George Ade's New Year's Fable of Successful Tobias:
Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn38xhd8swc.
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Straws in the Wind - Part 208
From Inside Higher Ed: President Donald Trump’s skepticism of the current accreditation system bled into [the] National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) meeting—the first since Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other officials were confirmed. The Trump administration has cast accreditation as beset by alleged woke priorities, a theme repeated [at the meeting] along with pledges to shake up the system. Concerns about a supposed pervasive liberal ideology among such bodies prompted an executive order in April that threatened to strip federal recognition from accreditors that require institutions to engage in unlawful diversity practices...
[The] meeting began with the election of a new NACIQI chair, a process that required two votes after the 18-member board tied on the first try. After the second vote, Jay Greene, a former senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and sharp critic of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, was named chair. He was among the five Department of Education appointees named in November. Greene promised “to be a fair, even-handed chair” despite the “awkwardness” of the vote, which he won after Jennifer Blum, a Republican appointee abstained after voting against Greene in the election.
The vote was followed by remarks from Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent who was participating in his first NACIQI meeting since being confirmed by the U.S. Senate. (While the meeting was initially scheduled for July, ED postponed it until October, and it was later rescheduled to December because of the lengthy government shutdown in the fall.) “Instead of focusing on student outcomes and accountability to taxpayers, accreditation has functioned as a shield for incumbent institutions, or worse, as a tool for political and ideological enforcement,” Kent said. “We will end the practice of using accreditation as a political weapon. As we correct past abuses, we might be accused of weaponization, but those accusations will be false.” ...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/accreditation/2025/12/17/kent-tells-accreditation-panel-buckle.
Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Subway-Related Traffic Issues Coming in the New Year
Decking Removal Resumes at Westwood/UCLA Station Decking removal at the Westwood/UCLA Station will be postponed until Friday, January 2 at 11pm. Work is anticipated to end at 6am on Monday, January 5. This work will require the closure of westbound Wilshire Bl between Veteran Av and Westwood Bl as well as the reduction of eastbound Wilshire to two lanes between Veteran Ave. and Westwood Bl. Decking removal is anticipated to require an additional 10 weekends of work ending in late January. Construction that weekend will limit turns at the Wilshire Bl/Westwood Bl intersection. Traffic Control Traffic on westbound Wilshire Bl will be detoured at Westwood Bl to Santa Monica Blvd via portable changeable message boards located at various locations. Traffic will remain open on eastbound Wilshire Bl; however, since eastbound Wilshire Bl will be reduced to two lanes, message boards will be placed to encourage motorists to utilize Santa Monica Blvd via Sepulveda Blvd in case of heavy congestion. Work Hours Friday, January 2 at 11p.m. until Monday, January 15 at 6 am. Hauling Hours Hauling of the decking panels, deck beams, backfill material, base and asphalt will take place throughout the duration of the closure. Noteworthy
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Straws in the Wind - Part 207
From Inside Higher Ed: Two major federal research funding agencies are altering their grant review processes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, according to a Dec. 1 internal memo that Science obtained and published, while STAT reported that the National Institutes of Health distributed guidance Friday ordering staff to use a “text analysis tool” to search for certain phrases. The NSF memo says the government shutdown, which ended in November, hampered its progress toward doling out all its funding by the end of the new fiscal year. It said “we lost critical time” and “now face [a] significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels. In parallel, our workforce has been significantly reduced.”
The memo said the changes “enable Program Officers to expedite award and decline decisions,” including by moving away from the “usual three or more reviews” of proposals. It said that, now, “full proposals requiring external review must be reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers or have a minimum of two reviews. An internal review may substitute for one.” ...
As for the NIH guidance, while it instructs program officers on how to review and possibly terminate grants, STAT reported that “some outside experts said the guidance is a positive step, making future terminations more of a dialogue that researchers can push back on.” But another media outlet, NOTUS, published a more critical article on the guidance, saying the “Trump administration is pausing new funding for National Institutes of Health grants that include terms like ‘health equity’ and ‘structural racism,’ pending review.” ...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/12/17/nsf-lowers-grant-review-requirements-nih-hunts-phrases.
Monday, December 29, 2025
Pot Boiler
Politico summarizes where things stand in the UC/UCLA conflict with the Trump administration:
President Donald Trump spent a good part of the year trying to bend elite universities to his will, cutting off federal funds as leverage. The assault left schools with a choice: Surrender or fight. But since the president put the University of California in his cross hairs, school officials have charted a decidedly different course. They have neither conceded defeat nor mounted a vigorous defense. Instead, they are watching as UC faculty members wage their own legal challenges against Trump, scoring early wins that so far have restored more than $580 million in scientific research funding the Trump administration stripped from UCLA.
With UC officials taking little overt action to resolve the crisis, the fight over UCLA funding has not progressed much in the months since it kicked off in July. While other high profile schools around the U.S. have either hammered out deals with the government to get Trump off their backs or dug in for protracted legal battles, UCLA goes into the new year with its future stuck in a seemingly open-ended limbo state. “There’s no evidence that any type of deal with the United States is going to be happening in the immediate future,” Abhishek Kambli, a Justice Department lawyer, said during a November court hearing in San Francisco.
...Federal science and health agencies quickly followed through on Bondi’s threat that UCLA would pay a “heavy price” for its alleged misdeeds, announcing they were withholding $584 million in research grants – more than half of the total researchers were slated to receive to fund their work. Days later, Justice officials proposed a deal to settle its case and restore the funding: UCLA would have to pay $1 billion in fines, $200 million more in legal payouts, and make sweeping reforms to limit campus protests, end scholarships based on race or ethnicity, and screen prospective international students for “anti-American” activity, among other changes.
...There has been little movement in negotiations since August, according to a UC official granted anonymity to discuss the deliberations. The realization that faculty had to stand up for themselves spurred Claudia Polsky, director of the environmental law clinic at UC Berkeley, into action even before the sweeping cuts to UCLA research. In June, Polsky led a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit against the Trump administration, featuring researchers who had already seen their grant funding slashed...
In September, a coalition of faculty, staff, students and labor unions filed a second lawsuit over funding cuts hitting UCLA and other UC schools. In both cases, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin granted preliminary injunctions, temporarily restoring the funding and restricting how the administration can suspend funding from the university. Last week, a federal appeals court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with some grant suspensions that were made prior to the sweeping UCLA research cuts...
