Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, June 12. Brock Read wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Senate’s spin on ‘Big Beautiful Bill’

Late Tuesday, Senate Republicans took their first stab at reinterpreting the overhaul of federal financial aid laid out in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last month by the House amid a wave of opprobrium from higher ed. The draft plan, released by the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, largely follows through on the House’s objectives.

Colleges with plenty of part-time students are breathing a deep sigh of relief. Community colleges were particularly panicked about a provision in the House bill that would require students to take 30 credit hours per academic year to receive the maximum Pell Grant award, and 15 credit hours to be eligible for Pell Grants at all.

The impact of the Pell shifts would be seismic. More than half of students in the country would fall short of the 30-credit standard, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. About 400,000 community-college students stood to lose their Pell Grants altogether, according to a letter sent by the Association of Community College Trustees to the Senate committee after the House bill passed.

Message received, apparently: Those thresholds are gone in the Senate plan. Students would remain Pell-eligible no matter how many credit hours they take, and the standard for full-time eligibility would stay at 24 credit hours per year. Language from both chambers would render borrowers with “a high student-aid index” ineligible.

If that holds, Pell could emerge as a bit of a winner overall. Like the House, the Senate would pump $10.5 billion into the grant program over three years and create a Workforce Pell program that makes the grant available for short-term work-force training.

The Senate may also nix a controversial plan to put colleges’ skin in the student-debt game. The House legislation would force colleges to foot some of the bill when their students default on federal loans. That risk-sharing model is gone in the Senate plan, though colleges could lose federal aid if their students fail to meet standards on median earnings and debt.

It’s worth remembering: The two chambers agree more than they differ here. Other key tenets of the House’s aid overhaul are largely untouched in the Senate plan:

• Fewer lending options: Grad PLUS loans, which allow graduate and professional students to borrow unlimited amounts, would be eliminated. And Parent PLUS loans, which do the same for parents of undergraduates, would be restricted.
• Stricter income-based repayment: Deferment options for borrowers claiming economic hardship would be kiboshed as well.

What comes next: Reconciliation. President Trump is pushing to sign a bill by July 4. It seems glancingly unlikely that lawmakers from both chambers of Congress get the details squared away by then. But how hard will they push?

📱 Read The Chronicle‘s breakdown of the bill that passed the House: Republicans’ Plans to Tax Higher Ed and Slash Funding Advances in Congress

Federal news

• Rubio seeks yet another Harvard investigation: Marco Rubio, secretary of state, urged the Treasury Department last month to investigate whether the university violated federal sanctions by participating for several years in a health-insurance conference in China. The conference included members of a state-run group that has been cited by the U.S. government as a perpetrator of systemic human-rights abuses. It’s unclear whether the Treasury chose to open an investigation. (The New York Times)
• Judge rejects pro-Palestinian student’s detainment: U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz yesterday barred the Trump administration from using a rarely invoked passage of federal law to continue to detain Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident who is a pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University. In citing the law, Secretary Rubio had argued that Khalil’s presence in the United States compromised its foreign-policy interests. While the judge rejected the argument, he paused his order until Friday to allow the Trump administration to appeal. (The New York Times)
• Is Social Security safe for student-loan defaulters? Linda McMahon, secretary of education, will not renew efforts to seize Social Security benefits from borrowers who defaulted on student loans, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, after the two spoke earlier this week. The Education Department announced in April that it would garnish those benefits but soon put the plan on hold. (Politico)
• Trump touts trade truce: The president said yesterday on his Truth Social platform that he’d struck a deal with China to keep tariffs at the levels agreed to by the two countries last month. One stipulation: The U.S. will back off on its plan to revoke the visas of Chinese students studying at American colleges. (The Wall Street Journal)
• Fulbright board members quit in protest: Members of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board have resigned en masse to protest the Trump administration’s vetting of scholarship recipients on ideological grounds. In a statement published yesterday, the board members said the administration’s eleventh-hour denial of Fulbright awards to both American and foreign applicants were “impermissible by law” and “compromise U.S. national interests and integrity.” (Substack, The Chronicle)

Join us today

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• 📅 Today at 1 p.m. ET is the first webinar our new monthly summer series.
• 🖊️ Sign up here to attend. 🖊️

