From The Dartmouth: [Dartmouth] signed onto an amicus brief filed July 22 with the First Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Harvard University’s April lawsuit against the Trump Administration. Thirty-five other colleges and universities also signed the brief, including all Ivy League universities except Harvard. In the ongoing case, the Trump administration is appealing a September 2025 ruling in favor of Harvard after the administration froze $2.2 billion in federal grants because the university refused to comply with federal demands to make institutional changes such as reforming admissions and hiring practices, shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion practices and addressing antisemitism “or other bias” in campus programs.
The brief argues that “even temporary cuts” to federal research funding could have “permanent effects” which “endangers” the “life-changing and history-altering innovations” that arise from “basic research” conducted at colleges and universities... Amici institutions listed advancements in “scientific progress” made possible by federal funding — such as the computer, DNA sequencing, the pacemaker and the “decades-long collaboration among academia, government and industry” which produced the internet — as “enormous long-term benefits” of university research...
The Wall St. Journal ran an article about college waitlists for admission. Selective schools offer many rejected applicants the option of being on their waitlists.* Why not? Those rejected applicants who receive such offers will often accept waitlisted status unless they are completely happy with a school they did get into. But very few on the waitlist are accepted. At UC-Berkeley, as the chart above shows, the number who got in via the waitlist last fall was Zero.
UC President Milliken has talked about public discontent with higher ed with opaque admissions being one of the causes. A waitlist with a Zero probability - or even a close-to-zero probability - isn't likely to improve the situation.
From the NY Times: Boston University removed Pride flags that were displayed in campus buildings this month, angering professors who believe school leaders may be suppressing expression because they fear the Trump administration. University officials have suggested the displays could imply the school endorses them, violating its pledge to be evenhanded with its standards around speech. The university’s decision is a new skirmish in academia about campus expression, and it comes after more schools across the country embraced so-called neutrality policies, curbing the views they express publicly. Universities have also imposed more stringent limits on protests in the years since demonstrations over the war in Gaza rocked campuses.
But the debate in Boston involves flags, not encampments. According to the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the school temporarily removed at least three Pride flags, including one belonging to the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. That one was taken down and folded neatly during spring break.
...The First Amendment’s speech protections on their own do not apply at the private university, giving campus leaders more authority than some of their counterparts to determine what may be displayed on school property. The university said in a statement that it “upholds a content-neutral policy” around campus expression and that “outward-facing signage moves speech from an individual perspective to an institutional perspective.” ...
From Inside Higher Ed: George Washington University is pausing admissions to five Ph.D. programs for fall 2026, citing financial hardships. According to social media posts, applicants to the programs received emails last week alerting them that the programs “will not be reviewing applications for the 2026–2027 academic year.” The emails went on to say that their application fees would be refunded and offered them the opportunity to be considered for master’s programs instead. The Ph.D. programs affected are in clinical psychology, anthropology, human paleobiology, political science and mathematics. A university spokesperson attributed the pauses to financial difficulties.
...The suspensions follow other instances of high-profile institutions slashing admissions to Ph.D. programs due to budget concerns, including Boston University, the University of Chicago and Harvard University. In a recent Faculty Senate meeting, GWU president Ellen Granberg asked the university’s schools and divisions to prepare “budget contingency plans” amid declines in applications from international students, the student newspaper, The GW Hatchet, reported. International students accounted for about 13 percent of the institution’s enrollment this fall, a decrease from the previous year...
From the Daily Princetonian: ...The University [has] released its annual Report of the Treasurer. Following a tumultuous year for higher education across the country, the report emphasizes the University’s lab partnerships with federal departments, close ties to active-duty soldiers and veterans, and involvement in AI and public service. The report, entitled “In the Nation’s Service,” comes after approximately $200 million in research-specific funding was suspended last year by the Trump administration, then partially reinstated over the summer...
