Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, April 15. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Cambridge draws a crimson line

When the Trump administration threatened $9 billion in federal funding for Harvard University at the end of March, the institution’s first reaction was to “engage” with the government.

The engagement is off. The Chronicle’s Sarah Brown, Megan Zahneis, and Kate Hidalgo Bellows have the story.

Harvard will not negotiate with the Trump administration over the university’s independence or its constitutional rights, President Alan M. Garber announced on Monday.

The government crossed a line with new demands on Friday. Most of them amounted to “direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard,” Garber wrote. In particular, he rejected demands to:

• Audit viewpoints of students, faculty members, and staff.
• Reduce certain groups’ power based on their ideological views.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote.

Harvard maintains it will continue to take on antisemitism. Remember, the government threatened the university’s funding because of allegations the university hadn’t protected students from antisemitic discrimination.

• The university promised to broaden viewpoint diversity on campus, enforce disciplinary policies consistently, and uphold time, place, and manner restrictions on protests.

But it’s breaking sharply from the strategy wealthy institutions have followed as the Trump administration seizes on antisemitism allegations to demand increasingly broad concessions. Columbia University infamously bent at the knee in March, swiftly drawing criticism from within higher ed by agreeing to place an academic department under administrative review.

Did Harvard conclude that appeasement only leads to further demands? Rather than accept Columbia’s terms, the Trump administration pushed harder, calling its offer an important step toward further negotiations. Columbia’s interim president has since stepped aside. The administration is said to be seeking court oversight of an agreement.

The Trump administration’s demands of colleges increasingly risk looking arbitrary and capricious. Trump casually pitched the idea of withholding funding from Harvard over lunch, according to The New York Times. Among other details in that report:

• “What if we never pay them?” Trump is said to have asked. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”
• Members of the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force are largely anonymous. Most of its 20 members haven’t been publicly identified, with the government pointing to security concerns.
• Parallel processes have frozen funding for other major research universities. Some, like Harvard, have been targeted by the antisemitism task force; others by a group of top White House aides who’ve suspended funding for twice as many institutions as the task force.

Harvard is arguing that it hasn’t been afforded due process and that research is being harmed in a shakedown.

• The feds want “disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law,” lawyers representing the university wrote. “No less objectionable is the condition … that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives.”

Higher ed has increasingly started pushing back after the Trump administration sought to back the sector into a corner. In just the last few days:

• Harvard professors sued over the withheld funding. The American Association of University Professors and its Harvard University faculty chapter alleged the Trump administration’s review illegally harms academic freedom and free speech.
• A lawsuit challenged new Department of Energy overhead caps. Several higher-ed associations and top research universities on Monday sued after the agency last week announced a 15-percent cap on indirect research costs paid to colleges. The cap would slash rates that average more than 30 percent, cutting spending by $405 million. The 15-percent cap is the same level that the National Institutes of Health attempted to impose on its grants in February before states, associations, and colleges sued to block it, arguing the cap would hurt their work.
• Faculty senates are taking up the cry for mutual defense pacts. At least four senates at public universities — Rutgers University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the Indiana University at Bloomington, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — have passed resolutions calling for compacts that would pool resources to push back should the Trump administration target any member, The Chronicle’s Megan Zahneis reports. Several more plan to consider the idea, though administrative buy-in remains a key hurdle.

The White House closed the day by doubling down. The antisemitism task force said it was freezing $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and $60 million worth of multiyear contracts. It called Harvard’s stance indicative of “the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges.”

The bigger question: Will one side blink first, or is a watershed court case brewing?

📱 For more from The Chronicle:

• Harvard’s President Says the University Will Not Comply With Trump’s Demands
• These Faculty Senates Are Trying to Band Together to Stand Up to Trump

Federal news express

• Federal Student Aid issues crop up: Since massive employment cuts last month at the U.S. Department of Education, outages in the systems that disburse federal grants and loans have started taking longer to resolve. Calls and emails requesting guidance are going unanswered more frequently. As a result, college financial-aid offices say, it’s become more difficult to perform basic functions that rely on government systems, like calculating financial-aid offers. An Education Department spokesperson reported no “prolonged outages.” (The Washington Post)
• Australian researchers nix U.S. travel: Academics are calling off trips to the United States and ending research partnerships amid fears of being detained at the border or otherwise harmed by shifting policies, according to Australia’s National Tertiary Education Union. LGBTQ+ researchers and those with disabilities have reported particularly high levels of concern. (The Guardian)
• Canadian university moves to poach U.S. students: The University of British Columbia this week reopened its application period for prospective graduate students who want to avoid the Trump administration’s funding cuts. The institution’s provost said graduate applications from the United States are up 27 percent year over year. (CBC)

