straight up panicking because most of his students are on financial aid. And this was a president who supported President Trump.
What did you learn when you were reporting on the funding freeze? What did that moment tell you about where we’re going?
Seltzer: Yeah, I think the funding freeze is one of three big policy planks that we should talk about. It was dropped, I believe, on a Monday night. We did not have a ton of detail, and I think the way the details trickled out is instructive.
First, what did it do? The Budget Office directed a freeze of much of the funding that gets dispersed so it could be reviewed, for something like consistency with the president’s policies. And the morning after it went out, the Education Department, I think it was around 10:30 a.m., finally put out something that says: OK, Pell Grants and student loans are not affected. We all had some questions about that. I sent some questions in and other reporters also sent some questions in and by early afternoon they were clarifying that only discretionary grants would be frozen. I’m trying very hard not to get into jargon here, but it’s hard to talk about this without talking about accounting principles. So if you start falling asleep, just yell at me. But it took them a little while longer and they got back to me and said, no, minority-serving institutions aren’t going to lose funding. Folks have raised questions about that since, but it was just this steady drip of them giving partial answers. And then that answer just raising more questions. I think that shows that even the folks in the agencies either didn’t know it was coming or didn’t know exactly how it was going to be implemented.
That has added to the sense of uncertainty and chaos. And again, that may be part of that “muzzle velocity,” that chaos by design that we talked about earlier. It may just be that some of the folks weren’t on the same page. I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but it was instructive, because some of the other things that they’ve put out have followed this similar path, including that by the end of that week the freeze was blocked by a court challenge. A judge enjoined it while those court challenges proceeded. Since then we’ve actually seen a lot of fighting over whether the Trump administration is releasing the funding that it is supposed to be releasing. They’re using all sorts of accounting techniques to say: Well, we’re allowed to withhold this funding, and in some cases they probably are and in some cases they may not be. But it’s this whole arc of: big directive, let the agencies kind of figure it out or message it, let everyone try to scramble and catch up, and then the court system slowly catches up and does its thing.
Brown: And then there’s the question of whether the court system is having the desired effect. Because, I mean, not only did our own reporting hear this from people, we also saw really great reporting in other publications basically making clear that the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health did not fully unfreeze funding. There are questions about the extent to which they unfroze it for some things and not others, but they definitely were not fully unfrozen. The federal funding was not fully flowing in the days and even for the couple of weeks after the court order blocking it was put in place. It’s a whole other issue that gets into existential questions about the constitutional crisis we might find ourselves in. But that is a topic for another day.
Seltzer: Beyond those legal questions, it matters on campuses if you have a grant and you need money from that grant to run your program or pay your people. This is why you see so many people are not just sitting back and discussing this from a legal perspective. This is a growing problem for how we actually run these institutions.
Brown: So let’s talk about immigration. I thought that Trump’s first few weeks in office were going to be all about immigration, and to some extent they have been. For a lot of communities those policies have absolutely had real impact. To be clear, things did happen right away that had implications for higher ed. The sensitive-locations policy was rescinded pretty much immediately. This had been in place for the better part of a decade. And it basically said, ICE does not do proactive immigration enforcement on college campuses and in schools. The same week as the funding freeze Trump signed an executive order on combating campus antisemitism, and said that one of the key ways that he planned to enforce this order was to deport international students who had participated in pro-Palestinian / antiwar protests.
I’m curious, from what you’ve seen so far, is Trump’s immigration agenda actually touching campuses?
Seltzer: Yeah, well, certainly tensions are running high. If I’m remembering the executive order correctly, it’s “deport” international students if they broke the law. That phrase — if they broke the law — is doing a lot of work there. They have to be convicted. At what point in the process do you put them in a different justice system. Right? I mean, there’s all sorts of questions that you could ask.
Brown: And just to clarify, there were different things in the order and in the guidance from the White House. There was a fact sheet on the order and in the fact sheet Trump made pretty clear that he wanted to deport international students who had just participated in protests, even though the executive order talked about unlawful actions.
