U.S. Education September 2025-

Education May 2019 – March 2024

Free Harvard online government classes
As a response to the Trump nonsense, Harvard is offering free online courses with subjects including American Policy, Constitutional Foundations, and more.

Trump’s Harvard loss conceals a strategic victory
Universities will have to calculate the actions of a future Republican administration.
(WaPo) The Trump administration sees elite academia as a center of progressive conformity — the incubator of the “woke” ideas that exploded in the early 2020s and that even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) recently suggested went too far.
On taking office last year, the administration promptly launched a barrage of legal attacks on key universities. It threatened or withheld billions in federal funding and launched civil rights investigations alleging progressive racial preferences and antisemitism on dozens of campuses.
Much of this campaign was legally flimsy, as a judicial decision last week finally tossing the lawsuit against Harvard University shows. But that doesn’t mean the effort won’t achieve some of its desired results. University of California Law San Francisco professor Zachary Price argues in a recent paper that the Trump administration’s “shock and awe” approach could lock in new incentives for universities even after Trump leaves office. …
It’s rational, then, for universities to respond to the Trump administration’s onslaught by inching closer to the political center. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what many have been doing — or at least saying they’re doing. Harvard is seeking $10 million to hire faculty who will “broaden ideological representation across Harvard,” the student newspaper reports. Yale University published a report in the spring that criticized the influence of progressive groupthink on campus. Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis released an institutional statement pointing in the same direction.
Johns Hopkins and Tufts, among others, have announced initiatives to elevate a wider range of viewpoints.
13 August
Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard is dismissed
U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns said the incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to support the claim that Harvard is not complying with federal law.
A judge in Massachusetts dismissed a federal lawsuit Thursday that accused Harvard University of not taking sufficient steps to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment.
The lawsuit, filed by the Justice Department in March, said students were blocked from school buildings in 2023 and 2024 by protesters and forced to wear baseball caps to hide their yarmulkes, a traditional head covering worn by many observant Jewish men.
… Kenneth L. Marcus, chief executive of the Brandeis Center, a nonprofit legal center that fights antisemitism, called the ruling a “significant and troubling departure” from long-standing civil rights enforcement. In a statement, he said the judge’s ruling raises the bar for these kinds of cases by requiring the government to show that an institution failed to resolve the issue at hand and that subsequent violations occurred.

27 June
Higher Ed Is Very Sorry
Universities are studying how they lost the public’s trust.
By Rose Horowitch
(The Atlantic) Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust—and how they might restore it.
Three reports—from Yale, from Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, and from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, a higher-education advocacy group—were released this spring. (Cornell is working on a study of its own.) The reports differ in their diagnoses of where higher education went wrong and, by extension, of what should be done now. …
Some insiders, granted, seem to view universities as mostly the victims of factors beyond their control. The AAC&U report lists a number of them. People around the world in recent years have turned against all kinds of institutions, not just higher education. The racial-justice movements of the past decade spawned a virulent backlash, and colleges’ “visible commitment to diversity initiatives” made them “an easy political target.” A decline in state funding forced universities to compensate with higher tuition; government regulations around civil rights and financial aid led them to hire more administrators. Through it all, political actors seized on these larger forces to further erode trust in higher education.

