Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Monday, April 28. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Student-visa reprieve

Federal authorities backtracked on Friday after weeks of deleting information about student visas with little or no explanation, The Chronicle’s Nell Gluckman reports.

The Trump administration planned to restore student visas that had been deleted from a key federal database, its lawyers said in court on Friday.

• This comes after the government terminated the immigration status of 4,700 students in the first two weeks of April, throwing into question their ability to remain in the country — and likely barring them from re-entry if they left.
• It wasn’t always clear why students lost their visa statuses. In some cases, they’d had minor run-ins with the law, like speeding tickets. But some reported that charges had been dropped; others said they’d never had any legal trouble.

Lawsuits against the government had been mounting. Hundreds of students sued, arguing they’d done nothing to warrant losing their visas. A higher-ed group, the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, filed its own lawsuit on Thursday, arguing that the visa deletions were illegal, created a climate of fear among students, and “caused significant operational, reputational, and fiscal harm” to colleges.

The Trump administration was losing at a quick clip. Judges have frequently sided with students. Last week, for example, a federal judge in Georgia ordered the government to restore 133 students’ immigration statuses.

• “Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque?” Judge Ana Reyes of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asked a government lawyer in another case, ABC News reported. The lawyer had told her he didn’t know if students were in the country legally if their records were terminated from the government database.

Colleges were seeing the results of the government’s reversal. Even before lawyers revealed the change in court, campus administrators found on Thursday that some students’ immigration statuses have been restored in the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Program database, or SEVIS.

• Administrators reported receiving no notice that the visas were reinstated — nor any reason why, The Seattle Times reported.

But make no mistake: This isn’t a return to the status quo. Harm has been done:

• Some students have already left the country after their visa statuses were terminated. Administrators think some may have to reapply to re-enter.
• Trust dropped and fear spiked because the administration gave little warning or explanation about its actions.
• It’s not clear that every visa will be restored. Not all of the terminated visas appeared to have been reinstated in SEVIS on Friday.
• The change might not be permanent. The feds are restoring visa statuses while the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement draws up “a policy that will provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations,” an assistant U.S. attorney told a judge on Friday.

The Department of Homeland Security refused to admit a reversal. “We have not reversed course on a single visa revocation. What we did is restore SEVIS access for people who had not had their visa revoked,” it said in a statement to ABC News.

The bigger picture: This chaotic episode might help the White House advance a goal of making this country a less attractive place for immigrants. But it also adds to a string of setbacks and embarrassing incidents that raise the question of whether MAGA bit off more than it can chew.

For more from The Chronicle:

• 🔎 Tracking Trump’s Actions on Student Visas
• 📱 Citing Trump’s Targeting of International Students, a Professor Says He’s Leaving the Country
• 📚 ICE Snatched a Georgetown Postdoc. I Visited Him in Jail.

Protests and antisemitism allegations

• Senators accuse Trump of bad faith: The Trump administration is using the stated goal of fighting antisemitism as “a means to an end to attack our nation’s universities,” alleged five Democrats who wrote to the president last week, identifying themselves as “Jewish senators who have spoken out strongly against rising antisemitism here in the United States, including on college campuses.” (U.S. Senate)
• Feds ask Barnard employees if they’re Jewish: A U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission survey sent to employees’ personal cellphones asked respondents if they were Jewish or Israeli, whether they practiced the faith, and if they’ve been harassed. Barnard’s top lawyer confirmed that the government had ordered the institution to share employees’ contact information as part of a federal antidiscrimination probe. One faculty member who is Jewish reported feeling uncomfortable that “the government is putting together lists of Jews.” (Associated Press)
• Task force praises Yale: The Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism released a statement on Thursday saying its members are “cautiously encouraged” that Yale University appears to enforce policies governing protests. The statement came after demonstrators at Yale assembled to object to Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right security minister, who was speaking near campus at a discussion society not affiliated with the university. (U.S. Department of Education, The New York Times)
• Columbia protests fail to materialize: A tent encampment to protest the war in Gaza was never set up at the end of last week after reports about organizers’ plans leaked and the university promised to discipline anyone who refused orders to disperse. But pro-Palestinian activists protested at the City College of New York on Thursday. (NBC News, USA Today)
• Michigan attorney general says raids were a response to vandalism: Dana Nessel said law-enforcement officers raided five homes across two counties last week under warrants issued for an investigation into “coordinated criminal acts of vandalism and property damage” with a price tag of $100,000. Allegations include smashed windows, chemicals being sprayed, and political slogans left behind. The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has objected to the raids, saying they targeted the homes of pro-Palestinian students and former students of the University of Michigan and that they were overly aggressive. (The Detroit News)

