Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, March 25. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

The U word

Uncertainty may have been the Great Recession’s defining term. When markets crashed, businesses often weren’t sure whether they could invest … or where they should. Then, many employers lamented a lack of clarity as President Obama’s massive health-care-reform law was negotiated and suffered a rocky rollout.

Today, uncertainty is back in a big way as the Trump administration seeks to remake the federal government. And unlike past crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, colleges may be feeling that uncertainty more acutely than those in other sectors of the economy.

Federal uncertainty keeps forcing higher ed to take unusually decisive actions. The University of Southern California on Monday restricted hiring, slowed capital spending, and locked in budget reductions. The University of Arizona has paused work on a biomedical hub, KSAZ reported. And restrictions on graduate-student admissions started mounting last month, as The Chronicle has documented.

• “This feels like the pandemic; this feels familiar,” Anne F. Harris, president of Grinnell College, recently told Bloomberg.

Of course, many colleges were facing tough budget decisions before the Trump administration scrambled long-held planning assumptions, The Chronicle’s David Jesse reports. For example, Washington State University has been budgeting for declining enrollment.

But the list of questions tied to the feds seems to run longer by the day: Will cuts to research funding survive the courts or otherwise become permanent? Are Pell Grants in line for reductions? Will layoffs and restructuring at the U.S. Department of Education disrupt federal financial aid or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid? Could federal cuts to Medicaid funding force states to balance budgets on the backs of colleges?

New surprises would only make things more difficult. The administration has shown a willingness to threaten federal funding for institutions that don’t fall in line with its priorities on race, gender, protests, and antisemitism. Congress is working on a tax-and-budget package that could overhaul key parts of higher-ed spending.

Some institutions have been exploring worst-case scenarios. Washington State asked units to model budget reductions ranging from 1 to 10 percent.

Finance officers have relatively few tools at their disposal. Class sizes and course loads can be increased in some cases. Campus space might be used more efficiently. A relatively small number of wealthy institutions could lean on their endowments. Some programs can be closed.

Big savings are hard to find without hurting employees. Employee compensation makes up the bulk of college budgets. Benefits changes and especially layoffs can cut spending at a scale some other strategies simply can’t.

The uncertainty ripples into faculty members’ work. It’s not just numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s a cloud of paralysis that makes it harder to plan research, hold conferences, and recruit students.

• “Even in Covid there was little question we’d still have the next semester,” said Mike Duncan, an English professor at the University of Houston’s downtown campus. “This time, there’s no technological solution to a political problem. You can’t vaccinate against a lack of funding.”

The bigger picture: As uncertain as the health picture was during the pandemic, colleges were financially insulated by billions of dollars in federal emergency funding. Today, higher ed’s most prominent colleges find themselves on the front line of uncertainty, courtesy of the feds.

• “This is not that unlike the Great Recession,” said Leslie Brunelli, executive vice president for finance and administration at Washington State University, who was at the University of South Carolina during that crisis. “You just could not make a cut without another one coming at you immediately.”

📱 Read David’s full story: ‘It’s a Black Hole': Facing the Prospect of Trump’s Cuts, Colleges Budget With Trepidation

Federal news express

• NASFAA taps former Education Dept. official: Melanie Storey directed policy implementation and oversight at the U.S. Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office for the last five years, leading work on student-loan relief and the FAFSA Simplification Act. She’s set to become the next president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. Storey says she’s concerned that the Trump administration’s Education Department will lose its best talent, lacks a plan for keeping key functions running as it reorganizes, and could struggle to bolster the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. (The Chronicle)
• Lawsuit challenges firings: The American Association of University Professors joined a group of school districts and unions that sued the Trump administration on Monday, alleging that officials are acting illegally, harming students, and hurting educators with efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education through an executive order, layoffs, and plans to transfer functions to other agencies. (Democracy Forward)
• Federal Student Aid backtracks on layoffs: The U.S. Department of Education is bringing back some full teams in its Federal Student Aid office that it initially marked for layoffs. FSA was set to lose roughly 600 people through buyouts and a reduction in force. (Politico, The Chronicle)
• ICE detains university lab tech: Lewelyn Dixon, a green card holder who emigrated from the Philippines five decades ago, has been held for more than three weeks after she was detained at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. She’s a lab technician at UW Medicine, the University of Washington’s medical arm. Her case means students, faculty, and staff members from across higher ed have been caught in the immigration system. (The Seattle Times, The Chronicle, Associated Press)
• Judge blocks some DOGE data access: The federal government likely did not comply with the Privacy Act of 1974, which was written amid concerns that information collected by the government could be used to piece together “every detail of our personal lives,” U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote. She issued a narrow order stopping the U.S. Department of Education and two other federal agencies from sharing personal information from 2 million plaintiffs with Elon Musk’s government-cutting operation. The plaintiffs had sought a universal injunction covering all sensitive personal data held by the agencies. (The Hill)