Seltzer: You’re absolutely right. That’s the broader message. That’s the broader intent that they are signaling. And that’s why you see such concern on campuses, because you see that dynamic play over and over again: There’s one piece of specific language and then there’s other broader language. Now, as far as what actual concrete action we’ve seen on campuses, I’ve seen one credibly reported instance of ICE arresting a former student on a campus. It was, I believe, at Spokane Community College in Washington State. It was in a parking lot. I believe it was late at night. That is the only one that I have seen. That does not mean it has not happened elsewhere. But we know it has happened at least once, which means it can happen again. In that case, I believe that campus police were given a heads-up briefly before. I do not believe that they participated in the arrest.
Separate from actual reported arrests, we have seen some cases of what I call students intimidating students. In some cases, it’s not clear whether it was intentional. In some cases, it’s very clear what they were doing. There was one report about a group of students who were dressed as ICE officers that tried to enter a dormitory. They were turned away and later arrested. It is not legal to pretend to be a federal law-enforcement officer, it turns out. And there was another report of a student group, I believe it was an explicitly right-leaning student group, holding an event where they were calling for deportations of other students on campus. So you’re seeing this trickle-down effect in behavior on campus as well as this question of when law enforcement shows up or whether they will show up.
Let me circle right around quickly to the law-enforcement question. Most campus guidance that I’ve seen, and campuses have been pretty clear about putting out this guidance, is that if an immigration officer shows up they should be routed to a central point of contact. Students do have some legal rights to privacy. Certain areas of campus are more restricted than others. And institutions are trying to make very clear to their employees that you should not be blocking them because legally you probably cannot do that, or you definitely cannot do that. That’s a pretty important set of points. Many of the listeners here probably saw that guidance on their own. But I think it’s important to highlight right now.
Brown: Another thing a lot of you listeners here have been thinking about, talking about, and freaking out about understandably is research funding. This was another late on a Friday night announcement from the Trump administration. Just to be clear, that is not just a Trump administration thing. Presidents of both political parties love to drop major education news on Friday nights.
Seltzer: And journalists love it. It’s not all about us, but we just love it when something comes out on Friday night. We thought we had a weekend, and now we don’t.
Brown: Exactly. So this announcement says we are immediately capping indirect costs for all research grants at 15 percent. It sent higher ed reeling. Big research institutions were talking about losing billions of dollars overnight. And frankly, even though the amounts were smaller in terms of funding losses for smaller R1s and R2 institutions, this was existential for them. A $5-million loss overnight — they don’t have that cash in the bank.
This is also not the first time that this issue has entered the conversation. Trump actually tried to take on indirect costs in his first administration, and it didn’t go anywhere. This has not been a political winner. Even Republican lawmakers who want to cut costs do not want to harm the flagship university in their state. That is not popular.
Why do you think that Trump went after research funding so aggressively? And do you think that they’ll keep this fight up?
Seltzer: I do think this is going be a fight that continues. I have no inside information, but the most prestigious and powerful institutions in the country are on one side, and the Trump administration is on the other, and they love nothing more than to be seen as fighting this set of exclusive institutions.
To your point about this being a priority in the first Trump administration, or an effort in the first Trump administration, the potential for conflict has been here for a long time. It actually predates the Trump administration. If I’m remembering right, the Obama administration looked at capping some overhead on research funding, and when you really dig into what’s going on you can see why folks who either want to save money or are skeptical of spending might look at this and say: What’s going on here? And you can see why colleges will look at it and say, We need this money. This is money that is charged in addition to the grant money that’s supposed to go for the research itself, and it’s supposed to go to all of the things you need to be able to do research — facilities, laboratories, administrative overhead, etc, etc.
The NIH funding rates are negotiated on an institution-by-institution basis. The average rate, I think, is something like 28 percent. Some of the really big places negotiated 50, 60, almost 70 percent. When you look at those numbers and you put them out that way in the court of public opinion, it’s hard to defend those numbers. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard. So the administration has a home turf to start from there. The other part is, they really are looking for savings. They want to do a big tax package. This would save around $4 billion. $4 billion is not nearly enough to do the tax package. But it’s a start.
So you combine all those things together, and what is a very important priority for higher ed becomes a very important thing for them to target.
Sarah, do you think I’m missing anything?
