Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, April 11. Eric Kelderman wrote today’s Briefing, with contributions from Scott Carlson and Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

More cuts to DEI in Texas. What’s next?

Public colleges are scrambling to comply with bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion in states where such laws have passed, leading to job cuts, as well as frustration and confusion among students who relied on such services.

In Texas, where lawmakers have approved two separate laws that prohibit spending on DEI, the University of Texas at Dallas announced this week it would close its Office of Campus Resources and Support and eliminate some 20 jobs.

That office had opened at the beginning of the year, immediately after the university closed its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, according to a news report from the Austin American-Statesman.

Sound familiar? Last week, the University of Texas at Austin closed its Division of Campus and Community Engagement. Groups representing faculty and staff members estimated that 60 employees had lost jobs as a result. While much attention has been paid to programs that focus on racial minorities, the campus also eliminated three full-time staff members in the Women’s Community Center, our Katherine Mangan reported, which for the past 20 years had been the Gender and Sexuality Center — it was renamed in January.

The cuts in Texas are the latest examples of how public colleges are responding to such laws. Across Florida and Texas, administrators are taking a variety of approaches, according to a survey of those institutions by our Erin Gretzinger and Maggie Hicks.

They found that campuses are reacting inconsistently — some drastically and others not at all — reflecting uncertainty around vaguely worded statutes and untested areas of the law.

Quotable: “These DEI bills are new terrain. There’s not all this precedent that we have in other areas of the law. Florida and Texas are the vanguard,” said Antonio L. Ingram II, a civil-rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, about the recent changes.

The big question: The rollout of these laws has left no one satisfied. Similar state legislation is being proposed each month. Do Florida and Texas provide a glimpse into a messy and chaotic future?

Quick hits

• Kentucky lawmakers consider expanding higher education in rural areas: Legislators may turn a technical college into a stand-alone college offering bachelor’s degrees in high-demand careers. The move is meant to provide more economic opportunity in an area struggling with the loss of mining jobs and limited access to four-year colleges. (The Hechinger Report)
• Cleveland State U. prepares for employee buyouts: The university’s Board of Trustees approved measures to close a projected $40-million deficit, including reducing its staff and spending $9 million from its reserves. (Signal Cleveland)
• Tuition increases considered in South Carolina: Lawmakers are debating a measure to allow the state’s public colleges to raise tuition by 2 percent next year. Tuition has been frozen for in-state students the past six years, with the state providing more appropriations to offset increased costs. (Hilton Head Island Packet)
• Attorneys general in eight states file lawsuit to halt student-loan repayment plan: The state officials, all Republicans, joined in the legal action this week to stop modifications in the federal student-loan income-driven repayment plan that took effect last year. The new arrangement bases borrowers’ payments on a smaller portion of their income and prevents loan balances from growing because of accrued interest. It also provides cancellation for those who borrowed less than $12,000 and have made payments for a decade. The plan has already waived loans for more than 150,000 borrowers and lowered payments for eight million. (Missouri Independent)

What do we learn when a small college dies?

Goddard College announced on Tuesday that it was shutting down at the end of April. Out senior writer Scott Carlson reflected on LinkedIn about what it means for him and higher education broadly. Here’s a version of his post, for Briefing readers:

Journalists are not supposed to get emotionally invested in what we cover, but the closure of Goddard College was particularly depressing for me. I wrote about Goddard in 2011, when its financial situation seemed to be turning around.

Goddard — by necessity — had reinvented itself again and again. In 1963 the college created the first low-residency model in higher education, and later it turned that low-residency program into a survival strategy. The college closed its full-time undergraduate program and brought in rotations of student cohorts to its various programs two weeks at a time, increasing enrollment and scaling the campus’s carrying capacity.

Even Goddard’s curriculum, influenced by the philosopher John Dewey, was innovative: Students chose what they wanted to study, how they wanted to study it, and how they would show what they’d learned. Many of the students I interviewed said it was the most challenging and fulfilling learning experience of their lives.

Reinvention was baked into the college structure. Royce S. (Tim) Pitkin, Goddard’s founder and longtime president, did not believe in building an endowment, because he thought it would hamper innovation. That’s a brave position — and an example for the universities that sit on their billions.

What remains: With the deaths of these small colleges, we’re seeing a loss of biodiversity that affects the ecology of higher ed. Small colleges, pivoting under pressure, are often places where new ideas come from — and where students can find an alternative if mainstream colleges aren’t a good fit. Comfortable, mainstream colleges have little incentive to change and radically challenge the model. If we want to encourage new ideas and growth in higher ed, philanthropists need to protect and support the unusual organisms in higher ed that can contribute to that biodiversity.

Quote of the day

“The Department of Education’s FAFSA rollout was mired in delay and dysfunction.”

— U.S. Rep. Burgess Owens, a Republican of Utah and chair of the Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee, in his opening remarks at a Wednesday hearing on the Education Department’s efforts to overhaul the process for the federal financial-aid application.

The new application was delayed by several weeks and has hit several snags, as our Eric Hoover has reported. Figures from the Education Department show that Free Application for Federal Student Aid completions are, on average, 40 percent lower than they were at the same time last year.

Stat of the day

100,000

That’s how many fewer undergraduate credentials were awarded in the 2022-23 academic year compared with the previous year — a change of nearly 3 percent — according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

This marks the second consecutive decline in undergraduate credentials, which include certificates and associate and bachelor’s degrees. The number of completed credentials fell by 58,800 — a change of 1.6 percent — for the 2021-22 academic year.

Comings and goings

• Richard K. Lyons, associate vice chancellor and chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer and former dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, has been named chancellor.
• Sylvia Torti, former dean of the Honors College at the University of Utah, has been named president of the College of the Atlantic, in Maine.
• Alina Chircu, a professor and former interim dean of business at Bentley University, in Massachusetts, has been named dean of the Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico.
• Paul Sniegowski, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named president of Earlham College and Earlham School of Religion.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote

Daily Briefing readers are word people. You write to us about the occasional grammatical error, word choices, and sometimes, words and phrases to ban.

Let’s keep the fun going. Inspired by the writer Gretchen Rubin’s newsletter, we want to hear from readers: What are your favorite words that have contradictory meanings, especially on campus?

Sometimes those words are sanctioned and their use is encouraged. But be careful because other times you’ll be sanctioned for overusing them.

📝 Send us your favorite words with double meanings, and you may see your submission in a future briefing. Bonus points if you can use them in a sentence that relates to campus life. Double bonus if you can include a Led Zeppelin reference. Write to: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.