Princeton spent $283 million in total financial aid contributions in 2024–25 and saw its largest ever number of Pell Grant recipients. Most families that make less than $250,000 per year pay no tuition. The University is potentially facing a new 8 percent endowment tax from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which applies to universities with endowments of over $2 million per student and a tuition-paying population of at least 3,000.
With a projected increase of financial aid spending to $327 million in 2025–26, there is a possibility that the University will avoid the endowment tax by having under 3,000 tuition-paying students. The University has previously declined to comment on the endowment tax and the number of students that pay tuition...
From the Daily Cal: UC Berkeley’s Philosophy Forum is facing pushback from campus students for hosting author and philosopher Peter Singer on Nov. 6 due to controversy from Singer’s comments on people with disabilities. Singer is best known for his novel, “Animal Liberation,” and his advocacy for people living in global poverty. However, he has also faced backlash for his support of euthanasia for infants with severe disabilities. Many in the disability community see his views as eugenics. During the Philosophy Forum event, Singer gave a presentation on effective altruism which was followed by a Q&A session. When asked about a hypothetical scenario regarding procreation, he shared that he believed people with disabilities should refrain from reproducing in some cases.
UC Berkeley’s Disabled Students’ Program, or DSP, sent out an email Sept. 24, approximately two weeks after the event was announced, that said it had been made “aware of a student organization’s efforts to invite a speaker to UC Berkeley.” However, the email did not explicitly mention Singer or the Philosophy Forum by name. The email affirmed a student group’s free speech rights to have speakers on campus while also stating that “constitutionally protected speech can still be deeply hurtful and nothing will hinder our efforts to support impacted members of our community.” ...
Philosophy Forum organizer Matthew Henry said concerns about Singer were valid and important. He agreed that issues such as these need to be discussed, and argued philosophy is the best way to do so. “The reason I am a big fan of Peter Singer is not because of his views on disability,” Henry said. “I am a big fan of Peter Singer because of his views on our obligations toward people in extreme poverty and our obligations toward animals. So, that is why I invited Peter Singer.”
...Henry said it is important to invite philosophers to the forum even when their views are controversial in order to engage with their ideas in conversation. He also said the Philosophy Forum had facilitated discussions with a number of students who reached out with concerns about Singer’s invitation to speak, and was informed of potential protests against Singer...
From the NY Times: The president of the Boston University College Republicans has been attacked online for saying on social media that he had called immigration agents before a raid at a Boston carwash in which nine workers were detained. Zac Segal, a Boston University junior and a track athlete, according to his school bio page, posted on social media on Nov. 7 that he had “been calling ICE for months” about workers at Allston Car Wash, near the Boston University campus in the Allston neighborhood. Federal agents swarmed the business on Nov. 4, detaining five women and four men who worked there, according to their lawyer, Todd Pomerleau. The workers are contesting their detentions in court, he said.
Mr. Segal’s post about the carwash included a link to an article about the raid. He wrote that immigration agents “finally responded to my request to detain these criminals. As someone who lives in the neighborhood, I’ve seen how American jobs are being given away to those with no right to be here. Pump up the numbers!” ... It is not clear that Mr. Segal actually had anything to do with causing the Nov. 4 immigration raid in Allston. The Trump administration... denied that Mr. Segal had brought agents to the carwash...
Boston University’s president, Melissa Gilliam, said in a statement that Mr. Segal’s original post had raised “many concerns” and that the school would support “those who are distressed by this situation, as well as ensuring the safety of all others.” ...
From Inside Higher Ed: Carnegie Mellon University is tapping its strengths in computer and data science to reframe one of its humanities doctoral programs in hopes of preparing graduates to navigate an increasingly tough job market. Starting next fall, the English department at the Pittsburgh-based institution will offer a Ph.D. in computational cultural studies, which it says is the first program of its kind in the country. The program will replace the traditional literary and cultural studies program and will train students to use computational methodologies to produce historical, theoretical and cultural scholarship...
Students in the program will still take standard literature and cultural studies courses, but they’ll also be required to take two computation-focused courses—one in the English Department and one from an outside department—and complete a series of projects guided by computational experts...
