Good morning, and welcome to Monday, April 14. Megan Zahneis wrote the top of today’s briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Rick Seltzer wrote the rest. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Big-time budget woes

Many college leaders have spent the first months of the Trump administration worrying about — and trying to calculate — the potential impact of the president’s policies on their bottom line. In an essay in The Review, Phillip Levine outlines three areas likely to be hit the hardest.

• National Institutes of Health funding: A proposed 15-percent cap on indirect-cost reimbursements sent many academic researchers into a tailspin when it was announced in February. The cap was frozen by a federal judge and is still working its way through the courts.
• National Science Foundation funding: Specific cuts to the NIH’s sister agency have yet to be announced, but officials have floated a two-thirds reduction, and the NSF is already doling out nearly 50 percent fewer grants since Trump took office.
• The all-important endowment: Several versions of an endowment tax — including 10-percent, 14-percent, and 21-percent rates — have been proposed, alongside reductions in the endowment threshold.

Some institutions will face major cuts in all of those areas — a “triple whammy,” as Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, calls it. The 10 universities with the most to lose (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Penn, MIT, Duke, WashU, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt) all boast large endowments and have an engineering school, adding to their exposure to NSF funding cuts; most also have medical schools, making them more vulnerable to NIH cuts.

Then there are the public institutions that enjoy R1 Carnegie status. While their public-sector status exempts them from the endowment tax, they do often have medical and engineering schools, and Levine estimates they could be on the hook for losses of $50 million to $200 million annually.

Don’t forget the private liberal-arts institutions. They might escape the brunt of the NIH and NSF funding cuts, since they focus less on research, but an endowment tax would hit them especially hard, to the tune of upwards of $40 million per year — no small price given their smaller overall budgets.

All told, Levine identified 77 institutions that could experience the most damage under Trump’s proposed policies. That damage, he writes, will manifest in different ways on different campuses, but it will be widespread.

The bigger picture: “These cuts will have lasting effects on these institutions and will reverberate through society,” he wrote. “They will hamper the investments these colleges make in the leaders of our next generation. Advances in medicine, science, and technology will slow. The negative effect on economic activity will be substantial. And the economic opportunity that these institutions offer to lower-income students will be limited.”

🔍 Is your institution on the list? Find out, and read Levine’s full analysis.

Federal news express

• Visa revocations near 1,000: As of last week, an association had counted more than 800 reports of international students and scholars having their visas revoked or their records deleted from the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Program database. Undergraduate, graduate, and Optional Practical Training students have all been affected, as have students at all types of institutions. NAFSA: Association of International Educators hasn’t identified any pattern in student nationality. (NAFSA)
• Coalition wants Congress to welcome international scholars: A multisector effort known as the U.S. for Success Coalition is pressing lawmakers to tell the Trump administration that visa restrictions and revocations harm innovation and undermine national prosperity. It’s citing survey results that show a 40-percent plunge in interest in U.S. postgraduate education since January. (Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration)
• Air Force Academy ends race-conscious admissions: The change, disclosed in a court filing on Friday, could nullify a lawsuit that sought to challenge an exemption for military academies that the U.S. Supreme Court wrote into its 2023 ban on race-conscious admissions. The Air Force Academy is at least the second service academy to nix race-conscious admissions under the Trump administration, after the Naval Academy recently confirmed its own change. (Reuters)
• Columbia consent decree? If the Trump administration pursues a consent decree for Columbia University as rumored, it would be a break from the government’s standard procedure for resolving civil-rights cases. Typically institutions voluntarily agree to make changes, but the federal government has few enforcement mechanisms. A consent decree would allow a court to penalize noncompliance. There are, however, other examples of the arrangement being used in higher education, such as a 2022 consent decree that sought to bring the University of California at Berkeley’s online presence into compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. (The Chronicle, U.S. Department of Justice)
• Illinois scraps scholarships: The Trump administration on Friday said that Illinois and six universities suspended what the government alleged was an “unlawful minority-only scholarship program” at odds with the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision barring race-conscious admissions. The U.S. Department of Justice had threatened to file a lawsuit. (U.S. Department of Justice.)
• House committee drops Northwestern probe: The Committee on Education and the Workforce is no longer trying to obtain information about a legal clinic at Northwestern University’s law school that represented pro-Palestinian protesters, a lawyer said in a court hearing last week. The committee in March requested information including budget data and policies. Two professors sought a restraining order against that request, alleging it infringed on their First Amendment rights and would undermine their work. A university spokesperson had earlier said Northwestern would comply with the investigation. Law schools operate legal clinics to give their students experience under supervision. (Reuters)

Quote of the day

“We have to adapt. And sometimes it’s harder to adapt.”

