(Greetings from airportland. Today I’ve been in New York’s JFK airport for nine hours and counting, with flights delayed due to the awful Potomac River crash. Apologies if this post is telegraphic or hasty.)
Donald Trump is back in office with an intense flurry of executive actions and statements. In that whirlwind he and his team have found time to take some steps against concerning higher education, which I’ll try to summarize here.
First off: if any of these policies impact you in your academic work, please share your story in comments, if you can. If you’d like to, but don’t want to do so in public, you can reach me privately here. We need to get these stories out to show the real, human damage Trump is doing to academia.
Second, please note this is a post made in haste. Political events are moving very quickly. Personally, the past two weeks have been grueling. If this post missed anything, please let me know in comments. This is also a post focused just on higher education impacts; I don’t have time for a summary or analysis of the overall administrative strategy. Similarly I can’t offer advice about what to do about all of this.
ITEM – some federal web content has gone down or been replaced by new materials. This has removed some data and documents from researchers’ use.
ITEM – an executive order ending DEI language and practice in the federal government includes this plan to go after a handful of wealthy campuses: “each [federal] agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of… institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.” In other words, the feds will target some universities with lavish endowments to, ah, check on their DEI work.
ITEM – an executive order against antisemitism includes many points about colleges and universities. They include working with campuses to possibly deport “aliens” who teach (alleged) antisemitism as well as preparing for future Attorney General actions against campuses.
ITEM – the new administration tried to suspend the operation of a lot of federal grants and loans. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo M-25-13 called for a pause in many payments:
To implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal. [bold and odd capitalizations in original]
Some of those grants currently go to academic activities. In response, the National Science Foundation (NSF) told grant recipients to not spend any grand monies while they “are working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.” The National Institutes for Health (NIH) suspended staff travel for the moment, travel which is key to holding meetings for grant decisions. NIH also canceled meetings straight up.
The threat poses by this order to academic research and other programs is substantial. President Mitchell of the American Council on Education (ACE) stated that “this unprecedented order to pause grants, loans, and other direct federal support is causing great harm to millions of Americans, as well as our nation’s overall economy and security. This is bad public policy…” On a podcast Mitchell referred to the policy as “institutional destruction.”
With a day the pause was itself temporarily paused by a federal judge. The OMB then fired back with a clarification memo, within which we find assurances that the pause wouldn’t hit student loans. Instead, the policy was “expressly limited to programs, projects, and activities implicated by the President’s Executive Orders, such as ending DEI, the green new deal, and funding nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest.” At around the same time the new press secretary offered her view on X/Twitter:
This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo. Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.
Many scholarly societies and universities have issued comments, mostly of the “we’re watching closely” variety (for example). The Department of Education seems to be starting to review some of its programs, according to Inside Higher Ed:
At the Education Department, programs subject to review include TRIO, Pell Grants, student loans and grants for childcare on campus, as well as those that support students with disabilities and minority-serving institutions. Currently, neither the $229 million fund for Hispanic-serving institutions nor the $400 million grant program for historically Black colleges and universities is included in the review.
As part of the review, agencies will have to answer a series of questions for each program, including whether the programs fund DEI, support “illegal aliens” or promote “gender ideology.”
So it seems now that the administration is conducting, or is about to start, some review of some of its grants to academics. This immediately has a chilling effect on plans, research, teaching, and other academic work. And some of that work just stopped.
ITEM – an executive order ended a suite of Biden administration executive orders, including a group dealing with higher education, such as:
Executive Order 14021 of March 8, 2021 (Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free From Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity).
Executive Order 14045 of September 13, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics).
Executive Order 14049 of October 11, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Native Americans and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities).
Executive Order 14050 of October 19, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans).
Executive Order 14084 of September 30, 2022 (Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum and Library Services).
These are varied, but the reader can glimpse the impacts: reducing federal support for museums, tribal institutions, black people, Hispanics, women, gender nonconforming folks, and more who are students, faculty, or staff.
ITEM – the order proclaiming the existence of only two genders can impact nonbinary and gender fluid students, faculty, and staff by ending federal programs which supported them and by changing their identity documents.
ITEM – another order announced an impending “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” for K-12 schools. This entails a review of federal funding (grants), school curriculum, and more. The target: the teaching of “radical, anti-American ideologies.” It’s not clear how this might work in higher education, and I’d like to hear from people in education programs.
Beyond these statements and policies directly impacting higher ed are other orders which may have indirect effects:
The orders tightening border controls and launching mass deportations (for example) can impact undocumented students.
That executive order against DEI in the federal workforce – this includes ending federal promotion of diversity and ending DEI language in grant documentation.
This order ending many Biden orders may hit federal climate programs, which side effects for academics relying on them.
That’s where I’m stopping for now. Looking back on this post, it seems to be a lot. It might be too much to deal with for some folks. If you’d like more information, the American Council on Education (ACE) has some good resources on what the Trump administration is doing to academia, including this page.
On a personal note, an observation and a question: over the past year I worked to help academics plan for a potential Trump 2.0 administration. That seemed like a good use of my futurist skills and platform. Accordingly I wrote a bunch of blog posts (look under this header) and hosted several Future Trends Forum sessions. We did an open, extended reading of Project 2025. Now Trump is fulfilling many Project 2025 plans and taking other actions we’ve discussed.
Honestly, I’m not sure if what I did last year did any good. Most readers and participants reported being depressed and resigned. Now, I’m not sure what I should do as the warned event has begun. I’ve had people tell me privately that I shouldn’t do anything publicly, either because it might lead to attacks on my family or because I might platform those the speakers found to be dangerous. Do posts like this one help anyone?