But that doesn’t mean the English Department is abandoning the current program’s core focus on literature and culture. “There’s a common misconception that this is pushing us to sell out to computational studies, but it’s not,” Richard Scheines, dean of CMU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said. “It’s just seeing if there’s interesting tools that we can apply to some of the questions humanists are asking, but get much more robust answers from the data than we’ve had before.” ...
Over the past decade, humanities enrollments have declined, more and more tenure-track professors have been replaced by adjuncts, and budget cuts have forced many programs across the country to downsize or close altogether. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated numerous faculty positions and humanities programs, including all of its foreign language degree programs. In 2024, Boston University suspended admissions to its humanities and social sciences doctoral programs. And last month, the University of Chicago paused new Ph.D. student admissions for the 2026–27 academic year across all arts and humanities departments except for philosophy and one program in the music department...
From the Boston Globe: In an era of higher education marked by cost-cutting and layoffs, some Massachusetts colleges are taking a dramatic step: Eliminating entire academic programs. Berklee College of Music earlier this month said it will phase out its contemporary theater degree. Clark University is discontinuing majors in Ancient Civilization and Studio Art. Boston University will shutter satellite master’s programs in social work in Bedford, Fall River, and Cape Cod. And Lesley University in Cambridge has stopped enrolling students in its once-acclaimed creative writing master’s program.
It’s a sign of struggle at colleges when everything from federal funding to international student enrollment is up in the air. Administrators are more pessimistic about their schools’ financial outlooks, and lending agencies have soured on higher education at large. That’s on top of a recently increased tax on university endowments, changes to federal financial aid for students, and a downturn in the population of college-aged young adults in the coming years.
...In November, Boston University said it will not accept new PhD students in a dozen humanities and social sciences programs. Then in July, BU announced it will close three satellite social work programs that offer evening and weekend classes to 35 students with other full-time jobs and childcare responsibilities...
Most of the affected programs and humanities courses are small and graduate a fraction of the students they did just a decade ago. Rhode Island College in Providence suspended 20 degrees, all in programs such as gender studies and modern languages, that project to graduate six or fewer students each year.
...Some colleges are explicitly divesting from liberal arts courses in favor of programs that they say offer more immediate job prospects. In designing a “career-focused” curriculum “driven by employer needs,” officials at Champlain College in Vermont stopped accepting students in seven majors, including pre-law, accounting, and data analytics. The University of Maine Board of Trustees in July voted to create five new adult education offerings while closing seven low-enrollment degrees. But most degree closures are tied to financial woes.
A consolidation of four academic degrees at Clark University in Worcester is part of a larger plan to streamline the budget that includes an indefinite hiring freeze and dozens of faculty layoffs. And Berklee College of Music announced it would not enroll new students into its contemporary theater program as a result of a review that considered enrollment trends and revenues, a spokesperson said.
Hanging over schools is the potential for a decline in international enrollment as the Trump administration clamps down on student visas from some countries and scrutinizes applicants’ social media accounts. Around 2,700 foreign students, or 32 percent of the Berklee student body, attend the college...
From the Daily Northwestern: Northwestern is set to eliminate more than 400 staff positions as it continues to grapple with a $790 million federal funding freeze in place from the Trump administration, multiple people familiar with discussions told The Daily. Staff from several schools across the University, including the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the McCormick School of Engineering, told The Daily that administrators had informed them of plans of staff layoffs hitting. ...Administrators confirmed it will begin the process of eliminating about 425 positions across the University, with half currently vacant, and reduce the University’s budget “attributable to staff” by about 5%. Notices about these position eliminations should occur in the next 48 hours, administrators said.
Administrators said NU currently faces a “significant budget gap” that cannot be bridged without cutting personnel costs. Those costs account for 56% of the University’s total annual expenditures...