Brown: That seems about right to me. I wonder whether Republican lawmakers might get in Trump’s ear. Even the most conservative lawmakers from Texas do not want the University of Texas at Austin to be mad. As much as they have been trying to push their own state higher-ed overhauls and passing new policies and new restrictions and new requirements, they know that the University of Texas at Austin is a gem. They know it’s a huge employer. They know that it’s driving a huge amount of research, a huge amount of economic impact. So I kind of thought maybe the Trump administration is going to realize that this was a little much. On the other hand, indirect costs on research is a really hard thing to explain to the average person. And it is also hard to explain why Harvard needs 60-whatever percent back in indirect costs when they have a multibillion-dollar endowment. It’s a tough one.
Seltzer: It requires a conversation, right? I mean a place that has a higher indirect cost can say it’s more expensive to recruit people here, because we have a higher cost of living and it’s more expensive to build here because we’re in an urban area. There are all sorts of reasons why it might be more expensive. But you actually have to have a conversation, and that doesn’t play well in the Twittersphere, which is where we have so many of our political arguments today.
Brown: So, Rick, before we get into what’s next, we’ve got to talk about DEI and the Education Department.
Seltzer: Let’s frame this as the third big policy initiative they pushed that we need to talk about. The first was the spending freeze, the second was the research funding overhead cuts. This is the Dear Colleague letter. To folks like you, Sarah, who have covered Title IX, and to other folks who have worked in Title IX, the term “dear colleague” is, I don’t know if notorious is the right word, but it’s certainly well-known. Because there was a 2011 letter that changed the way that campuses must handle sexual-assault claims.
So we have a new Dear Colleague letter that may be just as notorious by the time it’s all said and done. This one came out late at night and landed with a big boom across the sector. Basically, as I understand it — and again, I’m not a lawyer, but I looked at this as much as I could and talked to as many people as I could about it. The Trump administration took the Supreme Court case that said you cannot consider race in admissions decisions and is attempting to expand it to cover basically any consideration of race on campus.
The letter is at once sweeping and threatening. It threatens federal funding if you don’t comply and is vague because it says DEI is not allowable, but it does not actually define the term DEI. Many folks have argued that is intentional, because by being vague it incentivizes institutions to comply with rules that may or may not actually exist, to basically go further than the law requires. Dear Colleague letters are not the law. They attempt to change action on the ground without redefining the law. But they are guidance on how the administration interprets the law.
I think you have to look at this from this perspective: If you were negotiating with someone in public, you’re going to come out with something and say you must do this and try to play to the crowd and threaten as many downsides as you can. And that is basically what they’re doing, saying we want you to do something and we will investigate you if you don’t. If you lose the investigation, you could lose federal funding.
Now I have seen all sorts of reactions to it. Some places or some folks say: Oh, we have to immediately stop all DEI. Others say: We were in compliance with the law yesterday, we’re in compliance with the law today.
But I think one really important point that’s easy to gloss over here is that the feds just can’t yank federal funding immediately. And that’s the other part of this letter that I should have mentioned. They gave institutions 14 days to comply. So by the end of the month. But you can’t just yank federal funding at the end of the month, or at least no one has been able to previously. As I understand it, there’s a long administrative process. So the question is, do institutions want to take the risk of complying or not complying? Of having to go through an investigation process.
So that is a very long, probably too winding summary of it. Sarah, what did I miss? How did I potentially confuse folks more than I helped them understand what’s going on here?
Brown: I think we’re all a little bit confused, and a big part of that is because Trump in the executive orders that he signed on DEI as well as in this letter says that DEI is illegal but doesn’t really say what DEI is. The letter does offer some examples of what they think would constitute illegal consideration of race. They talk about graduation ceremonies, for example. That the Black Student Union might have its own graduation ceremony in addition to the main university graduation.
The anti-DEI movement is something that The Chronicle has been tracking before Trump. We already saw a lot of dismantling of DEI efforts on campuses, both dismantling and changing names, altering or moving jobs, renaming jobs, getting rid of trainings, getting rid of diversity statements. Some of it was in response to state legislation. Some of it was preemptive. Some of it had nothing to do with the law. Some of it was a response to feeling like the national winds are pointing in a certain direction. And we’re just going to preemptively say we’re done with DEI.
Seltzer: It was a vibe shift.
