Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Monday, March 24. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Columbia’s proffer

The writing had been on the wall for days. And yet the message was no less resounding when one of higher ed’s wealthiest and most prominent institutions folded in the face of federal pressure with a Friday-evening news dump.

Columbia University will try to comply with the Trump administration’s demands, two weeks after the government said it was pulling $400 million in grants over allegations that the university hadn’t acted to protect Jewish students from harassment, as The Chronicle’s Maya Stahl reports.

University leaders said they will:

• Revamp student discipline with “consistent, rigorous” rule enforcement, judicial-board changes, and new ways for student groups to be defunded or suspended. The university noted that some protesters have been suspended, expelled, or had their degrees revoked, and it is proceeding to discipline others.
• Strengthen campus police with new officers who have the power to make arrests.
• Bolster protest regulations by requiring demonstrators to identify themselves and crack down on disruptions in key areas like academic buildings.
• Ban face masks except for religious or medical purposes.
• Appoint a new administrator to review Middle Eastern programs, including the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African-studies department.
• Add faculty members “to ensure intellectual diversity across our course offerings.”
• Review admissions processes to ensure they are not biased.
• Add programming to strengthen dialogue between those with differing opinions by creating K-12 curricula for talking about “topics related to antisemitism.” New programming will also be added at its Tel Aviv Center.
• Adopt a definition of antisemitism recommended by a university task force.

Several of the changes read like trying to thread a needle by giving the Trump administration the bulk of what it wanted without meeting its demands word for word: Columbia’s University Judicial Review Board will not be abolished, as the administration sought, but will instead be reorganized within the provost’s office. Middle Eastern programs aren’t technically subject to the academic receivership the administration wanted.

“At all times, we are guided by our values,” Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, wrote, “putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.”

Columbia faculty members saw it as capitulation. The curricular changes in particular would traditionally be driven by academics on campus, not public negotiations between administrators and federal agencies.

• “It feels like we just gave our values away,” said Kay James, an associate professor of neuroscience and education at Columbia’s Teachers College.
• “Acceding to the Trump administration’s demands is not going to restore the funding,” said Dani Friedrich, an associate professor of curriculum at the college.

Remember: This is no guarantee that the feds will restore the $400 million they yanked. The Trump administration cast its conditions as necessary before it would even start considering releasing the money.

• “We are on the right track now to make sure the final negotiations to unfreeze that money will be in place,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, according to the Associated Press.

Could Columbia have swallowed the risk of fighting the White House? The Trump administration didn’t follow the process normally required to yank funding over shared-ancestry discrimination.

• The government has enormous leverage over an institution like Columbia, which operates a hospital and a huge federally funded research apparatus. In addition to the $400 million currently at play, the government is reviewing billions more in grants to Columbia, as The Chronicle’s Nell Gluckman reported.

Or did it risk more by not fighting? Right-leaning academics joined in warning that the case is setting a dangerous precedent for all colleges that draw federal dollars.

• “Nobody should suppose that this will stop at Columbia or with the specific academic programs targeted by the government’s letter,” Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton University’s president, wrote in The Atlantic. “Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

The bigger picture: Other college leaders are keeping their heads down. Last week, The Chronicle contacted 59 colleges that the Trump administration has warned to protect Jewish students, asking how they would respond if they received demands like those Columbia faced. None directly answered the questions, Kate Hidalgo Bellows reports.

📱 Read the full stories from The Chronicle:

• Facing a Loss of $400 Million, Columbia U. Concedes to Trump’s Demands
• We Asked Colleges How They Would React to Demands From Trump. They Wouldn’t Say.
• Why Hasn’t Columbia U. Sued to Protect Itself?

Details on dismantling the Education Department

Since taking office, the Trump administration spent a lot of time showing how much it wants to shutter the U.S. Department of Education without saying exactly how officials plan to pull it off.

That started to change at the end of last week.

Federal student loans will be overseen by the Small Business Administration, President Trump said on Friday. That would mean transferring a $1.7-trillion portfolio, The Chronicle’s Katherine Mangan reports.

But wait. That sounds easier than it probably will be.