10 May
Opus Dei’s opaque influence on US campus politics
Think-tank network that has prospered under Donald Trump has close operational ties to secretive Catholic group
(FT) This year, the US National Endowment for the Humanities gave one of its largest-ever grants to a little-known organisation in Princeton: the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, or “Fehe”.
The $10mn of funding came after the Trump administration overhauled the agency, ousting most of its board and deploying its grants towards the conservative fight against “woke” ideas.
Fehe describes itself as an “independent, non-partisan” organisation aimed at “renewing elite universities” through programmes in classical humanities. A network of think-tanks it supports on US campuses are on “the front line of the cultural battle”, according to its co-founder Luis Tellez.
Now an FT investigation has established that Fehe has another side, which the organisation does not advertise: extensive operational ties to the controversial Catholic group Opus Dei.
Every think-tank in the Fehe network was either co-founded by Opus Dei members or includes Opus Dei members in its senior leadership….
Opus Dei has repeatedly come under fire from former members, who have accused it of secrecy and abuse. In Argentina, federal prosecutors are investigating several of the group’s senior clerics over allegations of labour exploitation and human trafficking.
Opus Dei has several of its own universities in countries across the world, including the University of Navarra and its IESE Business School in Spain. The chancellor of Navarra is the head cleric — known as the “Prelate” — of Opus Dei.
But in the US, its main interaction with higher education is through Fehe.
Fehe’s strategy has its origins in a think-tank Tellez launched in 2003 with George, who is president of the James Madison Program in Princeton’s politics department.
That think-tank, the Witherspoon Institute, has become a platform for rightwing thinkers, particularly in relation to traditional family values. It runs the journal Public Discourse, which publishes prominent conservative thinkers and sponsors reading groups that promote the “historic understanding of marriage”.
Witherspoon got off the ground with funding from a non-profit called the Clover Foundation, one of Opus Dei’s main US-based grant-making organisations of which Tellez was formerly treasurer. …

2025

22 October
Trump put universities in a bind. U-Va. charted a way out.
Colleges need more viewpoint diversity but not external monitors to enforce it.
(WaPo editorial board) The University of Virginia on Wednesday became the first public institution to reach a settlement with the Trump administration to resolve multiple investigations into its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. The deal is probably the best the state’s flagship school could have hoped to secure: It won’t pay any financial penalty, nor will it be forced to hire an external monitor to ensure that there is no DEI on campus.
In July, Columbia University accepted both of those conditions in exchange for the return of withheld research funding.
U-Va. agreed to abide by recent guidance for recipients of federal funding, which disfavors almost all preferential treatment by race or other protected characteristic. To avoid an outside monitor, Mr. Jefferson’s university promises to provide data to the Justice Department every quarter through 2028 and its president will personally certify that the school is in compliance.
Universities understandably want to stop fighting with Trump, who has proven willing to choke off federal funds. Proponents of aggressive affirmative action will no doubt be dismayed by the deal, which leaves the university precious little room to balance its classes or its faculty by race. But they should take heart that the deal seems confined mostly to areas the government has traditionally overseen, rather than more sweeping intrusions on academic freedom and First Amendment rights.

14 September
Trump’s travel ban keeps international students from coming to the US for college
(AP) Thousands of students are among the people affected by the Trump administration’s travel ban and restrictions on citizens from 19 countries, including many who now feel stranded after investing considerable time and money to come to the U.S.
Some would-be international students are not showing up on American campuses this fall despite offers of admission because of logjams with visa applications, which the Trump administration slowed this summer while it rolled out additional vetting. Others have had second thoughts because of the administration’s wider immigration crackdown and the abrupt termination of some students’ legal status.
But none face bigger obstacles than the students hit with travel bans. Last year, the State Department issued more than 5,700 F-1 and J-1 visas — which are used by foreign students and researchers — to people in the 19 travel ban-affected countries between May and September. Citizens of Iran and Myanmar were issued more than half of the approved visas.

4 September
Hundreds of US Colleges Poised to Close in Next Decade, Expert Says
(Bloomberg) A dwindling number of prospective students will drive as many as 370 private colleges in the US to shutter or merge with another institution in the next decade, according to a major higher-education consulting firm.
Huron Consulting Group’s prediction is more than triple the total amount of private, nonprofit two- and four-year college closures that the National Center for Education Statistics calculated in the 10 years leading up to 2020.
The projected closures and mergers will impact around 600,000 students and affect about $18 billion in endowment funds, according to Stokes.
“These are schools where we see red flashing lights and warning signs that they’re in significant financial stress,” he said. Huron declined to disclose the names of schools that they expect will close or merge.
Another 430 institutions with over 1.2 million students and $134 billion in endowments face moderate existential threats, according to Huron, which serves over 580 education clients annually, a bulk of which are four-year public and private universities, according to a July earnings presentation.
In contrast, 114 private, nonprofit colleges shuttered from 2010 to 2020, according to National Center for Education Statistics data, and in the decade prior to that period, 59 schools closed.
The Economics of Small US Colleges Are Faltering