Brown: And we’re starting to see a lot more of that now that the Trump administration has staked out its position on DEI. It feels like every few hours I see another big name university taking down DEI webpages. You’re already seeing that preemptive compliance. So even though there are a lot of questions about the Dear Colleague letter questioning whether this is overreach and whether it would really hold up in court. But colleges are already complying. And this is trickling into the service academies as well.
Seltzer: The service academies, I think, are much clearer cases than colleges, although they may not be clear either. They are a unique set of institutions. They’re exempted from the Supreme Court ruling. They were allowed to continue race-conscious admissions. Although the new administration has said they will no longer be doing so.
At least one of them, the Naval Academy, started weeding out various DEI operations. I think they did a keyword search for various keywords. I don’t remember all of them off the top of my head. But you know, they just started looking for instances where — I think “bias” was among them — even something like bias was something flagged to review. But the service academies are different because they are distinctly under the executive branch. What’s going on with this Dear Colleague letter is the administration is trying to herd everyone, including private institutions, to take action that the Supreme Court has not actually addressed. Now, that can be seen as teeing up court cases, and a likely Supreme Court case, to see how far the Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard ruling actually extends. It can also just be seen as saber-rattling. And if institutions act on their own pre-compliance, as you said, it has been effective. So you’re seeing it be effective. But the question, I think, is what is DEI? It’s not clear. A graduation ceremony is one thing. Does this extend into the classroom? The Higher Education Act very specifically says that it has restrictions to keep the feds from influencing curricular decisions. Yet here we are, saber-rattling and pointing to the Supreme Court and trying to influence curricular decisions.
And so as we talk about DEI, this is one of those things I keep coming back to. This is a term that really exploded after 2020, and colleges were all rushing and telling us how valuable it was that we addressed the racial reckoning and never backtrack on this. And now, all of a sudden, this supposedly deeply held value ... is it so deeply held?
Brown: As a reporter who covered the aftermath of George Floyd on campus, this all feels super whiplashy. On the note of equity, one of the other things we’re seeing has to do with the Education Department canceling a bunch of contracts that have something ostensibly to do with equity. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is also canceling a bunch of other contracts having to do with education data.
There is obviously the overarching issue of a proposal to dismantle the Education Department. There seems to be a lot going on over there that is kind of hard to make sense of. One thing that I wonder about is, as you’re looking at what’s happening at the Ed Department, how much of this is new versus how much of this is what we’ve seen before? Because as we all know, Republicans have been trying to get rid of the department forever.
Seltzer: Actually closing the department requires an act of Congress. Congress is very, very closely divided. Congress is by all prognostication going to struggle to get through a tax cut that Republicans agree should happen. Closing the Education Department, while it does have a lot of support on the right, the last time there was a show vote on this something like 40 congressional Republicans voted against closing the Education Department. So there are still some folks who are concerned about keeping it, and we have not seen a firm plan for what the administration wants to do. Where it wants to put the things that the Education Department does. We’ve seen some suggestions that you could move loan administration to the Department of the Treasury. Move some of the OCR compliance to the Department of Justice. They may be doing that, anyway, with some of their moves as they talk about antisemitism investigations, for example. But the department does some things that are pretty important. It is statutorily required to do certain things, legally required to do certain things. That’s why you need an act of Congress. But who is going to gather data on the education system? A lot of reporters, a lot of folks who do research, a lot of administrators use IPEDS, the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System, to benchmark, to understand what’s going on in the sector. IPEDS data is too slow, but it’s still very valuable. Who does that? Does anyone do that?
We could go on and on. The Education Department does important things. The FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Who does that, if not the Education Department? Now, a critic could say they didn’t do such a bang-up job with the FAFSA last year when it was broken. But that still begs the question: If you move it, if you do something different and put it in a different agency, will they do it better?
One other thing on dismantling the Education Department. Linda McMahon had her confirmation hearing last week and she was asked several questions about this. One of the things she said that I think is really important is that the Trump administration does not want to spend less on education at the federal level. Now, given some of the cuts to other programs within the department that we’ve seen in the last week, you can quibble with that if you want. But her argument was: We do not want to spend less. We want to send it to the states through block grants, and the states can distribute the money more locally because they know more about what their students and economies need. And I think that model or that difference in the model is a fundamental argument. I remember being in high-school government class and we were talking about block grants. And so that’s been around for a long time. There are block grants today that exist. And that doesn’t mean that this wouldn’t be a huge change in the way that a lot of these programs function and a lot of the latitude states have to do different things.