From Forbes: A group of the nation’s leading research universities has requested that a federal judge allow them to file a legal brief supporting Harvard University’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over more than $2 billion in frozen federal grant money. The 18 institutions requesting permission to file an amicus curiae (or “friend of the court”) brief are:
Boston University; Brown University; California Institute of Technology; Colorado State University; Dartmouth College; Johns Hopkins University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Michigan State University; Oregon State University; Princeton University; Rice University; Rutgers University; Tufts University; University of Maryland, College Park; University of Oregon; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; and Yale University.
The request was granted on Friday by Judge Allison D. Burroughs, who is presiding over the federal lawsuit. The schools have not yet filed the brief, but in their request they state that each of them “has received millions of dollars in federal investments in scientific research over the decades.” ...
Boston U Suspends Admissions to Humanities and Social Science Ph.D. Programs
In an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed on condition of anonymity, the heads of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), in which all the affected programs are located, pointed to increased costs associated with the union contract that graduate student workers won after their historic, nearly seven-month strike ended in October.
According to an undated post on the university’s website, the programs not accepting Ph.D. students for next academic year are American and New England studies, anthropology, classical studies, English, history, history of art and architecture, linguistics, philosophy, political science, religion, Romance studies, and sociology...
In the email, Stan Sclaroff, dean of CAS, and Malika Jeffries-EL, senior associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, referenced the new collective bargaining agreement multiple times as the source of what they called “budgetary implications.”
The deans also suggested that the larger university (which last reported an over $3.1 billion endowment) is leaving the college largely on its own to pay the higher tab. “The provost’s office has agreed to fund the increased costs this fiscal year, including students funded on external grants,” the deans wrote. “Beyond this year, CAS must work within our existing budget to fund this transition in our doctoral programs.”
The new grad workers’ contract did give Ph.D. students a big raise: They now have a $45,000 minimum annual stipend plus 3 percent annual raises during the three-year collective bargaining agreement. That’s roughly a 70 percent increase for the lowest-paid doctoral students. The university also continues to pay for Ph.D. students’ tuition.
But the BU Graduate Workers Union had sought much more in compensation, including $17,000 more in annual stipends for Ph.D. workers. The union also wanted 7 percent annual cost-of-living adjustments or adjustments tied to the median Boston rent increase, whichever was higher.
The university continually refused these demands, leading to the longest union-authorized work stoppage among any U.S. college or university employees in at least a decade, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. (Center executive director William A. Herbert has cautioned that his organization doesn’t know the length of some strikes during that period.) Last month, the union ended the strike—accepting a deal that gave it less than it desired...
The deans wrote that the pause in admissions won’t merely give the College of Arts and Sciences more time to understand the ramifications of the union contract. They mentioned an effort, underway long before that collective bargaining agreement was signed, in which the university was exploring possibly lowering the number of students in Ph.D. programs. They wrote that “all departments and programs contributed valuable reports on how to right-size our doctoral cohorts, considering factors such as selectivity in admissions, student success, job prospects and placements, standing and reputation of the program, etc.”
A paper was recently presented at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private research institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dealing with a website called Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR).* Anyone can post there anonymously. Although the postings do deal with economics-related topics, and although the website posts a long list of good behavior rules (perhaps to reassure advertisers), the fact that the postings are anonymous allows "toxic" comments featuring racism, misogyny, etc.
Three economists reported a technique for identifying IP addresses from which particular comments come at the conference, i.e., they report that while using public data from the website - sifting through a vast data set - they can identify particular computers (each computer has a unique IP address) from which particular comments come. Computers, of course, are not the same as individuals; individuals may use more than one computer and more than one person may use a particular computer. And there are other caveats regarding the statistical techniques used. Nonetheless, the paper suggests that there are many toxic comments coming from top university economics departments. As the buzz around the paper spread, the outside world became interested. A reporter from the New York Times attended the presentation.**
When advanced copies of the paper began to circulate, users of EJMR began to speculate as to whether they would be "doxxed" (exposed as individuals). In fact, the paper does not purport to identify individuals. There was also grumbling about whether what the authors did was somehow illegal, improper, a violation of "free speech," etc. And toxic comments were made about at least one of the paper's authors, as shown below:
Note that the Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills would probably not want its ad running on this site if it knew about the toxicity. But, as noted above, the ostensible statement about bad behavior on the site may suggest to advertisers that their content is protected.