In a statement, UC spokesperson Stett Holbrook pushed back on the idea it had taken a path of inaction. He pointed to lawsuits UC joined this year challenging new limits the administration imposed on how much universities are reimbursed for facilities and administrative costs associated with research.
...The UC, which has 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students and receives close to a tenth of all federal research funding, is significantly different from the smaller private schools that have struck deals. The UCs face much greater public scrutiny, amplified by being in a deep blue state where Democratic politicians are eager to be seen as resisting Trump. Any deal would likely require the blessing of Newsom, who has made clear that the UC should not give in. A settlement could negatively impact Newsom’s potential 2028 presidential bid that has gained traction as the governor – who is also a member of the regents – continues to cast himself as an antagonist to Trump. While Newsom has been kept in the loop, he is not involved in day-to-day talks and has not recently directly engaged with the rest of the regents, according to a person briefed on the discussions...
Full story at https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/28/uc-facultys-fight-with-trump-has-put-the-university-in-a-tough-spot-00694193.
Bottom line (at least as seen by yours truly): It remains unclear - based on the outlandish $1 billion demand - whether the Trump administration's goal is really a deal with UC/UCLA or whether it is just to keep the pot boiling.
===
Noteworthy is the UC President's 2025 year-in-review wrap up which doesn't mention the conflict:
Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKRTxVYl0VY or https://ia800103.us.archive.org/6/items/united-we-can-yes-on-50-united-we-can-10-3-2025/UC%20wrap-up%20for%202025%2012-10-2025.mp4.
No Phones - A Thought for the New Year
What Happened When My Yale Students Gave Up Their Phones for Four Weeks
Dec. 19, 2025 NY Times
By Colleen Kinder. Ms. Kinder is a writer and an instructor at Yale Summer Session.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/opinion/tech-free-college-spaces.html
Since 2014, I’ve led a study-abroad writing course for Yale University in Auvillar, a village in the southwest of France. For many of those years, I’ve experimented with requiring these students to go completely offline for our month together. No texting, no Googling, no posting photos of duck confit on Instagram. Most of my students last summer were born around 2004. They had cellphones in their hands as early as the second grade; by middle school, Instagram and Snapchat dominated their social lives, and TikTok and ChatGPT have defined their college years. You might think enforcing a technology ban gets harder with each passing year.
What I witnessed in the four weeks that followed has convinced me that we owe it to today’s college students to create internet-free spaces, programs, dorms and maybe even entire campuses for students committed to learning with far fewer distractions. There’s constant talk these days about how higher education needs reimagining in light of artificial intelligence, but we’re mistaken if we think A.I. is solely responsible for our broken system. I get the sense from my students that A.I. feels like the sour icing on an already bitter cake. Adults need to step up and set parameters so that it’s not on these kids to self-regulate.
Not even Will, the self-proclaimed Luddite of my class, had found a way to exist in college unassaulted by distractions. Sometimes, he’d go to a cafe and purposely not get the Wi-Fi password. But even then, simply knowing that someone might text his phone and interrupt his flow kept him from ever sinking fully into a story or idea.
In France we did just that. Yes, my students wrote on computers, but they were without Wi-Fi. If anyone was desperate to research something for an essay draft, they’d make appointments to (briefly) use the laptop of my program assistant — in and out. Once they finished their daily writing assignments, they printed them and at 6 p.m. on the dot, I showed up to gather the pile. On weekend trips, I handed out paper maps and set them loose in Bordeaux. They took to the streets like flaneurs of old.
At the end of such a day in France, my students weren’t pining for two hours on Instagram. If I’d handed them all devices at 6 every night, I’d have witnessed a lot of rotting. Here’s what happened instead: Ping-Pong, knitting, charades, climbing hay bales, letter writing, stargazing, sitting through two-hour dinners with nary a device on the table. Between bursts of writing, my students actually rested. Like the kids that they still are, they played.
After four weeks of these new rhythms, my students were raving to me about the effects: Will was sleeping more deeply than ever before, Gaby was reading quickly again, Devin had shocked himself not only by his output (15 essays in four weeks) but also by how long (a full six hours) he could just sit in a room — alone — and write.
Before everyone flew home this summer, I pulled my students aside, one by one, to scheme about how an internet sabbatical might work back on campus. Dare we dream? If disconnecting had such profound effects on them — everything from deeper sleep to quicker reading, wilder creativity to greater confidence — mustn’t we?
No one was more ready to dream than Devin. He’d found it so potent to draft his essays without a wireless internet connection that he took it a curious step further, lowering the brightness on his laptop screen until it was totally black, typing without seeing his words on the screen, as though the glow alone might spoil his new flow. He told me that his best writing came out of in-class writing prompts, when I forced my students to write, by hand, during seminars. The farther this young man got from technology, the more he seemed to grasp and demonstrate his creative powers.
Going offline could be the cornerstone of an entire college program. Why not create a track for kids who yearn to disconnect, who just need structure and community around doing so?
Students today need a cloister that doesn’t collapse at the end of the day. I imagine students in an offline tract signing a contract in which they commit to abstaining from smartphones for some time. I can imagine flip phones (distinctive ones, to build identity and camaraderie) issued to them, along with laptops wiped of everything but word-processing powers (or, at a minimum, blocked from social media sites). Finally, I imagine an old-school computer lab where students get a limited number of hours of internet access per week — in and out.
Plenty of colleges today have spaces specifically for identity groups (at Mount Holyoke, the Mosaic living-learning community for students who identify as people of color) and even certain lifestyle preferences (at Brown University, a substance-free house). It’s time to accommodate students who have the will to disconnect, so that they can pull off — in community — what’s virtually impossible alone.
What’s paramount is that we don’t underestimate the current appetite for full immersions in the offline world. These days, my students seem to find disconnecting as exotic as France itself — a foreign place they long to know, explore and re-encounter themselves through, as we so often do in travel.
When parents realize what a saboteur A.I. is for learning, they’re more likely to back an ambitious overhaul. I know such parents; I send emails to them every Sunday during my course. A few always reply to my assurances that their kids are alive and thriving: What an experience, they say. How lucky those kids are to be offline. Everyone — not just the young but also parents who’ve struggled to raise children in a world ruled by phones — is ready for sweeping change.
