Straws in the Wind - Part 242

From Inside Higher Ed: Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, ordered all state colleges and universities to freeze their applications for new H-1B visas... The pause... will last until May 31, 2027, though some institutions may be able to proceed if granted written permission by the Texas Workforce Commission... Texas’s halt on hiring visa holders comes on the heels of a proposed pause in Florida. Colleges and other industries use the visa program to attract skilled workers. To qualify for one, a worker must be employed in a “specialty occupation” that requires “highly specialized knowledge,” according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 

In an effort to restrict access to the visas, the Trump administration added a $100,000 fee for new applicants in September, which colleges have said would be detrimental to the recruitment and retention of international faculty, researchers and staff members. The decision in Texas came less than 24 hours after Abbott first announced publicly that he was considering such a move and had requested records on all H-1B visa–holding employees at the state’s public universities and K–12 schools.

...On [a] radio show, Abbott suggested that some visa holders may have overstayed their legal welcome, adding that those are “the type of people that the Trump administration is trying to remove.” ...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/01/28/texas-pauses-use-h-1b-visas-state-universities.

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From the NY Times: Texas A&M University said [last] Friday that it would end its women’s and gender studies program, and that the syllabuses for hundreds of courses had been altered under new policies limiting how race and gender ideology may be discussed in classrooms. The university said that six courses had been canceled entirely because of the new rules, out of the roughly 5,400 that were planned for this semester at one of the nation’s largest public universities.

The A&M system’s regents — all of them appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican — approved the restrictive policies late last year, and officials have been scrambling since then to interpret and enforce them. Supporters contend that the rules are appropriate measures to prevent political ideologies, especially those often associated with the left, from entering classrooms. Opponents say the approach encourages self-censorship and is itself ideological. A top-down demand to scrutinize a university’s entire course catalog in so short a time is extraordinarily rare in the United States, where professors have long had sweeping control over their syllabuses...

...Tommy Williams, the university’s interim president, said in a statement that he had directed the closure because of low enrollment and “the difficulty of bringing the program in compliance with the new system policies.” He said that students who were already pursuing degrees or certificates in the program would be able to complete them. In 2024, the regents ordered A&M to drop its minor in L.G.B.T.Q. studies. But ending a full bachelor’s degree program represents a sharp escalation in the debate over what should be taught at public universities in Texas, the nation’s most populous conservative state...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/texas-am-gender-ethnic-womens-studies-academic-freedom.html.