Inside Higher Ed ran a lengthy story on the paper yesterday: [Excerpt]
Researchers looking into online toxicity found a way to connect supposedly anonymous posts on the site Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) to IP addresses over the past dozen years, according to a draft paper leaked early online.
While EJMR is an academic jobs forum, it “also includes much content that is abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic or otherwise ‘toxic,’” the paper says.
“EJMR is sometimes dismissed as not being representative of the economics profession, including claims that the most frequent users on the platform are not actually economists,” the paper says. “However, our analysis reveals that the users who post on EJMR are predominantly economists, including those working in the upper echelons of academia, government and the private sector. In this paper, we identify the scheme used to assign usernames for each post written by an anonymous user on EJMR. We show how the statistical properties of that algorithm do not anonymize posts, but instead allows the IP address from which each post was made to be determined with high probability.” ...
[EJMR] sent this email [to Inside Higher Ed]: "It is essential to maintain an anonymous forum in the economics profession. EJMR has been used to expose multiple counts of plagiarism, corruption and serious professional misconduct that would not likely have been shared for fear of retaliation by their higher ups or colleagues. Indeed one of the co-authors of the paper had their own likely plagiarism exposed by anonymous EJMR users, calling into question the motivation for the study. This paper’s attempt to expose the identities of the vast majority of good natured users, using the excuse of there being a very small number of toxic posts on the site, is something that many people find troubling, deeply unethical, and may well be illegal." ...
The draft paper does include a chart showing, for each of the top 25 U.S. News–ranked economics departments, the percentage of total posts labeled toxic. The University of California, Los Angeles, at nearly 15 percent toxic, ranked No. 1, followed by Yale and the University of California, San Diego, both above 10 percent...
Anonymity and Identity Online Florian Ederer (Boston U), Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (Yale School of Management), and Kyle Jensen (Yale School of Management)
July 17, 2023
Abstract: Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an online forum and clearinghouse for information about the academic job market for economists. It also includes much content that is abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic, or otherwise “toxic.” Almost all of this content is created anonymously by contributors who receive a four-character username when posting on EJMR. Using only publicly available data we show that the statistical properties of the scheme by which these usernames were generated allows the IP addresses from which most posts were made to be determined with high probability. We recover 47,630 distinct IP addresses of EJMR posters and match these to 66.1% of the roughly 7 million posts made over the past 12 years. We geolocate posts and describe aggregated cross-sectional variation—particularly regarding toxic speech—across sub-forums, geographies, institutions, and contributors.
The conference presentation of the paper on EJMR can be seen at:
The LA Times reports on ripple effects, that is, impacts of the student-worker strike and settlement on other academic and research institutions:
The UC strike is over, culminating last month in significant improvements in wages and working conditions after 48,000 teaching assistants, tutors, researchers and postdoctoral scholars walked off their jobs in the nation’s largest labor action of academic workers. But the effects of the historic strike still reverberate across the nation, helping energize an unprecedented surge of union activism among academic workers that could reshape the teaching and research enterprise of American higher education...
In 2022 alone, graduate students representing 30,000 peers at nearly a dozen institutions filed documents with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. They include USC, Northwestern, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Caltech plans to officially kick off its organizing campaign this month, and other academic researchers are working to form unions at the University of Alaska, Western Washington University, the National Institutes of Health and such influential think tanks as the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute...
“Once you see a university system this large come together and demand livable wages, better benefits ... then you’re going to see it across the nation,” said Melissa Atkins, a labor and employment partner at Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel. “It’s going to be just a ripple effect of university grad students wanting what California obtained.” ...
Just as at UC, we will have to wait and see what changes occur in the use of teaching assistants, research assistants, and postdocs at other institutions that are under organizing campaigns or feel they are potential targets for such campaigns.
