Since Charlie Kirk’s murder on Sept. 10, higher education has come under intense scrutiny due to the reactions of faculty, staff, and students.

Details on Charlie Kirk's suspected shooter are emerging, but there's still much unknown about what the Kirk killing will mean for #HigherEd and the nation. @chronicle.com's @jackstripling.bsky.social and @ngluckman.bsky.social have some analysis in a quick-turn episode of our podcast.

"Embodied by Kirk...and reinforced by Trump’s electoral victories, the Turning Point mode has come to influence the nation’s politics in ways that few might have foreseen a dozen years ago. Nowhere is this more true than in #HigherEd." - @ngluckman.bsky.social and @jackstripling.bsky.social

The data wizards @chronicle.com recently updated our faculty-pay transparency tool to draw on 2025 data. Worth checking out to see how #HigherEd salaries are mediated by local cost of living.

@erickelderman.bsky.social breaks down the key points in yesterday's summary-judgment victory for Harvard, in which a federal judge rejected the government's claims of antisemitism as "a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities." #HigherEd

To sum up the judge's ruling: - The Trump administration's freezing of Harvard funds on or after 4/14 is arbitrary and capricious, and is set aside. It also violated the First Amendment. - The administration is also forbidden from implementing any freeze or termination of Harvard federal funding

The #HigherEd mutual-defense compact movement didn't gain traction with admininstrators this spring. But now, Big 10 universities are airing a TV ad that promotes unity among their ranks. Sarah Huddleston has the story @chronicle.com. #AcademicSky

NEW: The NIH just started requiring NIH-funded research to be made freely, immediately available. In response, some journals are forcing scientists to pay thousands in open-access fees to publish. The result: chaos. The fees, one scholar says, are “out of control.” www.chronicle.com/article/maki...

www.chronicle.com/article/will... “All of this is leading to fears that the Supreme Court is finding ways to do the bidding of the administration instead of being the independent safeguard that it was put in place to be.”

I've been away from the faculty governance beat, but @chronicle.com Sarah Huddleston has deftly taken up the mantle with this story on Republican influence on senate bodies. As one TX state senator told her: “The faculty senate is not the TX senate. It’s not a legislative body. Stop acting like it.”

@jasperjsmith.bsky.social and @katiemangan.bsky.social have been all over the George Mason U. DOJ investigations since they began. Today they broke some news @chronicle.com: GMU president Gregory Washington is digging his heels in and won't be apologizing for DEI work. #HigherEd #AcademicSky

Of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling, which allows hundreds of NIH grant terminations to proceed, @scott-delaney.bsky.social says: “I see no viable, no reasonably likely scenario where that research comes back. I think it’s gone.” www.chronicle.com/article/trac...

NEW @chronicle.com: I sat down with the chancellors of Vanderbilt and WashU to talk about how they believe #HigherEd should respond to Trumpism, and the pushback that stance has gotten from their peers. #AcademicSky

Join @stephaniemlee.bsky.social and I today at 1 p.m. ET as we guest-star on the @rseltzer.bsky.social and @brownepoints.bsky.social show and provide an update on the #HigherEd research landscape. @chronicle.com #AcademicSky connect.chronicle.com/trump-webina...

the latest from @franciediep.bsky.social and I www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

SCOOP: The NIH is moving to prohibit funded scientists, inside and outside the agency, from collecting data about gender, according to a draft policy I obtained. It’s part of the NIH’s aggressive crackdown on gender-identity research. www.chronicle.com/article/gend...

@chronicle.com has a new tracker collecting details on which colleges have seen funding withheld by the Trump administration and those that have settled. As of now, nine campuses have seen a combined $271 million frozen; three of those (Columbia, Penn, and Brown) have reached agreements. #HigherEd

Federal funding in limbo? Try GoFundMe instead. That's the route several scholars have taken in recent months — but the notion of crowdfunding academic research is a double-edged sword. I've got the story @chronicle.com. #HigherEd #AcademicSky

NEW: Our @chronicle.com crew has the details on tonight's deal between Columbia University and the Trump administration, the first over the government's claims of antisemitism on campus. #HigherEd #AcademicSky

ICYMI: I covered the Senate approps committee's vote to preserve the NSF's funding. While far from a done deal, research advocates celebrated the news. “For now, dodging an existential cut is a big win in light of everything that’s going on.” - @kennethmevans.bsky.social #AcademicSky #HigherEd

Prospective grad students are unsure how they'll pay for school in a post-GRAD Plus world, Camila Gomez reports @chronicle.com. "To have all of this work kind of end in a toss up of whether or not I’ll be able to afford the school is really frustrating," one law-school hopeful said. #HigherEd

🧵 For our special issue on research, @chronicle.com dove into how the scientific enterprise has been buffeted by the Trump administration. As Jenny Ruark writes in her editor's note, "the speed of retrenchment is breathtaking." We wrote about how we got here, and what might be next. #AcademicSky

NEW from me: Some analysis on the indirect-cost reform being proposed by a group of higher-ed juggernauts as a counterbalance to the Trump admin's 15-percent cap. Where will it leave universities' ledgers? #HigherEd #AcademicSky

NEW: I wrote about scientists who have been ghosted by the NIH. The agency has disappeared dozens of grant applications. Not rejected them, but shoved them out of the peer-review pipeline into an administrative no-man’s land. And there’s no clear exit. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

The second day of a key federal trial is underway. @ngluckman.bsky.social has details from Day 1, in which two professors who hold green cards argued that the government's detention of noncitizen academics who publicly supported Palestine has chilled their own speech. #HigherEd #AcademicSky