Brown: It also felt like Linda McMahon wanted to have it both ways. We’re not going to cut education funding. We’re going to clamp down on colleges who are doing things we don’t like. But we’re also going to drastically shrink the department or get rid of it. It’s hard to square those two things.
Seltzer: She had an exceptional hearing from the perspective of, did she field the questions correctly? I think the senators who questioned her were not always particularly aggressive and those that tried to be aggressive were sometimes very, very deep in the law in a way that it was hard to really nail her down to anything. But she fielded everything in the way that a candidate does to successfully win confirmation. Her nomination advanced yesterday. I would expect her to be installed very soon.
Brown: As we get into the last quarter hour here, I want to talk about higher ed’s messaging in response to the Trump administration. One thing that was really interesting to me is that the first lawsuit that we saw, the first example of higher ed really fighting back against Trump administration directives, was not colleges themselves. It was not the higher-ed lobbying groups. It was the American Association of University Professors and the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. They sued over Trump’s DEI order. Colleges got involved on the research side of things. I wonder what’s your read on the extent to which the sector has fought back so far, and how they’ve been doing on the messaging front.
Seltzer: Well, I think the sector always struggles with messaging, and part of that is just that there are so many different types of institutions in the sector. Federal student aid affects everything from medical colleges to community colleges. These grants affect research institutions, but they affect community colleges much, much less, if at all, in some cases. And it’s hard to get everyone on the same page other than kind of this big top-line message that well, we need to preserve or to have more funding. And the sector has in some cases struggled both to figure out a message that cuts through and to figure out what it wants and where it is willing to change.
The sector has been very effective at preserving funding, but it has not been as effective at reforming itself. And that set up this situation where if you don’t change on your own, sometimes you are forced to change in ways that maybe are not healthy for everyone or anyone. So I think there’s a lot of soul searching going on at the top. Having said that, I am surprised at the lack of clarity coming from the presidential level. I’m also surprised at the clearer messaging I’m seeing shaping up at some of the associations.
What do you think? I know you’re really watching what presidents are saying right now.
Brown: One thing that we’ve been following for the last couple of years is the trend of institutional neutrality, where colleges are essentially promising not to make any statements on any political matters because they don’t want to alienate various stakeholders who disagree. And as much as that is mostly an issue affecting the Harvards of the world, colleges are paying attention to what they are doing. Not just colleges, but employees, staff, students. Leadership starts at the top. It really trickles down. And now we’ve got political matters that directly harm colleges, like the NIH funding cut that would be existential. What are they going to do in that situation? To be fair, a lot of colleges did speak up about research. College leaders have not had the same stance on preserving diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. It’s been noticeably different.
There’s a larger context here where colleges have taken a reputational hit for years now. There’s obviously the age-old criticism that institutions are pushing progressive orthodoxy in the classroom and in campus programming. We’ve seen that in many Republican states. Questions about whether college is worth it have gotten louder and louder over the last few years, and it puts colleges on their heels. It feels like they’re in a really weak position.
I was talking with another university president who came by our office yesterday and we were talking about how to tell a story and get the message to cut through? If you ask college leaders what the message is, they will always tell you: We’ll talk about our economic impact. We’ll talk about the fact that we’re a major employer. We’ll talk about the critical research we’re doing in cancer treatment. We’ll talk about how we uplift people and earn them a million extra dollars in their lifetime and propel them into the next socioeconomic class. We hear that argument, but something is not cutting through, and I’m going to be interested to see if higher ed can ever figure out how to tell a unified story that actually cuts through in a way that people understand.