I’m no longer certain that the content of my course is where my greatest impact as a teacher lies. With the current generation, at least, what we as educators keep out is as important as what we put in. In creating containers, we give members of this technology-crushed generation a fair chance to be with their own thoughts, until they’ve made something of them and felt the oldfangled dopamine hit that comes with assembling meaning. I don’t know what we owe our students if not that.
Straws in the Wind - Part 206
From Inside Higher Ed: After multiple censorship controversies over the past two months, Weber State University has announced a “revised approach” to how it enforces a sweeping anti–diversity, equity and inclusion law that the Utah Legislature passed in 2024. But it remains unclear exactly how it will change its actions. “With help from the Utah Commissioner of Higher Education, Weber State is currently reviewing our existing guidance, and where appropriate, will revise that guidance to be more nuanced in its understanding of where and how learning happens on our campuses,” interim president Leslie Durham wrote in a message to campus Friday. The Salt Lake Tribune reported earlier on the announcement.
The goal, Durham wrote, “is to uphold the letter and spirit of the law, but also to ensure we remain fiercely committed to free speech, academic freedom, and fostering an environment where everyone at WSU feels welcome to express their thoughts, engage different viewpoints, and learn from one another.” She said that “we are learning from early and well-intentioned efforts at working within this new framework.”
...Weber State made national headlines in October for censoring a conference ironically titled, Redacted: Navigating the Complexities of Censorship. A few days before the conference was to start, an official at the public institution ordered a student presenter to remove all references to DEI from their slides. Organizers ended up canceling the event after faculty pulled out in protest. The uncertified employee union held a teach-in instead, but it was also censored.
That wasn’t the end of Weber State’s speech restrictions. Late last month, Apache writer Darcie Little Badger announced on Bluesky she was withdrawing as keynote speaker at the university’s annual Native Symposium because the university sent her a list of 10 prohibited words and concepts, including “bias,” “oppression” and “racial privilege.” ...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2025/12/10/facing-criticism-weber-state-says-it-will-be-more.
From Inside Higher Ed: Utah System of Higher Education Commissioner Geoffrey Landward criticized Weber State University’s efforts to censor speakers in the name of state law... The university said last week it had revised its approach to enforcing the state’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion law following several censorship controversies. Last month, Apache writer Darcie Little Badger pulled out of a speaking commitment at Weber State after the university sent her a list of prohibited words and concepts, including “bias,” “oppression” and “racial privilege.” In October, the university censored and canceled a conference about censorship. “That was frankly just misguided and is contrary to what we’re trying to do with invited speakers,” Landward [said]. “We’re not banning or censoring certain words or something because that kind of defeats the whole purpose of having viewpoint diversity.” ...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/12/17/utah-system-head-calls-out-weber-state-censorship.
Sunday, December 28, 2025
In Dialogue or In Denial?
Back at the end of last January, yours truly asked on this blog about whatever had become of the so-called Dialogue Across Difference program?* Whenever the events surrounding the Israel-Gaza conflict, and particularly its repercussions at UCLA, came up, the powers-that-be on campus have tended to refer to that program. See, we have Dialogue Across Difference! We're addressing the problem!
Former UC-president Drake gave money to the various UC campuses, including UCLA, to create such educational programming about the Middle East conflict. The Drake funds seemingly disappeared at UCLA into the Dialogue Across Difference program, although exactly what happened is unclear. But that particular funding isn't the real issue. You really don't need a lot of money to have programming on Israel-Gaza and the wider Middle East situation. As we have also pointed out in the past, Dartmouth created such programming shortly after the Hamas attack because it had faculty on campus who were willing to make it happened. (The powers-that-be at UCLA might be interested to know that Dartmouth received much positive national PR for its program. Actually, on second thought, I am sure that they do know.)
I can now tell you that UCLA actually DOES have a Dialogue Across Difference program (as opposed to just talking about having it).** But you might also be interested to know that it avoids touching on what would seem logically to be the major justification for it - with one notable exception which we will talk about below - namely, the Israel-Gaza conflict.
So, what does the program include, if not that?***
Well, for 2026, there is an upcoming event entitled "Speaking Across Conflict Workshop for Faculty and Staff" in which one will "delve deeper into a core skill for having more constructive conversations across charged political differences." I will unkindly put this program into the kumbaya category - let's all get along despite our differences. Put another kinder way, it's some kind of general conflict management training - but not about any specific conflict, i.e., not focused on The Conflict. So, we will all get along, but avoid specific discussion of what was causing us not to get along.
That event is followed by another entitled "The Politics of Migrant Scapegoating: A Conversation on Inclusion and Exclusion." I'm sure this is a worthy topic to discuss. But let's get real; there isn't a lot of migrant scapegoating going on at UCLA, even though it surely is occurring in the larger external polity.
Next on the agenda is "Speaking Across Conflict Workshop for Students," another non-specific kumbaya-type program. And it is followed by a similar one: "Speaking Across Conflict Workshop for Graduate Students."
The closest program in terms of possibly dealing with The Conflict is "An Interfaith Dialogue on Justice, Forgiveness, and Compassion." But when you read the actual description, it seems again to be generic kumbaya:
"In our deeply fractured world, religion serves both to connect and offer wisdom and to foster conflict and division. Over the course of centuries, it has been frequently invoked to justify brutal violence, but can it be an effective tool to advance justice? To explore different perspectives on the topic of faith, forgiveness, and justice, we will be joined by a distinguished panel of religious leaders: Father Greg Boyle, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Valarie Kaur, and Imam Dr. Jihad Turk..."
Let's put it this way. If there were to be a program about The Conflict, one might expect to see words in the titles or descriptions such as "Ottoman Empire," "British Mandate," "Balfour Declaration," "United Nations," etc., as well as the more obvious contemporary ones: Israel, Gaza, Hamas, Iran, etc., as opposed to "faith, forgiveness, and justice."
The final program listed appears to be a repeat of the first: "Speaking Across Conflict Workshop for Faculty and Staff."