My work on climate change… continues, even though it’s now become a lot harder. I plan to keep doing that, addressing what Trump means for academic climate work.
Over to you. What would you like this higher ed futurist to do? I’m open to suggestions.
Above all, I wish you all the best, my academic family. Please take care and be safe.
I hear that my local community college is about to lose grants, even when Trump’s hold has been rescinded. Secondly, even sadder, Head Start grants are apparently on hold, at least that’s what I am hearing locally.
When the CC first heard the news, the reaction was “This is going to be BAD.” Suddenly, the impossible entered the realm of the possible, although unlikely, the loss of Title IV funds can no longer be ruled out so easily. Eyes have been opened to this, and other possibilities. In the same sense, Trump’s body-blow that momentarily stunned the sector is also a paradigm shift.
Agreed about financial hits to CCs.
What glimpses do we have of a new paradigm?
https://www.wkow.com/news/top-stories/uw-madison-pauses-spending-amid-federal-funding-uncertainties/article_828823fa-df1f-11ef-bf05-5770d08480a6.html
I am reminded of the Thomas Theorem in Sociology:
“If men [and women, presumably] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_theorem
Politico writes:
“For all the prior planning, an energy executive familiar with discussions around the OMB memo, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, told POLITICO that the freeze appeared to also have caught the administration off guard.
“The White House is scrambling to figure out how to explain this,” the person said.
In an attempt to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the memo, the OMB released a ***second memo*** underscoring that agencies are only required to pause funding for any activities that may conflict with a handful of executive orders the president has signed, including those relating to foreign aid, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and the environmental spending approved by Congress during the Biden administration.
The second memo also said the freeze would not impact any direct assistance to individuals, including SNAP and Medicaid, though access to Medicaid’s payment system appeared to have been turned off Tuesday afternoon in what the White House said was an unrelated issue.
Other social safety net programs that get indirect money from the federal government, including some housing assistance and drug treatment programs, were not addressed in the memo.”
But the article goes on to disclaim any direct tie with Project 2025, even though freezing federal funding is among its suggested strategies. I believe this will continue to be the case, since Project 2025 proposals do not appear to be the product of rational minds.
Clearly the new admin is implementing a lot of Project 2025 while denying it.
They also seem a bit unprepared to roll this out.
Confusion, anxiety, and fear seem to be big parts of what the administration is trying to accomplish, based on all of the executive actions to date (including those that apply to topics outside of higher education).
I agree that your columns from recent years, trying to predict Trump actions, are part of your futures work. I don’t think that we need you to provide news roundups; we can get them elsewhere. (That ACE webpage to which you linked, for instance, is very helpful.) And I don’t think that it’s useful to speculate about actions that might happen — to take a random example, how many and which state attorneys general will use their new authority under the Laken Riley Act to impede the flow of students to colleges. Those attorneys general will show their faces soon enough. And in the meantime we all need to continue to teach and care for the students in our charge.
At the moment, I find it hard to describe what I want from my favorite higher ed futurist. It would be a mistake for us to base future planning on the assumption that we’ll “get back to normal” in 2028 — because our old normal was already unsustainable, and because lasting damage is possible by that point — but it also seems prohibitively difficult to speculate on which of the many possible Trumpist futures we might actually see. Perhaps the best strategy is to think about what the early indicators of different futures might be, and then look for whether those data are coming true. For example, I heard a colleague speculate that as colleges in places like Texas and Florida monkey around with the curriculum, students would flow to colleges in more hospitable states. Do enrollment data suggest that this is happening? Would Texas and Florida have to enroll more poor students, including BIPOC students, to keep their enrollments strong? Are they doing that? It would be helpful to have your eyes on things like that.
Speaking of enrollment data, I’d love to read your take on how the Clearinghouse data error has affected thinking about the future of higher education. Do you have to revise some of your work? Are there broader lessons that a futurist can draw from this situation?
And maybe that’s the best path forward, at least in the short term. Until the instability vortex eases up, go back to looking at the other items that are your bread and butter: climate, carbon, enrollment, institution closure, pricing and economics, technology, etc. Keep collecting the pieces so that, when the dust settles a little, you can assemble them into a useful picture.
Thank you very much for the thoughtful consideration, sibyledu .
News roundups are something I do as part of my work, gathering evidence for trend detection and analysis. Perhaps I should build on them and offer results instead, as you recommend.
Population and enrollment movement: I’ve been tracking this in the wake of Dobbs and haven’t found much evidence yet. I’ll keep on.
Enrollment rebound: yes, I’ve been thinking hard about it. I worry that my Clearinghouse friends took a bad hit from that error. More generally, we might have recovered from COVID losses. I’m not sure how long this rebound lasts, especially since all the downward pressures are getting stronger.
Dr. Alexander,
Thank you for your post, super interesting… This is needed now more than ever to help parse through layers of insanity, confusion and help channel anger and frustration in any possibly constructive ways. Please do all you can to continue.
Federal grants freezes so impact so many things including scholarships based on gender (like women in stem) or minorities (whether cultural or linguistic, etc.), programs to aid endangered languages, and so forth.
I’ve been reading up some data on that, but also am checking on federal websites to check that they still offer content in Spanish and other languages. In your opinion, would we likely see disruption to translation services for the government – on website, in courts, etc.? Would any languages be potentially dropped first vs some be “allowed” to remain, or maybe not? Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you.