Seltzer: One thing you mentioned is the institutional neutrality pledges that a lot of campuses have. Most of the ones I remember have exceptions for public-policy debates that directly affect the campus. And so the way I read that is, if a president is not speaking in the face of some of these things, that sends as much of a message as speaking out would. There is a recent development this week that I think is really interesting on this point. As much as I just interrupted you to say that leadership starts at the top, and what presidents say matters, there were some instances of labor-led protests, either on campus or by faculty members. In one case, students were protesting an institution that they felt was going to over-comply with the DEI Dear Colleague letter. As we referenced earlier, there was this question of whether protest would be springing up or even allowable under policies that changed after the pro-Palestinian protests and the ensuing crackdowns. And I think the open question right now is whether students, whether employees, whether the folks who are not at the leadership level start to make noise. If there is going to be push back to the actions that the Trump administration has taken, some of it will be in the courts. Some of it will be at the leadership level, and some of it will be at the student or ground level. Otherwise, the Trump administration will probably get what they want. And so I’m really interested to see if this protest movement catches on or just kind of peters out.
Brown: To that point, I think we’ve been talking at a pretty high level for a lot of our conversation today. And I want to acknowledge that people — faculty, staff, students — are experiencing real impacts. For example, The Chronicle reported out a scoop that the NIH was essentially just tossing out grant applications from minority researchers because they had a diversity notation on them. After we reported the story, the NIH reversed course, at least for that particular program. But these are real human impacts. And we are just about to publish a story chronicling some of the people who are experiencing these things on the ground. Higher ed was already exhausted before Trump’s second term began. We just did a big survey of faculty and staff that found they’re so burnt out right now. Everyone in this room knows that. We know college leaders are turning over faster than ever. Higher ed was already feeling so many pressure points. And now it’s just been turned up to 11.
Seltzer: Right. There’s something really interesting going on here where enrollment actually was stronger than folks expected this year. But budgets weren’t really stronger, and you have an upcoming expected decline in the number of high-school students graduating who traditionally would have been most likely to enroll in college. So the sector is facing some long-term pressures that are not political.
And now you keep the political pressure on, and there certainly are reasons to be concerned. That plays into what we opened up talking about, this “muzzle-velocity” strategy. My hope when I write the Briefing every day is to give you everything you need to know to start your day. You can read the email, you can close it, and you can turn the notifications off on your phone. You can go about your job because that’s all you can probably control. That’s the value I’m trying to bring to folks. When I feel overwhelmed writing the Briefing, I tell myself something I read in a sports column a long time ago. When the clock’s ticking down, don’t panic. There will be plenty of time for that later. Control what you can control and try to make sense of it. And I hope that when we do things like this, when we go through a high-level discussion about what’s happened, but also the likely strategies behind it, the potential ramifications, what we’re seeing, I hope we’re providing good context for folks. And I hope the Briefing can provide both that good context, but also just the right amount of additional detail. And that’s a hard thing for us all to do. It’s a tight, tight rope that we’re all walking right now.
Brown: I’ve got one more question for you. As we’re looking ahead to the weeks and months to come, what’s the big question that you’ll be asking as a reporter? In addition to that, what issues are top of mind for you? One thing I’m wondering about is the endowment tax. There’s a lot of fear around the potential of congressional Republicans to increase the endowment tax on certain colleges. So what’s a big question you’re asking? And what else are you following?
Seltzer: The endowment tax is a really good one. We’ll see what happens there. I’m also interested in seeing what happens at open access institutions — community colleges, regional publics — that are not well-endowed. They are in some cases as affected or more affected by funding freezes because they are very reliant on students who require federal funding, and they generally run very, very tight budgets. The Ivy League institutions for all of the large scale and the amount of money they spend and how much they may have to cut, they do have bigger financial heft to skate through uncertainty.
Whether and how much this affects institutions that do not have that cushion and that serve the majority of students in the sector, I think, is really important.
The fights in court are important. Who rises to litigate either in the actual legal courts or in the court of public opinion. And how those cases go, even as they will be slow, are other really important questions. Will they actually disband the Education Department? What’s the plan there?
Brown: Well, Rick, this has been great. We got through as much as we could. Again, we’re hoping to do this in the future. So thank you so much, Rick, for sharing your expertise with us, and thanks to everybody in the audience for joining us.
We really encourage you to keep up with us. Tell us what you want to hear. Tell us what you’re seeing and experiencing on the ground. Please do consider subscribing to the Daily Briefing for a quick, rundown daily dose of what is happening in the Trump administration, and we’ll hope to see you again soon.
Seltzer: Thanks so much, everyone.
Brown: Cheers, bye.