The programming described above will take place in the coming months of 2026. What about programs in the past? What did Dialogue Among Differences do in the spring of 2024? (Nothing is listed on the website that I could find for year 2025.) Apparently, however, in 2024, Dialogue Among Differences sponsored a series of Fiat Lux classes:
⦁ Bridget Callaghan (Psychology): Treat Yo’self: Examining Evidence Behind The Modern Self-Care Movement
⦁ Irene Chen (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering): Writing for Wikipedia: communicating science to a global audience
⦁ Lily Chen-Hafteck (Music): Cultivating Cultural Understanding and Intercultural Competency through Music
⦁ Linda Demer (Medicine): The Autism Spectrum and Neurodiversity
⦁ Vinay Lal (History): The Principles, Politics, and Poetics of Engaged Dialogue
⦁ Susanne Lohmann (Political Science): Radical Disagreement
⦁ Paul Macey (Nursing): Forget the Vaccine, Give Me Ivermectin! Dialogue around Disinformation
⦁ David Myers (History) and Carol Bakhos (Near Eastern): Keywords: How to Talk about Terms of Contention
⦁ Vadim Shneyder (Slavic): Language, Identity, and Power in the Post-Communist World
⦁ Sharon Traweek and Nadine Tanio (Gender Studies): Tasting the difference: Terroir, pleasure, and the politics of food and drink
⦁ Lee Ann Wang (Asian American Studies): Living with Violence Through Feminist Genealogies of Unknowing
Again, The Conflict is not mentioned. Might some of these courses have nonetheless included something about The Conflict? Maybe. Perhaps in the "Keywords" course, for example, there might have been a reference. But you'd never know it from their titles.
There was one notable exception to avoiding explicit mention of The Conflict: a discussion of Zionism that was posted as a video online on March 1, 2024 and presumably took place on or before that date.****
The important thing to be said about that particular event is that it did deal explicitly with The Conflict, so it is clearly possible at UCLA to do so. The topic wasn't then, and isn't now, too hot to handle. The two main presenters were not from UCLA. One was from Carleton University in Canada, a person of Jewish background who spoke Hebrew and had lived on an Israeli kibbutz at one point, and the other was a person of Palestinian heritage who taught at the University of the Pacific and who had advised the Palestinian delegation during the peace talks of 1999. Both presenters - although they had differences - had come nowadays to favor a "land for all" solution to The Conflict which seemed to mean a two-state confederation from which no one would be expelled, with an internal border, and with freedom of movement across the border. In short, a kind of Belgium.[1] The two presenters seemed to agree on more than they disagreed about. There was not a lot of difference in the dialogue that occurred.
Even so, the question is why weren't there other such programs as follow-ups, perhaps involving people with a broader range of viewpoints? Why are there no such events listed for 2026? Is it really the case that UCLA has no one on the faculty who could make knowledgeable comments on The Conflict? (If there isn't, that raises an important issue. But even were that true, with readily-available technology, knowledgeable people can be brought in remotely.)
To be clear, I'm not against kumbaya training. I'm not against discussing the various topics listed for the Fiat Lux courses. But I am against avoiding The Conflict as a major focus of Dialogue Among Difference. I hope that the lesson being taught in the various kumbaya events isn't that the best way to deal with a problem is to be in denial that it exists.
I puzzled over why - with the one 2024 exception - there is no scheduled discussion of The Conflict on the Dialogue Across Differences website, particularly after I read an op ed in the Daily Bruin about two conferences recently held at UCLA.***** One was a talk entitled "Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination." The other was a second conference, created in response to the the first, entitled “Is Anti-Zionism Racism?” The two were held separately, so there was no Dialogue Among Difference involved, either in format or in actual sponsorship.
The author of the Daily Bruin op ed indicated that he had attended the first conference and found the presentation "forceful" but not sufficiently "nuanced." He says that he did not attend the second conference, but had "heard" tell that it was "superficial."
The op ed concludes with these words:
All too often, Zionists and anti-Zionists avoid asking the other what they mean when they use phrases such as “Israel as a Jewish state” or “from the river to the sea.” We must push past this constraint to foster a real, if difficult, exchange of ideas. Especially at this critical moment in the history of American higher education, we can and must do better.
Now here's the real puzzle. The author of the op ed is director of the UCLA Dialogue Across Difference program. Back in 2024, he did do the kind of event - he was the emcee - that he now complains isn't happening. If what is needed now is "a real, if difficult, exchange of ideas," he is the one in charge of doing it. But it isn't happening despite the fact that he is managing the programming.
If the powers-that-be at UCLA are serious about having an effective Dialogue Across Difference program, they should be asking how it can be that programming of the type that their own appointee says is very much needed, isn't listed on the schedule on a regular basis. In fact, at the moment, it isn't on the schedule at all. They might also consider whether someone who publicly critiques the content of a conference he did not attend in a Daily Bruin op ed is likely to want to have a dialogue with those whose views are contrary to his.
The alternative hypothesis is that the powers-that-be think that a "real, if difficult, exchange of ideas" is too much for UCLA to handle and that sticking with kumbaya training is the best we can do. I doubt that's the case. If I'm right, however, the Dialogue Across Difference program needs a change in direction. Either the current leadership changes course or there needs to be new leadership. The powers-that-be in Murphy Hall can make it happen - if they want to.
There are surely faculty on campus who have no personal stake and/or public position regarding The Conflict and who yet have expertise in such areas as history, politics, diplomacy, etc., to organize programming about it. That kind of neutral expert would likely be more open to a continuing set of events related to The Conflict with a broader range of viewpoints than were seen in the one 2024 event which the Dialogue Across Difference has held. And if we don't have such an expert, one could be and should be recruited.
As the Daily Bruin op ed concluded, "at this critical moment in the history of American higher education, we can and must do better." So here's a New Year's resolution for 2026: Let's move the Dialogue Among Difference program out of avoidance and denial. That would be a good place to start.
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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-notable-absence-of-dialogue-across.html.
**https://evcp.ucla.edu/priorities/dialogue-across-difference/.
***https://community.ucla.edu/program/dialogue-across-difference.
****https://vimeo.com/918557576/e75dd48558 or https://dn721903.ca.archive.org/0/items/a-laugh-a-tear-a-mitzvah/UCLA_dialogue_across_difference__zionism%20posted%203-1-2024.mp4.
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[1] Belgium is divided into a Dutch-speaking region and a French-speaking region with a common capital city, Brussels (also divided by neighborhood). But it is all under one flag and the country works out tensions between the two major groups through political means. "Belgium," I should note, is my characterization of what the two presenters seemed to think would be an ideal solution, not an example that the speakers cited. There was no discussion by the panelists as to how to get to a Belgium-type solution from where things are now.