After months of reporting on the Trump admin's effect on #HigherEd from the policy perspective, I was curious about the human impact. So I talked to early-career researchers who told me about how their trajectories have been thwarted. Here's what they told me, in @chronicle.com. #AcademicSky

In light of this morning's letter from the White House antisemitism task force to Harvard — which found Harvard "in violent violation of Title VI" — here's @franciediep.bsky.social and @erickelderman.bsky.social on what a deal between the parties might mean for #HigherEd. #AcademicSky

In the face of pressure from alumni, a student lawsuit, and the federal government, Harvard University has promised to deal with antisemitism on campus. A look at the fate of one program, Religion and Public Life, shows what that looks like on the ground. chroni.cl/3HvCc5t

The signers said they modeled their indictment after Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. “He is proud of his statement, and we are proud of ours,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute who signed the Bethesda Declaration. apnews.com/article/nih-...

Which disciplines have seen the steepest drop in inflation-adjusted pay? My colleagues @mzahneis.bsky.social and Brian O'Leary crunched the numbers from CUPA-HR www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

A thoughtful analysis from @mkhaw.bsky.social of the limitations of philanthrophy in filling the holes left by NIH and NSF cuts. “We’re trying to just get as much money out the door as we can," the Spencer Foundation's president said. #HigherEd #AcademicSky

NSF-funded grants are down 51 percent through May 21, per @nytimes.com reporting. #HigherEd #AcademicSky

BREAKING: In an unprecedented action, the Trump administration has revoked Harvard university's ability to enroll international students. My article: www.chronicle.com/article/trum...

A crackdown on DEI at the University of Virginia shows how messy and complicated it can be to prove that DEI has been eliminated, especially when the college’s basic diversity ideals haven’t changed. New, from me and @katiemangan.bsky.social: www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

New from me @chronicle.com: A professor's account of what happened when, he says, he approached the University of California system's president before a commencement ceremony to register concern about the system's "repression of anti-genocide protesters."

SCOOP: HIV scientists were given a choice by the National Institutes of Health: Eliminate a study of transgender youth, or lose a shot to recover larger grants that had been terminated. They chose the former. www.chronicle.com/article/an-n...

Faculty bodies at two-thirds of Big Ten institutions have now adopted #HigherEd mutual-defense compact resolutions, with the University of Iowa doing so today, per @profpaulboxer.bsky.social. UCLA and USC are the only Big Ten institutions that have not yet considered.

I noticed a new trend: The Trump administration has been highlighting less prestigious colleges in its higher-ed reform efforts. One thing that points to is that officials seem to be choosing where to focus based on viral news. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Throughout his historically short tenure in charge of one of the premier public universities in the nation, Santa Ono often would disappear, leaving staff, including the university’s top administrators, looking for direction, sources told me. www.chronicle.com/article/at-u...

In the 14 years one professor has worked at Broward College, his salary has risen from $56k to $67k — or declined by 15% when adjusting for inflation. To cover the bills, he now teaches as many as 10 classes a semester. @adriennelu.bsky.social shares compelling stats on #HigherEd salary stagnation.

Update on #HigherEd mutual-defense compact resolutions: In the Big Ten, Northwestern and UW-Madison adopted last week. Elsewhere, UConn, UMass Boston + Lowell, Western Washington, Miami (OH), Stockton, SUNY Plattsburgh, CUNY, Lehman, and Kingsborough CC did the same, per @krforde.bsky.social and co.

NEW: It's been a tumultuous few days at the NSF, which froze funding for all new and existing grants, then announced a 15-percent cap on indirect costs. Plus, the agency's coffers could be cut by 55.8 percent for the 2026 fiscal year, per today's skinny budget. #AcademicSky #HigherEd

NEW: Following NIH's lead, NSF announces it's capping indirect cost rates at 15 percent, effective Monday. "This policy allows NSF and its awardees to focus more on scientific progress and less on administrative overhead by aligning with common federal benchmarks." #HigherEd #AcademicSky

NEW: @acls1919.bsky.social. @historians.org, and @modernlanguage.bsky.social are suing the NEH and DOGE over grant, program, and staffing cuts. The associations say the dismantling of the NEH is "unlawful many times over," violating separation of powers and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Two-thirds of the Big Ten faculty senates have now endorsed mutual-defense compact resolutions, with Oregon and Penn State voting this week. Of note: Oregon's resolution cites the Trump admin "actively censoring curricula" and "carrying out politically motivated detentions." #HigherEd #AcademicSky

The reasons aren't always clear, but some reversals seem linked to lawsuits filed against the administration. That's according to data collected by @noamross.net, @anthonybarente.bsky.social & @scott-delaney.bsky.social, who says, “You can’t win if you don’t fight.” www.chronicle.com/article/thes...

NEW: We (mostly @noamross.net) launched a website to shine a brighter light on terminated NIH and NSF grants. grant-watch.us It links to our NIH & NSF trackers, grant info submission forms, and other info. We'll also add new analyses soon. Check it out and let us know what else you'd like to see.

NEW: @chronicle.com dug into 500+ pages of internal reports on antisemitism and anti-Muslim, Arab, and Palestianian bias at Harvard. We describe some key differences in what they found, and what they're recommending. #HigherEd #AcademicSky

The #HigherEd mutual-defense resolutions continue to stack up: UIUC and SUNY are the latest to endorse. But as momentum builds, there have also been questions about how such an arrangement would work in practice — and whether it would even be legal. My latest in @chronicle.com #AcademicSky

NEW: DeSantis directed the University of Florida to cancel a nearly-complete search for its next dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences — because the governor believed the finalists were not in alignment with the state's opposition to DEI