Stat of the day

19-32 percent

That’s how much of the ballooning federal student-loan debt between 2007 and 2019 can be blamed on the Great Recession, according to a new working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Researchers compared labor markets to tease out the recession’s effects on student-loan debt. On average, a one percentage-point increase in unemployment rates was associated with a 7-percent increase in outstanding debt.

What’s the connection? Borrowers who faced difficult financial conditions left balances unpaid, researchers wrote. Students also borrowed at higher rates.

The bigger picture: How crises affect borrowing and repayment is a key question at a time when watchdogs are concerned that borrowers have been exceedingly slow to pay down their student loans after pandemic-era pauses.

Quick hits

• Should student-government elections count dual-credit votes? A dual-credit high-school student and the winner of Murray State University’s March student-government elections have sued to try to stop the public institution in Kentucky from throwing out the results. The losing candidate successfully challenged the elections, arguing that students voted despite being ineligible because they were dual-credit students or faculty members taking classes, the lawsuit alleges. (WPSD)
• North Dakota chancellor out early: Mark Hagerott said he’s retiring from the helm of the state’s university system at the end of April, ditching plans to stay through the end of the year and then serve as a professor of artificial intelligence. Hagerott, a cybersecurity expert and Navy veteran, explained the change by saying it will speed up his research and book project on naval officer formation. The State Board of Higher Education appointed North Dakota’s former lieutenant governor, Brent Sanford, as interim chancellor. Sanford, a Republican, has been interim president of Bismarck State College since January. (North Dakota Monitor)
• Fake students have real staying power: Minnesota officials are warning community and technical colleges to watch out for fake “ghost students” — scammers who register for classes in an attempt to siphon off financial-aid money. Despite colleges’ efforts to root out the fraud, artificial-intelligence tools may be making it harder for professors to spot fake students who are increasingly submitting assignments completed by chatbots. One professor at Southwestern College, a community college in the San Diego area, concluded that just 15 out of 104 students who were listed as enrolled or waitlisted for her classes were, in fact, real. (The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Chronicle, Voice of San Diego)
• Ohio proposal would add requirements for private colleges: The state House’s budget plan calls for private institutions that receive funding through the Governor’s Merit Scholarship to ban diversity and inclusion work, evaluate faculty members through post-tenure reviews, require students to take an American history course, and automatically accept the top 10 percent of high-school graduates. Many of those rules mirror restrictions in newly passed legislation that governs Ohio’s public institutions. (Ohio Capital Journal, The Chronicle)

Transitions

• Beverly J. Warren, former president of Kent State University, has been named interim provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. Warren served as provost at VCU before becoming president of Kent State.
• Heather J. Shotton, vice president for diversity affairs at Fort Lewis College, in Colorado, has been named the college’s first Indigenous president.
• Karen Marrongelle, chief science officer for the U.S. National Science Foundation, has been named president of Montana Technological University.

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

Footnote

Major dental work is one of life’s great terrors. Teeth drilled, pulled, capped, crowned, bridged … it’s all so painful, expensive, and inadequate. Despite dentists’ best intentions, you can’t truly replace your adult teeth once they start to break down. No wonder nightmares involving pearly white problems are popularly — if unscientifically — associated with feelings of psychological distress and anxiety.

But brace yourself, because today we have reason to smile: Lost teeth may not be grinding down our confidence forever. King’s College London researchers have grown a human tooth in the laboratory.

The hope is to eventually allow new teeth to take root in the jaw. “They would be stronger, longer lasting, and free from rejection risks, offering a more durable and biologically compatible solution than fillings or implants,” Xuechen Zhang, a Ph.D. student, told the BBC.

Still unclear is whether replacement teeth might be fully formed in a lab before being placed in a patient’s mouth. It could end up being better to transplant young tooth cells into the gums, where they would grow and presumably give adults more sympathy for children who are cutting their first molars.

Either way, this should help us brush off at least one anxiety so our minds can ruminate elsewhere.