Straws in the Wind - Part 205
From Tuscon.com: The provost’s office at the University of Arizona will invest $200,000 in a new, one-time bridge funding program to support students working on grant projects whose federal funding has been paused or stopped. The program will be in addition to the $1 million bridge funding program started earlier this year by the UA Office of Research and Partnerships for faculty, staff and students facing grant funding cuts by the Trump administration. The provost’s one-time initiative for spring 2026 will provide bridge funds to university grants that “directly support student success, including academic support, advising, mentoring, experiential learning, assessment and related activities,” said UA spokesperson Mitch Zak...
The aim of launching the bridge program, in addition to the fund previously created by the office of Senior Vice President of Research and Partnerships Tomás DÃaz de la Rubia, is to cater to student grants that may fall outside the original program’s eligibility criteria, said Zak...
The Trump administration has targeted federal research funding this year for universities, pausing or stopping some ongoing projects and reducing the percentage of overhead costs covered by grants. As of May, federal agencies had eliminated 73 research awards and grants at the UA, totaling nearly $61 million in unspent funds; more recent tallies haven’t been provided...
The White House offered a higher education compact, initially to nine universities, including the UA, which would give them preferential access to federal funds if they agreed to a list of financial, ideological and political demands. The UA declined to sign the compact, saying academic freedom, merit-based research funding and institutional independence must be preserved.
Full story at https://tucson.com/news/local/education/college/article_976c1d6e-44fd-48bc-94b2-2f8fcd87b8ab.html.
Autism Donation
UCLA has received a $7.5 million grant from Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA) to serve as the Clinical Coordinating Center (CCC) for a landmark multicenter clinical research effort to accelerate clinical trial readiness and implementation for autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.
The CCC will provide a centralized service for the Innovative Medicine and Precision Approaches Clinical Trials (IMPACT) Network, an international group of clinical trial sites working together to advance research. By ensuring standardization of clinical and data processes and efficient workflows for future clinical trials, the CCC will create an environment where clinical research can be effectively and efficiently designed, conducted and disseminated.
The CCC will be co-led by Dr. Shafali Jeste, chair and executive medical director of the department of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and executive director of the Children’s Discovery and Innovation Institute, and Dr. Mustafa Sahin, neurologist-in-chief at Boston Children’s Hospital. Jeste and Sahin will manage participating sites within the IMPACT Network.
“This grant is a testament to Dr. Jeste’s distinguished career as a pioneering researcher and compassionate advocate for children with neurodevelopmental disorders,” said Dr. Steven Dubinett, dean of the Geffen School of Medicine. “Her leadership reflects UCLA’s enduring commitment to translating scientific discovery into meaningful improvements in patient care. Additionally, we are pleased for the opportunity to partner with Boston Children’s Hospital on this innovative model.”
Despite promising developments in therapies for autism with known genetic origins, the field lacks a unified framework for conducting rigorous, inclusive clinical trials. Most studies have focused on verbal, higher-functioning individuals, leaving those who do not rely on speech alone to communicate or who require significant assistance in daily life underrepresented.
The ARIA IMPACT Network will address this gap by establishing a robust infrastructure for clinical trial readiness and implementation. Early next year, participating sites will be onboarded to begin standardized phenotyping and biomarker discovery. Each site will be expected to enroll a minimum of 125 participants for longitudinal study.
“The Clinical Coordinating Center serves as the nucleus of the ARIA Impact Network,” said Dr. Ekemini Riley, managing director of ARIA. “We are proud to embark on this journey with Dr. Jeste, Dr. Sahin and future IMPACT Network investigators to contribute foundational datasets that will enhance our understanding of autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.”
The project places patients and families at the heart of its activities. UCLA, BCH and participating IMPACT Network sites will work closely with patient advocacy organizations to support outreach and enrollment. Enrolled participants will receive ongoing clinical care through the network.
“We envision a research and clinical care system working in concert to deliver therapies for autistic people seeking support, including people with co-occurring conditions like epilepsy,” said Jeste. “This collaborative, international network will advance these efforts.”
Jeste began her appointment as chair of the UCLA Department of Pediatrics on Oct. 1. She previously served as professor of pediatrics and neurology at the USC Keck School of Medicine, and as chair, chief of neurology and co-director of the Neurological Institute at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). After earning a bachelor’s in philosophy from Yale University in 1997 and her M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 2002, Jeste completed a residency in child neurology and a fellowship in behavioral child neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital. She joined the faculty at UCLA in 2010, then moved to CHLA in 2021 as chief of neurology.
Saturday, December 27, 2025
Past-Present-Future
An email from the UCLA Academic Senate chair circulated on December 17. As blog readers will know, the Senate has previously expressed dissatisfaction because of lack of meaningful budget data for the campus. The relevant part of the email reads:
...Budgetary updates: The Council on Planning and Budget (CPB) has recently received unit-level budget information from last year for the majority of campus units. CPB will conduct analyses to provide advice and participate in budgetary meetings in the new year, which are important steps forward in shared governance. As mentioned in November, I am participating in the Chancellor’s Executive Budget Action Group (EBAG), where currently we are discussing methodology to evaluate budgetary items within a constrained budget...
It sounds good, but here is the problem. When I look for budget data for UCLA, the latest publicly-available figures are for 2023-24.* But we are already almost half way through 2025-26. In a few weeks, the governor will be submitting his proposal for the 2026-27 state budget - including allocations for UC. So what does "unit-level" budget information really mean?
To make sense of budget data, whether for a campus unit, the entire campus, or the entire UC system, you need to know about the past (so you can observe trends), the present (so you know where you are right now), and projections for the future (so you know what is planned to happen). Is that what "unit-level" information entails? Apparently not, since only last year's data are included. What can you do with the information that department X last year had expenditures of Y, when you don't know what came before Y, what Y is now, or what Y is expected to be in the future?
Useful budgetary data must provide past, present, and future. It doesn't seem as though we are there yet.
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Straws in the Wind - Part 204
From Stat: The MOSAIC program is the type of early-career research grant that checks many of the boxes of the Trump administration. National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya listed “training future biomedical scientists” as one of his top priorities, and has spoken often about the need to support researchers at the start of their careers, when they tend to do their most original work. MOSAIC is meant to do just that, funding scholars during the precarious transition from postdoctoral researchers under the wings of more established scientists to independent lab heads. Dispersing federal research funding, largely concentrated at private universities on the coasts, to the rest of the country is another NIH goal, and scientists supported by transition awards have a track record of migrating away from the coasts, and from private institutions to public ones.