Quick hits: Speech-and-identity edition

• Arizona gov. nixes antisemitism bill: Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have made it illegal for college professors and public-school teachers in the state to “teach, instruct, or train students in any antisemitism or antisemitic conduct.” The bill would have made educators personally liable for any damages from lawsuits alleging misconduct. (Associated Press)
• Anti-DEI bill dies in Louisiana: The State Senate declined to advance legislation that would have prohibited state colleges from requiring any curriculum “that promotes the differential treatment of any individual or group of individuals based on race or ethnicity, imputed bias, or other ideology related to diversity, equity, or inclusion.” (Louisiana Illuminator)
• “Diversity Way” goes away: Florida Atlantic University has rechristened a campus walkway, named 15 years ago, as “Opportunity Way.” A professor criticized the move as “an empty symbolic act.” (University Press)
• DEI drama at WCU: An activist conservative group is touting a newly released video, in which an administrator describes a goal to “embed” diversity and inclusion campuswide, as evidence that Western Carolina University is failing to comply with federal and state laws mandating that it shutter DEI programs. A Western Carolina spokesperson said the university adheres to all relevant laws, and that the administrator, who retired in April, “was not authorized to speak on behalf of the university.” An earlier video, in which a student confronted a transgender woman in a women’s bathroom, prompted the Education Department to open a civil-rights investigation of the university. (The News & Observer, The Chronicle)
• Planned Parenthood out at DePaul: The university has disbanded a student group affiliated with the organization, citing incompatibility with DePaul’s Catholic “values and teachings.” (Fox 32 Chicago)

Budget-crunch roundup

Another day, another set of sobering statements:

• Northwestern University announced a hiring freeze, expanding on an initial round of cost-cutting measures in February. (Evanston RoundTable)
• The University of Oregon, where lower-than-expected enrollment is compounding concerns about federal funding, expects budget cuts of up to $30 million. (KLCC)
• Yale University is seeking to sell off up to $6 billion in private-equity and venture-fund stakes amid underwhelming returns and federal-funding uncertainty. (The New York Times)
• The University of Minnesota system, struggling with federal research cuts and losses in state funding, is considering tuition hikes and academic-program cuts. (Higher Ed Dive)

Quote of the day

“It was kind of a hard hammer at first.”

—Linda McMahon, secretary of education, said in an interview with Bloomberg that the Trump administration’s aggressive moves to yank funding from elite institutions have prompted other colleges to review their policies. When asked whether institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton might see federal money return, she cited “progress” in negotiations: “It would be my goal that if colleges and universities are abiding by the laws of the United States, and doing what we’re expecting of them, that they could expect to have taxpayer-funded programs.”

Transitions

• Don Oberhelman, director of athletics at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, will retire.
• Cam Patterson, chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, plans to step down.
• Kimberly L. Jones, associate provost for faculty affairs at Howard University, has been named dean of the College of Engineering and Architecture.

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

Footnote

For as long as I’ve been at The Chronicle — and that’s now much longer than I care to admit — our journalists have been marveling at the longevity of E. Gordon Gee, the man who has seemed destined to be at the reins of some university, somewhere, until the end of time.

You probably know the biographical basics: Forty-four years as a college president, seven stints at five different institutions, virtually no time off between any of those gigs. What, if anything, could make Gee call it quits?

The Chronicle reporters who have profiled Gee have struggled to come up with answers that don’t seem, well, a bit morbid. As our Jack Stripling memorably put it in 2012:

It has been said that the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust will be cockroaches and Cher. At this point, it might seem reasonable to add E. Gordon Gee to that list.

Or as Gee himself told Emma Pettit last year, recalling faculty critics who had said back in 1981 that he didn’t seem up to the top job:

Despite his poor start, Gee, now 80, is still a university president. As for the professors who insisted he change?

“Those guys are dead.”

The headline of Emma’s piece, which took stock of Gee’s controversial second stint at the helm of West Virginia University, seemed both inarguably true and somehow a little gutsy: Gordon Gee’s Last Stand. (It had to be, right? And yet ...) Emma did, of course, get it right: Gee announced last September that he’d retire this June. Michael T. Benson, president of Coastal Carolina University, was tapped as his successor. Finally, Gee would get his turn as éminence grise, and it wouldn’t take a nuclear holocaust to make it happen.

Still, we at the Daily Briefing got a little jolt this week when WV News reported that West Virginia’s Board of Governors would vote this week to extend Gee’s contract. Did we dream the whole retirement thing? Will Gee’s presidencies outlive us after all? No, and no. This is a mere procedural matter — a two-week extension to make sure the university isn’t leaderless between the end of June and Benson’s start date of July 15. On that day, Gee will make good on his plans to “disappear for a year” and spend more time with his grandchildren.

We think.