— Barbara Gellman-Danley, president of the Higher Learning Commission

Like other accreditors, HLC is caught between its current standards and hostile policymakers, The Chronicle’s Eric Kelderman reports. Six of the nation’s seven major accreditors, including HLC, require members to show a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the Trump administration and several states are pushing accreditors away from such standards.

The context: Accreditors are the gatekeepers to federal financial aid. Colleges must have standing with a federally recognized accreditor to receive Pell Grants and federal student loans. What accreditors require influences what colleges do.

📱 Read the full story: Accreditor Urges Academe to ‘Rage’ Against Challenges to Higher Ed. It’s Also Revising Its DEI Standards.

Stat of the day

2 percent

That’s the rate at which backlogged capital needs increased on campus last year, according to an annual report from the facilities manager Gordian.

Major investments in facilities and slowing inflation helped cut spending shortfalls, the company found. Most colleges are also reevaluating their long-term campus needs or curtailing expansion plans.

The bigger picture: Concerns still run high that colleges haven’t put enough money into maintaining, replacing, and upgrading buildings on campus.

Quick hits

• Community-college president ousted: Community College of Philadelphia trustees placed Donald Guy Generals on administrative leave and chose not to renew his contract last week. They didn’t say why, releasing a statement that only said the decision was made “with a high degree of transparency and consideration.” (Billy Penn)
• University president lasts three months: David Joyce resigned from Averett University, a private institution in Virginia, because of a medical diagnoses his wife received. The institution, which has faced major financial challenges, had noted Joyce’s “record of turning around a college” when he was named president in December. (Cardinal News)
• Florida DOGE wants research details: Gov. Ron DeSantis’s initiative to cut costs and target diversity, equity, and inclusion work has asked the state’s colleges to provide information on six years’ worth of faculty grants and research. Some faculty leaders have criticized the request as burdensome, particularly considering that research results are published. (Tampa Bay Times)
• Stanford protesters charged with felonies: The Santa Clara County district attorney last week charged a dozen people with felony vandalism, alleging that pro-Palestinian protesters caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage when they occupied the building that holds Stanford University’s president’s office last June. Eight of those charged are currently students. All are U.S. citizens. The San Francisco chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations called the charges an effort to criminalize activism, but the district attorney said the protesters crossed “a bright line between making a point and committing a crime.” (KTVU)
• Students balk at AI commencement reader: More than 1,800 people have signed a petition against plans by the University of North Georgia to have an artificial-intelligence service read students’ names at next month’s ceremony. Critics say AI removes an important human connection, though the university argues it will be able to ensure students’ names are pronounced correctly. Tassel, the company that offers AI name-reading services, has more than 300 college clients. At least one, West Chester University, has promised not to use AI name-reading in future graduations after an outcry following its December commencement. (The Chronicle)

Transitions

• Rachel Davis Mersey, executive vice president and provost at the University of Texas at Austin, has been named executive vice president and provost at Southern Methodist University.
• Christopher Fiorentino, interim chancellor and former president of West Chester University, has been named chancellor of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education.
• Derek Kindle, vice provost for enrollment management at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been named vice president for enrollment management at the University of Oregon.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com. You can also find Transitions online here.

Footnote

As baseball fans have surely heard by now, a former professor hit a home run with his post-academic career.

Aaron Leanhardt spent seven years as a physics professor at the University of Michigan. Now, he’s getting credit for an innovation known as the bowling-pin bat or the torpedo bat, which is taking Major League Baseball by storm.

Pitching quality seemed to have far outpaced hitting in the 2023 season, when Leanhardt was a minor league hitting coordinator for the New York Yankees. (He’s since become major league field coordinator for the Miami Marlins.) Strikeouts had risen to new highs. How, Leanhardt asked hitters, might they redistribute the weight of the boring old bat?

The answer is this bowling-pin bat, which shifted weight 6-7 inches from the end of the implement to a portion where hitters more typically make contact with the ball. The result is a bat that tapers at the end, which will give broadcast teams a much-needed topic of discussion as they fill all the airtime that comes with a 162-game season.

Wondering how, exactly, this change helps hitters? Here’s how ESPN put it:

“To understand how the bowling pin bat works is a lesson in physics. Take a sledgehammer and a broom handle. The sledgehammer will be more difficult to swing because much of its weight is distributed to the tip. The broom handle, meanwhile, can be swung with immense speed but doesn’t contain significant mass. If the length and weight of bats are constants, the distribution of mass is the variable — and Leanhardt conceived of a bat that optimizes both so it can do the most damage.”

Professors of physics, English, and journalism will all no doubt appreciate that description.