But none of that mattered. Over the first several months of the administration, the MOSAIC program was terminated because it was seen as running afoul of President Trump’s executive order to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. It was one of several awards that the NIH had created to diversify its grant recipients, targeting a point in the training pipeline where academia often loses people underrepresented in the field. It was offered to scientists from a broad range of disadvantaged backgrounds, defined more broadly than just race and ethnicity.
Many of the MOSAIC scholars felt betrayed, because they had been urged to seek funding through the program when they could have qualified for other training grants not focused on diversity. Now they’re scrambling for other jobs, or to set up their new labs with limited resources...
Early-career scientists... have been pummeled by the administration’s various cuts. All told, 104 researchers saw their MOSAIC funding terminated, according to Grant Witness, an independent project tracking NIH grant terminations, although some have had their grants restored for now under a court order. In addition, a STAT analysis of NIH data shows that the agency awarded new transition grants to 172 fewer postdoctoral researchers in the nine months before the government shutdown than in the same period the previous year — a 10% reduction...
Full story at https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/08/trump-nih-cuts-impacts-next-gen-researchers-american-science-shattered-series/.
Friday, December 26, 2025
Don't plan on a gold watch...
...but if you are thinking of retirement from UCLA, there is this:
Path Forward to Retirement - Faculty - Workshop 1
Date & Time: Feb 20, 2026 09:30 AM
Description
This workshop begins with an overview of ensuring that your emerita/us years will be both secure and professionally satisfying. Topics include understanding your rights and privileges as an emeritus/a professor, negotiating a Pathways to Retirement agreement that sets out your plans for up to two years prior to retirement and three years following, and coordinating your departmental agreement with UC retirement benefits and other retirement resources. Then a representative from UC/Fidelity Services will discuss financial planning and management in your retirement years. The formal program will conclude at approximately 11:45am, at which time Q + A will be available.
I won't put the Zoom registration link here to avoid Zoom-bombing. But it you check with the UCLA Emeriti/Retirees Relations Center, you can obtain the link.
Note: Professor Emerita Rosina Becerra is UCLA Faculty Retirement Liaison as of July 1, 2025
The Chancellor’s Office created the position of Faculty Retirement Liaison in 2015 as part of its initiative to enhance the continuing role of emeriti faculty in campus research, teaching, and service.
As the Faculty Retirement Liaison, Professor Emerita Rosina Becerra serves as an advisor and advocate for faculty members who are considering retirement, as well as those who have already retired. She helps Academic Senate faculty members develop Pathways to Retirement agreements with their department chairs. She helps all retiring faculty navigate the University’s general retirement process and coordinate it with their individual pre- and post-retirement plans. She works semi-autonomously from the Academic Affairs & Personnel Office, and all her discussions with individual faculty members are confidential. She oversees the Pathways to Retirement Program and The Path Forward: Faculty Planning for Retirement Workshops.
Rosina Becerra is available for consultation year-round. She meets privately with faculty individually on campus, and by Zoom or phone.
Source: https://errc.ucla.edu/faculty.
Straws in the Wind - Part 203
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: One of the biggest buzzwords in modern academe is innovation. At Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, it has the force of a mantra. The word has dangled from 50-foot banners gracing the facades of campus buildings. It’s been used to jazz up real-estate ventures, like the university’s new Robotics Innovation Center, which is due to open soon on the site of a former steel mill. So it is perhaps unsurprising that innovation also appears in marketing materials for a new Ph.D. program: “computational cultural studies.” The more apt word might be coup. That’s because Carnegie Mellon already has a Ph.D. program in cultural studies. Or it did, anyway, until February 2024, when Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, placed an administrative “pause” on admissions to the literary and cultural-studies (LCS) doctoral program...
Unlike its [English] departmental sister, the Ph.D. program in rhetoric, the LCS Ph.D. has focused on providing doctoral-level training in both literature and cultural studies — the only such training that Carnegie Mellon offers in either of those subject areas. The suspension of applications to the program, though, has left current LCS Ph.D. students in an awkward limbo. One student has left for another program; others have considered doing the same, or have tried. Those who remain have had to carry out their work under a shadow of uncertainty. Will the Ph.D. program even exist by the time they finish earning their degrees? ...
The new computational cultural-studies program is being celebrated as a means of saving the humanities and improving Ph.D. students’ job prospects. The irony, for current students in the LCS program, is that it is also contributing to the humanities-job crisis. Carnegie Mellon has announced two job openings that are ostensibly being offered through its English department, according to the Modern Language Association’s job list: One is advertised as tenure track, and the other is nontenure track. The two positions are to comprise half of a new “computational humanities” cluster hire focused on “artificial intelligence, machine learning, data modeling, computational linguistics, historical analysis, and cultural analytics.” ...
Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-coup-at-carnegie-mellon.
More on the Way We Live Now
From an email circulated last week before the UCLA winter closure:
Dear UCLA International Students and Scholars,
On December 16, 2025, the White House issued a proclamation titled, "Restricting and Limiting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the Security of the United States."* This proclamation builds upon the June 4, 2025 Proclamation,** and expands travel restrictions on entry into the United States for citizens of specific countries who are outside the United States and do not have a valid United States visa. For more information, please see the Proclamation fact sheet*** for the updated list of affected countries and read our previous message from June 5, 2025.****
The proclamation is effective at 12:01 a.m. eastern standard time on January 1, 2026. International students and scholars from listed countries and currently in the United States in valid status may continue their studies and research activities without interruption.
While entry visas issued before the effective date are expected to remain valid, international students and scholars from impacted countries are cautioned that travel outside the United States may still result in restrictions on re-entry on or after January 1, 2026.
The UCLA Dashew Center continues to monitor developments and is closely reviewing the December 16 Proclamation to support members of the UCLA community who may be impacted by these entry restrictions. If you hold an F or J visa and believe you may be affected, please refrain from making international travel plans until you have consulted with an immigration counselor at the Dashew Center.
We remain focused on supporting and keeping all members of our international community well informed. You may contact us by email or seek individual support by scheduling an appointment with our immigration counselors.