Quote of the day

“We’ve advised staff not to respond.”

— Brian E. Clark, a Brown University spokesperson

A libertarian student at Brown University asked over 3,500 staff members and administrators to justify their jobs. Alex Shieh sent an email asking the employees “how Brown students would be impacted if your position was eliminated.”

• That language might sound familiar to anyone following the billionaire Elon Musk’s crusade to find waste in the federal government.

Responses were said to be bound for an online database that Shieh created after using AI to score employees’ jobs based on data scraped from sources like LinkedIn, job postings, and news articles.

Brown is now evaluating whether the student broke its code of conduct, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. No disciplinary charges have been filed, but the university is said to be checking policies about emotional and psychological harm, privacy invasion, misrepresentation, and “operational rules.”

📱 Read the full story from The Chronicle: Channeling DOGE, a Brown U. Student Asked Administrators: What Do You Do All Day?

Quick hits

• Drag ban blocked: U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal found that organizers of an annual “Draggieland” event are likely to succeed in their claims that Texas A&M University violated First Amendment protections for expressive activity when its governing board created a policy in February that deemed drag shows “inconsistent with the System’s mission and core values.” The judge issued a preliminary injunction against the policy on Monday. Organizers now plan to hold the event on Thursday. (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, FIRE)
• Hacker replaces NYU website: Users seeking to visit New York University’s website were redirected for about two hours on Saturday, landing instead on a page with a black background, green writing, data for download, and charts said to show students’ test scores and grades, disaggregated by race. Text on the page alleged that the university has practiced affirmative action in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ban. Working to secure its systems, the university reported the incident to law enforcement and had the rogue website taken down, a spokesperson said. (New York Post)
• New Florida merger on the table? Lawmakers are in talks about a plan that could have New College of Florida absorb two nearby campuses: a University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee branch and the Ringling Museum of Art, which is currently managed by Florida State University. Gov. Ron DeSantis previously proposed having the college take over the museum. (Tampa Bay Times)

Comings and goings

• Neel U. Sukhatme, a professor and associate dean for research and academic programs in the Georgetown University Law Center, has been named dean of the University of Michigan Law School.
• Anita Thomas, executive vice president and provost at St. Catherine University, in Minnesota, has been named provost at Meredith College, in North Carolina.
• Arrick Jackson, provost and senior vice president for academic and student affairs for Minnesota State University at Moorhead, has been named chancellor of Indiana University Northwest.
• Michael I. Kotlikoff has been named president of Cornell University, after serving as interim president since July 2024.

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

Footnote

Don’t put off paying your postage.

That seems to be one lesson from a lawsuit filed by a professor at William Paterson University, in New Jersey. Martin Becker, a professor of environmental science and a paleontologist at the institution, is suing William Paterson and its mailroom supervisor after fossils he’d collected allegedly ended up in a Tennessee landfill.

Becker had spent hundreds of hours collecting Devonian-age invertebrate fossils in New Jersey, NBC News reported. He packaged about 80 percent of his collection into 19 boxes, each weighing between 20 and 60 pounds, to have them shipped to a colleague in Florida who was working with him on a monograph about the fossil collection.

UPS picked up the packages from the university mailroom in June, but tracking and insurance information was slow to come. The fossils never arrived in Florida. It wasn’t until the end of September that Boone contacted UPS directly and learned they’d been intercepted because the university’s account had been canceled due to unpaid invoices, the lawsuit alleges. It claims the packages were subsequently dumped in a landfill in the Nashville area.

Here’s another lesson from the lawsuit for postal companies: Impound packages or return them when problems arise. Throwing them out only risks trashing your reputation.