Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, July 23. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Platform pending v. Project 2025

After a full day to digest President Biden’s Sunday decision to drop his bid for re-election, let’s take a moment to consider the state of the race and its most likely potential outcomes for higher education.

Assume for a moment that Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic nominee for president. She’s lined up support from party heavyweights, including Biden and the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It’s hard to say with certainty how Harris would change the picture for higher ed. That’s in part because the Biden campaign laid out very few specific policy priorities it would bring to a second term.

The safest bet: A Harris presidency would be more of the same for colleges. Little in her history suggests a break from the approaches of the last two Democratic administrations, which mixed general support for higher ed with additional regulations that roiled some corners. Consider:

• Her 2020 presidential bid: Harris supported debt-free college and steering extra money to historically Black colleges and other minority-serving institutions.
• Her time as California’s attorney general: She cracked down on for-profit colleges, including examining allegations against Trump University.
• The Biden administration’s record: It pumped money into colleges to help them during the pandemic. Officials also sought to tighten regulations on profit-seeking entities involved in higher ed, eliminate chunks of student debt, extend antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people, and make sexual-misconduct investigations less onerous for those who have been assaulted.

A second Trump term could be a much more significant break from the norm. Here’s why:

• Trump’s words: Last year he promised to “fire the radical Left accreditors,” require entrance and exit examinations “to prove that students are getting their money’s worth,” and purge diversity, equity, and inclusion employees.
• The GOP platform: It calls for affordable alternatives to four-year degrees, yanking funding from “institutions engaged in censorship,” reinstating the 1776 Commission on patriotic education, and restoring “due-process protections,” a reference to Title IX rules.
• Project 2025: Though Trump distanced himself from this conservative plan for the future, it was written by dozens of former staffers from his administration. It calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and transforming federal student loans into government-backed private loans. Also among its planks are expecting borrowers to repay student debt, undoing Biden-administration regulations, and specifying that Title IX’s antidiscrimination protections apply only to “biological sex recognized at birth.”
• The nominee for vice president: Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio has cast professors as “the enemy” and colleges as “hostile institutions.” He introduced legislation to increase the excise tax on some college endowments and sought to create a federal office that would investigate violations of the ban on race-conscious admissions. He’s also suggested removing federal funding from institutions where critical race theory is taught, a step that our Len Gutkin has called “the end of academic freedom as we know it.”

The bigger questions: Will Democrats lay out any vision for higher ed while flagging enrollment, finances, and public support are pressuring many colleges? Or will they run on the implicit message of business as usual when a second Trump term could bring much more drastic change than the first?

For more from The Chronicle: What Biden’s Exit From the Presidential Race Could Mean for Higher Ed

Quick hits

• Saint Augustine’s U. maintains accreditation: An arbitration committee reversed a decision that would have stripped accreditation and access to federal financial-aid dollars from the private historically Black institution in North Carolina. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges moved in December to terminate the university’s accreditation amid concerns about its finances and governance. Saint Augustine’s went on to fire its president and sent students home this spring to save money. (Saint Augustine’s University, The Chronicle, WRAL)
• After weeks of turmoil, Dickinson State crafts triage plan for nursing program: The university is tapping Mayville State University, another North Dakota University System institution, to keep its program running after all seven of Dickinson State’s full-time nursing faculty members left amid a workload dispute. Their departure prompted Stephen D. Easton to resign from Dickinson State’s presidency. (The Dickinson Press, The Chronicle)
• Fall enrollment puts American U. in a bind: The private institution in Washington, D.C., must close a $23-million revenue shortfall because it expects to miss its freshman-enrollment goal by nearly 400 students, and the class requires more financial aid than anticipated, leaders announced on Friday. They blamed a competitive market, shifts in student populations, and changes in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. (WTTG)
• College blocked from selling rare books: An agreement between Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, bars the institution from selling rare books for six months, according to a court order. Yost argues the college risks violating rules for deaccession, or the sale of items in charitable collections. The institution’s leaders said they had no plans to sell its rare-book collection. (WCPO)

Quote of the day

“This was kind of like a slow time bomb.”

—Laura Dunn, the Title IX lawyer and advocate for sexual-assault victims’ rights, sold her law practice.

A 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling cut the amount of damages clients can win in court, undercutting Dunn’s practice, which typically collects fees only when clients get money. “If it’s going to cost us more to litigate than we can win, you’ve gutted Title IX without it being obvious,” she told The National Law Journal.

Dunn will receive 25 percent to 33.3 percent of revenue from her Title IX and campus sexual-assault cases after selling to the firm C.A. Goldberg.

Selling gives Dunn flexibility for renewed advocacy. She said she is considering running for office or working on improving the enforcement of Title IX.

The bigger picture: The legal landscape is shifting under Title IX, with the 2022 Supreme Court ruling and a decision by the court this year making it easier to challenge the regulations federal agencies write. Energy could well move from legal skirmishes to rallying coalitions to advocate on behalf of sexual-misconduct victims.

Stat of the day

$117.5 million

That’s how much a Massachusetts budget deal would dedicate to expanding a program of free community college to all state residents.

Lawmakers built on a program, enacted last year, that made community college available at no cost to residents over the age of 25 with no college degree. Like that MassReconnect program, the proposed expansion is structured as a last-dollar program, covering the tuition and fees that remain to be paid after other forms of financial aid are counted.

What was true in 2021 remains so: Free college is dead in Congress but alive and well in the states.

Comings and goings

• Maria A. Pharr, president of South Piedmont Community College, has been named president of Pitt Community College, in North Carolina.
• Randall Deike, a former senior vice president for enrollment management and student success at Drexel University and founder of a higher-education consulting firm, Deike and Associates LLC, has been named vice president for enrollment management at Cleveland State University.
• Ofer Harel has been named dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut, after serving as interim dean since July 2023.
• Andrew Siclari, an adjunct professor in the College of Professional Studies at George Washington University and a former chief financial and operations adviser at the University of Massachusetts’ UMass Online and UMass Global, has been named chief financial officer at the National Student Clearinghouse.

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

Footnote

Athletes take the brunt of a college’s decision to shut down a sports program. Imagine the whiplash when that program has been around for only one season. And it’s even worse when that program was only the second of its kind at a historically Black college.

Unfortunately, that’s the case at Talladega College, a private HBCU in Alabama. Its interim president, Walter M. Kimbrough, has said the gymnastics program will be discontinued at the end of the month because of financial constraints.

The gymnasts are doing their best to avert that outcome with a fund-raising campaign. Some 450 donors have pledged about $25,000 so far. However, the goal is $500,000, making this a long-shot bid.

We can hope that it succeeds nonetheless. Just eight institutions enrolled two-thirds of all U.S. Olympic gymnasts who went to college, according to an Axios analysis. More paths for talent to vault to the top is good.

Although most programs don’t have much hope of ever producing an Olympian, they can still be important. As so many students feel disconnected and struggle with their mental health, more access to college sports — and other activities — can help keep students healthy and engaged.

So let’s pause for a moment to appreciate small athletic programs and the students who balance sports with classes, then stick the landing by graduating.