Sincerely,
Sam Nahidi, Director, UCLA Dashew Center
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Klein vs. Bernardo - Part 5 (the decision)
From the Daily Bruin: A Superior Court judge in Santa Monica tentatively ruled in favor of UC administrators in a lawsuit brought by a UCLA lecturer requesting more than $13 million in damages. Gordon Klein, a continuing lecturer in accounting, initially sued Antonio Bernardo – the former dean of the UCLA Anderson School of Management – and the UC Board of Regents in September 2021. The lawsuit followed UCLA placing Klein on administrative leave in June 2020 because of an email in which he said he would not provide grading accommodations for Black students in the wake of the murder of George Floyd – an unarmed Black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer.
Judge H. Jay Ford III sided with the Regents and Bernardo on all claims in his tentative Dec. 1 ruling. Klein’s lawyers filed an objection to the entirety of the tentative ruling Dec. 16...
Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2025/12/23/court-tentatively-rules-in-favor-of-uc-administrators-in-lawsuit-by-ucla-lecturer.
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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/09/klein-vs-bernardo-part-4-now-we-wait.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/08/klein-v-bernardo-and-regents-part-3.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/07/klein-v-bernardo-and-regents-part-2.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/07/klein-v-bernardo-and-regents.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-trial.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2024/02/slowly-grinding-wheels-part-2.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2024/01/slowly-grinding-wheels.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/two-speech-cases-that-involve-ucla.html (scroll down); https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/09/reinstated-year-later-now-lawsuit.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2020/09/reinstated.html.
Thursday, December 25, 2025
Nathan Hale, meet Jonathan Hale
From the Westside Current: Jonathan Hale, who has become a fixture in Los Angeles’ growing guerrilla-crosswalk movement, was cited for vandalism Sunday after police stopped him midway through painting what he described as a badly needed crossing at a hazardous Westwood intersection. Hale was arrested and cited while painting a crosswalk at Kelton and Wilkins avenues, according to video posted to social media. The longtime bicycle advocate is part of People’s Vision Zero, a group that has been painting or repainting crosswalks at intersections where pedestrians and cyclists have been injured or killed...
Hale received a $250 citation and said he plans to “face justice” when he appears in court on Jan. 5. Mayor Karen Bass’ office issued a statement Tuesday addressing Hale and People’s Vision Zero. “Despite communication about city, state, and federal laws and parameters, Jonathan has chosen to continue to pursue his own course of action,” the statement read. “Our office called him again Tuesday to offer to work together.”
Hale, an avid cyclist, said he contacted the mayor’s office in advance to say he and others would be at Kelton and Wilkins painting the crosswalk, but said he never received a response...
Or direct to https://www.instagram.com/p/DR_IQu_ETwN.
And you can Google Nathan Hale if you don't know his tale.
Straws in the Wind - Part 202
From Inside Higher Ed: Current and prospective Purdue University graduate students say the institution rejected a slew of Chinese applicants from its grad programs for this academic year. Also, one grad student says the university told grad admissions committees in the past couple of months that it’s highly unlikely to accept students from any “adversary nation” for next year. Faculty were told those countries are China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela, said Kieran Hilmer, a teaching assistant on the leadership committee of Graduate Rights and Our Wellbeing (GROW), a group trying to unionize Purdue grad workers. That list broadly matches the commerce secretary’s catalog of foreign adversaries. Hilmer said the university conveyed this prohibition verbally. “They didn’t write any of this down,” he said.
Purdue isn’t commenting on the allegations. The university has faced scrutiny from members of Congress about its ties to China. In May, the Trump administration briefly said it would revoke Chinese students’ visas nationwide. The president has since changed his tune and said he would welcome more students from China. ...Purdue spokespeople also didn’t provide a response to the Lafayette Journal & Courier and the Exponent student newspaper when asked about this issue. The Journal & Courier, which first reported the story, cited four faculty members from “a wide range of departments” who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the university.
...While Purdue won’t explain what actions it’s taking or why, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party said in a September report that it’s been investigating Purdue and five other universities—Stanford and Carnegie Mellon Universities and the Universities of Maryland, Southern California and Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—all year “regarding the presence and research activities of Chinese national students on their campuses.” ...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/graduate/2025/12/12/purdue-allegedly-rejecting-chinese-other-grad-students.
The Lease - Part 2
From the Daily Bruin: UCLA’s 10-acre lease with the Department of Veterans Affairs, which includes Jackie Robinson Stadium, was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit on Tuesday [Dec. 23]. “Because we are reversing judgment on Plaintiffs’ charitable trust claim, we dismiss UCLA’s consolidated appeals as moot and vacate any injunctive relief with respect to UCLA’s lease and services,” said Judge Ana de Alba in the court’s opinion.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a Vietnam war-era veteran and UCLA alumnus, barred UCLA baseball from its home ballpark of 44 seasons in September 2024 after deeming the university’s lease illegal for not primarily serving veterans in a class-action lawsuit – forcing the team to move practices off site, either using other facilities on campus or traveling to nearby high school and junior college fields. The lawsuit was filed by veterans advocates, who claimed that the lease was mismanagement on the part of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The dispute centered on whether the land – or rents earned from it – was sufficiently benefiting veterans, a legal requirement...
Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2025/12/23/us-court-of-appeals-upholds-uclas-lease-with-department-of-veterans-affairs.
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*Our previous post on this matter is at:
https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-lease.html.
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Note: According to the LA Times, there will be a refiling of the case against UCLA on other grounds. See https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-12-23/appeals-court-affirms-federal-judges-order-to-build-housing-on-vas-west-los-angeles-campus.
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Our traditional offering for tonight
Well, it's traditional in the sense that we did it last year.
Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5mF2TCyS-o.
Straws in the Wind - Part 201
From Inside Higher Ed: Two months after legal teams at University of North Carolina system campuses split over whether syllabi are considered public documents, system president Peter Hans announced plans to adopt a new policy that will answer an unequivocal yes. Starting as early as next fall, faculty members at UNC institutions will be required to upload their syllabi to a searchable public database, according to a draft of the policy provided to Inside Higher Ed by student journalists at The Daily Tar Heel. These public syllabi must include the course name, prefix, description, course objectives and student learning outcomes, as well as “a breakdown of how student performance will be assessed, including the grading scale, percentage breakdown of major assignments, and how attendance or participation will affect a student’s final grade.” Faculty must also include any course materials that students are required to purchase.