• The SBA was moving to cut 40 percent of its work force, which would drop it from 6,500 employees to pre-pandemic staffing levels, The Wall Street Journal reported. Concerns swirled that the SBA doesn’t have relevant experience overseeing such a large and complex loan portfolio, according to CNBC.
• Congress might have to approve the move. “The Higher Education Act specifically states that the Department of Education must administer Title IV student aid programs,” Beth Maglione, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a statement. “In the absence of any comprehensive plan, a serious concern remains: how will this restructuring be executed without disruption to students and institutions?”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon filled in a few more details on her approach to winding down the agency for Fox News on Friday:

• Plan with Congress for relocating functions the department carries out. Only Congress can officially close the department.
• Revise guidance and grants to give state and local leaders more authority.
• Redirect civil-rights enforcement, adding a focus on Jewish students studying on elite campuses and female athletes.
• Unwind regulations deemed to be unnecessary.
• Reassign some functions to states or other federal agencies. Here McMahon specifically named civil-rights enforcement and data collection without specifying where that work would end up.

Democrats want more details. Democrats on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Friday introduced a Resolution of Inquiry in an attempt to obtain legal documents and communications related to the administration’s closure plans. If the committee doesn’t vote on the resolution, it could go before the full House.

The bigger picture: The latest plans aren’t detailed, and they aren’t a surprise to anyone who’s been listening closely. But they’re the most specific picture yet offered for how the Trump administration wants to move from the messaging phase of an executive order to the hard work of trying to make changes without blocking important functions.

Quick hits

• Colleges exit The PhD Project: Institutions including the Universities of Kentucky and Wyoming have said they’re cutting off The PhD Project, a nonprofit that seeks to help Black and Latino students pursue business degrees. The Trump administration this month started investigating dozens of colleges for working with the organization, alleging it limits eligibility based on participants’ race in violation of February guidance. The PhD Project says it’s opened its membership applications to anyone who wants to “create a broader talent pipeline” into business leadership. (Associated Press)
• Yeshiva U. recognizes LGBTQ club: The Modern Orthodox Jewish institution in New York City reached a settlement with the Yeshiva University Pride Alliance that will have the group renamed Hareni, a religious term, and recognized by the university. Yeshiva had for years fought against recognizing the group, at one point banning all on-campus clubs. It also waged a court battle that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and pitted New York civil-rights law against religious-freedom protections. (The New York Times, The Chronicle)
• Florida merger off the table: Tallahassee State College and Lively Technical College will not merge operations. A task force split after studying the idea. The superintendent of a local school district that oversees Lively said the technical college has its own role but that he’ll seek to create an advisory board to make sure programs match work-force needs. (WFSU)
• U. of Illinois reviews honorary-degree process: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is negotiating with its Faculty Senate in search of a way for potential honorees to be considered behind closed doors. The talks come months after the Senate voted down an honorary degree for Shahid Khan, the founder of the auto-parts manufacturer Flex-N-Gate, citing past labor complaints made against a local company plant. Other institutions in the University of Illinois system are also reviewing their processes for picking honorary-degree recipients. (The News-Gazette)

Comings and goings

• Matthew Johnson-Roberson, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has been named dean of the College of Connected Computing at Vanderbilt University.
• Ken O’Donnell, vice provost and a professor of communication at California State University-Dominguez Hills, has been named provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of La Verne.
• Derry Ebert, vice chancellor for enrollment services at Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, has been named vice president for enrollment management at Chadron State College, in Nebraska.
• Deirdre Gonsalves-Jackson, vice president for Virginia Wesleyan University Global Campus, has been named the university’s provost and vice president.

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

Footnote

Many will no doubt remember that one recurrent feature in this space, readers submitting their favorite television shows about college, started with a Footnote about the return of the comedy The Sex Lives of College Girls for its third season.

It looks like there will be no fourth season to serve as fodder for another round of submissions, unfortunately. HBO’s Max platform dropped the show, leaving Warner Bros. Television Studios searching for a new home if it’s to continue, as USA Today reports.

“I can’t help but mention that it feels like there are fewer and fewer comedy series every month — and we are living in an era where we need that comedy badly, so I really hope that turns around,” Justin Noble, who co-runs the show, wrote on Instagram.

He is correct that we need more reasons to laugh, and more ways to appreciate absurdity. But even if this show isn’t back, at least it’s inspired Daily Briefing readers to look through the back catalog and find shows worth watching. With the likes of Community, The Big Bang Theory, Third Rock From the Sun, A Different World, Hank, and, perhaps most memorably, Boston Common having been mentioned in recent months, we can at least find plenty of humor in the past.