Straws in the Wind - Part 89

From AP: ...An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of emails from University of Colorado-Colorado Springs officials, as well as interviews with students and professors, reveals that school leaders, teachers and students soon found themselves in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, forcing them to navigate what they described as an unprecedented and haphazard degree of change. Here’s what the AP found:

Most students in the United States are educated at regional public universities or community colleges — not the kind of schools that have typically drawn attention from culture warriors. Conservatives have long sought to revamp higher education, particularly at elite universities, saying they are concerned about liberal indoctrination and raucous protests. Though students and faculty alike described UCCS, located in a conservative part of a blue state, as politically subdued, if not apolitical, the school has confronted many of the same challenges as its more prestigious counterparts across the nation.

UCCS lost three major federal grants and found itself under investigation by the Education Department. In the hopes of avoiding the Trump administration’s attention, the school renamed websites and job titles, all while navigating internal pressure from students, faculty and staff who wanted the school to take a more combative stance with the Trump administration. “Uncertainty is compounding,” the school’s chancellor, Jennifer Sobanet, told faculty at a February meeting, according to minutes of the session. “And the speed of which orders are coming has been a bit of a shock.”

...School officials were dismayed when the Trump administration terminated research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation, emails show. The grants funded programs in civics, cultural preservation and boosting women in technology fields. Administrators scrambled to contact federal officials to learn if other grants were on the chopping block, but they struggled to find answers, the records show... “The sky is falling” at the National Institutes of Health, a university official reported in notes on a call in which the school’s lobbyists were providing reports of what was happening in Washington...

Full story at https://apnews.com/article/colorado-trump-higher-education-crackdown-transgender-b40a3f3dfe77d3cb969bcc8a5ab4a61e#.