Straws in the Wind - Part 28

From Inside Higher Ed: Public colleges and universities in Texas have been asked to identify which of their students are undocumented so they can be charged out-of-state tuition, The Texas Tribune reported. The move follows a district court ruling [in June] that prohibits students who are not legal residents from paying in-state tuition. In a letter to the state's public college presidents..., Texas Higher Education commissioner Wynn Rosser wrote that “each institution must assess the population of students who have established eligibility for Texas resident tuition … who are not lawfully present and will therefore need to be reclassified as non-residents and charged non-resident tuition.”

The new rates will go into effect for the fall 2025 semester, Rosser wrote. The letter offered no further guidance about how institutions might comply...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/06/25/texas-colleges-asked-identify-undocumented-students.

And from the NY Times: The cyberattack that caused a widespread shutdown of Columbia University’s computer systems last week appears to be the work of a “hacktivist” — a hacker who also stole student data with the apparent goal of furthering a political agenda, a Columbia official said on Tuesday. During the outage, which began on June 24, a smiling image of President Trump appeared on some computer screens at the university, including on public monitors in the student center. The Columbia official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, did not provide a motivation for the attack.

But Bloomberg News, which received messages from the apparent hacker, said that the person described stealing student data in order to see if Columbia was using affirmative action in its admission policies, a practice the Supreme Court effectively barred in 2023... The university is in the midst of trying to negotiate a settlement with the Trump administration to unfreeze more than $400 million in federal funding for research, which the administration pulled over its claims that Columbia had not done enough to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/nyregion/columbia-university-hacker.html.

From Yale Daily News: Yale is implementing an immediate 90-day hiring pause, reducing non-salary expenses by 5 percent, delaying several construction projects and lowering annual salary increases for faculty and staff members. Faculty and staff received an announcement of those changes on Monday afternoon in a message signed by Provost Scott Strobel, Vice President for Finance Stephen Murphy and Senior Vice President for Operations Jack Callahan. The message was also posted to the Office of the Provost’s website.

The message referred to Congress’s present consideration of a steep increase to the rate at which Yale’s endowment will be taxed, one of the proposals in President Donald Trump’s sweeping “big beautiful bill.” Since the House of Representatives advanced a version of the legislation in May, Yale administrators have warned that the tax hike could imperil the University’s research budget and student financial aid...

Full story at https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/07/01/yale-pauses-hiring-tightens-budget-in-anticipation-of-endowment-tax-hike/.