...The system is currently seeking feedback on the draft policy, a system spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed, and “after receiving input from elected faculty representatives and other stakeholders, the system office will revise the draft as needed.” Only Hans, and not the Board of Governors, will need to approve the policy. In October, system campuses disagreed over whether to give up syllabi in response to a broad public records request by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. Alongside other conservative groups, the Heritage Foundation has used open records laws to gather information on and expose public university faculty members who teach about race, gender, sexuality and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Syllabi that include classroom policies, required readings and instructor’s names are particularly valuable to conservative critics. The UNC system flagship in Chapel Hill determined that syllabi are not automatically subject to such requests. But officials at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro declared the opposite...
The new policy would also classify syllabi as “work made for hire,” which makes the institution—not the syllabus’s creator—the copyright owner of the syllabus, according to U.S. copyright law. “As such, instructors do not retain personal copyright in these materials, and syllabi owned by a public agency generated in the course of public business, are not copyrightable in a manner that would exempt syllabi from public access to these records, consistent with state and federal public records laws,” the draft policy stated...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2025/12/12/unc-professors-must-soon-post-syllabi-publicly.
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From the Yale Daily News: In the wake of a shooting at Brown University... that killed two students and wounded nine others, Yale President Maurie McInnis chose not to issue a campus-wide statement about the attack... In her... email to the News, McInnis wrote that she was “horrified” by the attacks at Brown and in Sydney. But in keeping with the recommendations of a faculty committee’s report, she did not release a campus-wide statement about either of the shootings. “When considering whether to make a public statement, I do follow the guidelines laid out in the Report of the Committee on Institutional Voice,” McInnis wrote in response to a question about the report’s influence on her decision-making. “In this case, I decided to emphasize the work of campus safety.”
Published in October 2024, the report advises Yale leaders to refrain from commenting on matters of public importance, with few exceptions. The report states that university leaders may release statements of “empathy or concern in response to events outside the university,” but advises that leaders should comment only on events of “transcendent importance” to Yale...
Full story at https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/12/19/mcinnis-quiet-on-brown-shooting-cites-institutional-voice-report/.
Brownian Movement (Toward Security)
From ABC News: Brown University is moving forward with a series of safety and security steps following the deadly shooting on campus this month that left two students dead and nine others injured. The Ivy League university's announcement comes the same day the Department of Education announced it would be reviewing the school for potential Clery Act violations.* Brown University's review includes putting Rodney Chatman, the vice president for public safety and emergency management for the school on leave, effective immediately, the university's president announced on Monday. The former chief of police of the Providence Police Department, Hugh T. Clements, will serve as interim chief.
In a message to the campus community, President Christina H. Paxson said the university will first focus on immediate safety measures through a rapid response team working to ensure the campus remains secure during winter break and ahead of the Spring 2026 semester. The university will also hire outside experts to conduct an after-action review of the shooting. That review will examine campus safety conditions leading up to the incident, how the university prepared for and responded on the day of the shooting, and how emergency response efforts were handled afterward...
Full story at https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/brown-university-police-chief-put-leave-dept-education/story?id=128637735.
It's hard to imagine that similar reviews aren't occurring at other universities including UCLA.
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*U.S. Department of Education Announces Review of Brown University for Potential Clery Act Violations
December 22, 2025
Today, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) announced it will conduct a program review of Brown University (Brown) in response to the December 13, 2025, shooting on its campus, which killed two students. The Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) will investigate if Brown violated Section 485(f) of the Higher Education Act, otherwise known as the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act (Clery Act), which requires institutions of higher education to meet certain campus safety and security-related requirements as a condition of receiving federal student aid.
In the hours after the shooting, public reporting appeared to show that Brown’s campus surveillance and security system may not have been up to appropriate standards, allowing the suspect to flee while the university seemed unable to provide helpful information about the profile of the alleged assassin. Additionally, many Brown students and staff reported that the university’s emergency notifications about the active shooter were delayed, raising significant concerns about their safety alert system. If true, these shortcomings constitute serious breaches of Brown’s responsibilities under federal law.
“After two students were horrifically murdered at Brown University when a shooter opened fire in a campus building, the Department is initiating a review of Brown to determine if it has upheld its obligation under the law to vigilantly maintain campus security,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Students deserve to feel safe at school, and every university across this nation must protect their students and be equipped with adequate resources to aid law enforcement. The Trump Administration will fight to ensure that recipients of federal funding are vigorously protecting students’ safety and following security procedures as required under federal law.”
As part of the review, FSA has requested that Brown submit information by January 30, 2026, including:
- Copies of the original 2024 and 2025 Annual Security Reports (ASRs), and any revised versions of these reports that were produced for the purpose of complying with the Clery Act, along with credible evidence of distribution and/or redistribution;
- An “audit trail” showing all incidents of crime (organized by offense classification) for the calendar years 2021-2024 and an “audit trail” showing all arrests made by Brown University Public Safety and Emergency Management Department (BPS) or other state or local law enforcement agencies, and all referrals for disciplinary action against students or employees for violations of state laws and local ordinances related to the illegal possession, use, and/or distribution of weapons, drugs, or liquor that were included in the statistical disclosures contained in the University’s 2024 and 2025 ASRs;
- A copy of the BPS’s activity/dispatch/call log for calendar years 2021-2025;
- A copy of the daily crime log for calendar years 2021-2025;
- A list of all Timely Warnings and Emergency Notifications issued by the university during calendar years 2021-2025, with a brief description of the means or media used to disseminate the notices;
- A copy of all of Brown’s policies and procedures, including any internal policies and procedures, related to timely warnings and emergency notifications, maintenance of a daily crime log, and emergency response notifications and evacuation, and a copy of any assessments of Brown’s campus safety policies and practices conducted since 2020; and
- A complete set of BPS’s standard operating procedures regarding dispatch, response to calls, reporting writing, arrests including issuance of citations, and protocols for active shooter scenarios.
Background
The Clery Act requires colleges and universities receiving federal student aid to annually disseminate a public Annual Security Report to employees and students, which must include statistics of campus crime and details about the efforts taken to improve campus safety, including timely issuance of campus alerts and safety procedures to the campus community. FSA is responsible for enforcement of the Clery Act and may undertake an investigation of a specific incident or conduct a program review that examines systemic challenges with complying with the law. The Department may fine institutions of higher education that have violated the Clery Act and may require them to make policy changes to come into compliance with the law.
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