Once again, I'm asking technologists to ask not "can we do this" but instead "do people want this?"

This is why a number of us have expected the grants for enrollment-based MSIs to go www.insidehighered.com/news/institu...

First day of school means a bunch of cross-institution emails flying and I have a small fascination with how campus IT departments deal with phishing. Mine (top image) is simple but we get fake emails from the university to “test” us. Meanwhile just saw the one at the bottom and it feels like ALOT 😳

It’s the start of year 5 doing this professor thing. Let’s see how this round goes!

Columbia agrees to additional restrictions on international students as a part of their effort to potentially recoup a portion of withheld research funding.

Whoever is training these chat bots, I promise you: the performance of empathy in text does not translate to keeping calm or feeling understood when you know it’s auto-generated and you have an urgent issue.

Columbia functionally returning to its original name King’s College

A sad aspect of this situation is that other university leaders will think this is the way to appease an authoritarian. The other is that they’ll be surprised when more is demanded of them down the road. In the years to come, people will remind them ‘I hear what you say, but I see what you do.’

Breaking news: Columbia University has reached an extraordinary deal with the Trump administration, agreeing to pay $200 million to resolve the government's claims of antisemitism on the campus. chroni.cl/4mgRHO1

The assault on higher education is not just about coastal elite schools. "Federal agencies terminated or were attempting to terminate more than 4,000 grants across over 600 institutions. These grants are worth between $6.9 billion and $8.2 billion combined." www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will make it harder for many community college students to afford food and healthcare. Read a new report from @americanprogress.bsky.social about how affording basic living expenses are increasingly a barrier for community college students’ success.

A calm 24 hours in Colorado: a former senator facing criminal charges for allegedly faking letters of support in an ethics probe; revelations about Rep. Gabe Evans’ background; the state saying it mistakenly gave data to ICE; & Gov. Polis pledging to stop himself from building a bridge no one wants.

Doing a weeklong policy course was exhausting, and wow was it good to get five days to pull apart and fully comprehend everything that’s happening in and to higher education in policy systems in the last seven months with insightful doc students.

I thought the press descriptions had to be at least slightly off. But they are completely accurate. America First is literally arguing that the disparate impact of free tuition for all families making <$300K per year “masks racial preferences behind income thresholds.”

Note also that the lawsuit alleges that because race and class are correlated, providing free tuition to lower income students is also racial preference. They just want a pure aristocracy of inherited wealth

Straight from @Nature and @CooperBioEdLab: The largest survey of LGBTQ+ biologists finds that 40% of trans and gender-nonconforming and 20% of LGBQ researchers face hostility, intimidation, or offensive behavior at work. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It’s federal policy systems day in my education policy class! Felt like an apt opening image.

🧵 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

SCOTUS when Biden administration seeks to reduce student loan debt: Major question where they have to jump in and block before any action takes place. SCOTUS when Trump eliminates the entire Department of Education: Lets see how this plays out, no need to intervene right now.

Welp. That was fast. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

It is the fifth day of our PhD summer intensive but my first day of class! Fingers crossed for no breaking higher education policy-related news this week 🤞🏼

They don't ask me about stuff like this because I would be curious how conservative you gotta be? Do you have to have voted at least twice for certain candidates? Believe that birthright citizenship isn't real? What's the litmus test you're using to implement this folks? They can ask JHU I guess...

At my new doctor’s office waiting to be called back. Tell me why the receptionist looked at me and then turned on Will & Grace.

New chocolate chip oatmeal muffin recipe worked out and it just feels good to bake something again 🧑🏼‍🍳

School superintendents across the U.S. are scrambling to figure out what to do with programs funded by the $7 billion abruptly frozen by the Trump administration this week.

"O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be!" Starting the day sharing my favorite Langston Hughes poem in the family group chat before doing my own reading poets.org/poem/let-ame...

And with that, the biggest set of legislative changes to higher education since at least the 1992 Higher Education Act reauthorization is through Congress and will be signed tomorrow. Here is a good summary of key provisions.

The Trump administration is currently holding hostage nearly $7B in federal funding for K-12 schools--funding that was supposed to be distributed yesterday. They've stolen $80M from Wisconsin students and teachers alone. How much have they stolen from your state? www.edweek.org/policy-polit...

Thinking today about how rich conservatives throw their money at 500 different people doing whatever they want and if 10 payoff they consider it money well spent while rich liberals will make you complete a 35 page proposal to hope to get $15k for certain prescribed activities.

Wild in this moment is watching institutions like UPenn throw the most vulnerable under the bus to *maybe* get funding again despite evidence to the contrary (see Columbia).

How disgusting. Just such a betrayal. www.inquirer.com/education/pe...

This. If we have learned nothing in the last six months, it is that appeasement does not work

It’s been a bleak…day? Month? Existence? Trying to turn my attention off a screen for a bit (we’ll see how long this lasts). And a reminder that there is plenty of work to be done and we all have agency to do something with others to make the worlds we want. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I think we're at the point where public university presidents are expected to resign whenever a new governor comes into office from a different political party. Trump pushing James Ryan to resign at UVA is important, but it happened in part because VA's governor is also Republican.

Yes, based on plaintiffs’ & supporters’ arguments in the SFFA cases, any meaningful changes (however defined/insert handwaving here) beyond expected representation benchmarked with previous admitted classes (some intimate pre-affirmative action, so pre-1970) would be seen as possible discrimination.

It's not just books. It's really anything. Parents will try to opt out of media, assemblies, field trips, etc. It'll be chaotic in some schools and districts.

Sotomayor, in dissent, correctly says that today's decision in Mahmoud will lead public schools to simply censor books featuring LGBTQ characters and themes, creating "chaos" and stigmatizing children with LGBTQ families. This decision will lead to book bans. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

In her dissent from today's decision—Mahmoud v. Taylor—Justice Sotomayor says that the court's holding "threatens the very essence of public education," and that its "reverberations" will be felt "for generations." This is a very heartfelt and mournful dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

State water leaders appear to be coalescing behind a new proposal for sharing Colorado River rights after talks were stuck in a deadlock for more than a year. coloradosun.com/2025/06/25/c...

It's going great if Hans and DeSantis rolled out the same thing today, and they can't agree on what it is— sounds like it's going to be wildly successful for higher education!

Feels like the next phase of the anti-equity project: pointing out institutions who’ve not curtailed the work “enough” and should be forced to go further. Much of this shouldn’t hold up in courts, but the (further) chilling effect this will have is the bigger point.

The national school voucher proposal in the Senate GOP reconciliation plan would threaten students’ access to quality public schools, give tax breaks to the wealthy, & override states that have rejected these harmful policies. Lawmakers who care about our kids’ futures should reject it.