More federal news

• UC Berkeley faces foreign-funding investigation: The U.S. Department of Education on Friday said it’s scrutinizing the University of California at Berkeley’s reporting of foreign funding, alleging that a 2023 exchange with the Biden administration “revealed a fundamental misunderstanding” of legal requirements. The announcement came two days after President Trump signed an executive order seeking a crackdown on foreign-gift reporting. The department also said it’s moving enforcement of foreign-gift reporting back to the Office of General Counsel after the Biden administration placed it under the Office of Federal Student Aid. (U.S. Department of Education)
• Judges block anti-DEI guidance: Federal judges in Maryland and New Hampshire determined plaintiffs are likely to succeed in arguing that the U.S. Department of Education’s February “Dear Colleague” letter violated the First Amendment and wasn’t issued through required procedures. The letter threatened to withhold federal funding from institutions that “come close to anything that could be considered ‘DEI,’ lest they be deemed to have guessed wrong,” the New Hampshire judge wrote. That judge issued a limited injunction covering only plaintiffs in the lawsuit, but the Maryland judge’s order bars the letter from taking effect nationwide until the case is resolved. (Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle)
• Expect fewer physics and astronomy graduate students: The number of first-year graduate students in the fields is projected to decline by 13 percent, or 600 people, the American Institute of Physics projected after surveying department chairs. Private institutions were in line for sharper declines than public institutions. Asked if at least one faculty member had their federal funding cut, 34 percent of private institutions said they have experienced such cuts, compared to 9 percent of public institutions. (AIP)

🔎 For even more federal news: Tracking Trump’s Higher-Ed Agenda

Quick hits

• Last-second changes to Indiana public colleges: As this year’s legislative session wound down, state lawmakers tacked onto their budget bill surprise provisions that give the governor sole power to appoint trustees at the flagship Indiana University, add productivity quotas for tenured faculty members, define faculty governance as advisory only, and require faculty members to post syllabi online. Democrats criticized the under-the-wire changes for allowing no public testimony. (Indianapolis Star)
• St. Andrews U. will close: The private North Carolina institution will bow to long-simmering financial and enrollment problems by shutting down on May 5, it said Friday. St. Andrews lost accreditation in the 2000s only for a 2011 acquisition by Webber International University to keep it wheezing along. Leaders say shutdown measures like selling St. Andrews’s assets will allow them eventually to fully pay faculty members who only received 85 percent of what they were owed in their paychecks earlier this month. (The Assembly, The Chronicle)
• U. of Michigan expands free-tuition program: The “Go Blue Guarantee,” which covers tuition for in-state undergraduates who fall below income and asset caps, will now cover housing costs and fees for students who are studying to become nurses, teachers, and social workers. Leaders are also throwing more support into efforts for first-generation students, community-college transfer, and underresourced Michigan schools. They announced the changes last week after promising extra funding for such programs when they decided to close the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. (Detroit Free Press)
• Limestone U. tries to build on $1-million commitment: The private institution in South Carolina says the gift, from the local Fullerton Foundation, is the largest in its history. It’s the cornerstone of a “Together for Limestone” campaign that seeks unrestricted donations after the institution stepped back from the brink of closing or moving online. (Limestone University, The Chronicle)

Transitions

• Neva J. Specht has been named executive vice chancellor and provost at Appalachian State University after serving as acting provost since April 2024.
• Brian P. Brown, a professor in the department of marketing and interim dean of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business, has been named permanent dean.
• Thomas H. Powell, president emeritus of Mount Saint Mary’s University, has been named president of Averett University.
• Vicky Wilkins, acting provost and chief academic officer at American University, has been named to the position permanently.

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

Footnote

Happy belated birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope!

On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off with the 27,000-pound optical wonder on board, then placed the 43.5-foot satellite into orbit the next day. In the subsequent 35 years of stargazing from above the distortions of the Earth’s atmosphere, Hubble has made more than 1.6-million observations, as Scientific American noted.

The Chronicle gazed upon Hubble’s work many, many times — no doubt because the telescope helped us better understand the universe, and because its science-operations center is on the Johns Hopkins University campus.

The telescope is a tribute to engineering and maintenance as well. Early on, a tiny imperfection in its massive mirror caused problems until spacewalking astronauts installed a fix. Later missions kept equipment humming, until the space shuttle was retired. Since then, engineers have been working around hardware failures remotely. Only time will tell if creative measures can keep Hubble’s eye focused on the sky until its orbit degrades to the point when it burns up in the atmosphere, likely in the next decade.

When Hubble gives up its place in the heavens, we’ll still presumably have the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021, to feed us new valuable data and breathtaking images. Hubble will always have been first, though, giving us remarkable scientific advances such as the first confirmation that black holes exist.

Hubble’s images of our vast universe, like the one of the Veil Nebula above, may make us feel small. But they’re also proof of the human capacity to commit to audacious projects, survive setbacks, learn, grow, and aspire upward. We learn so much about the universe, and ourselves, when we look at the stars.