Straws in the Wind - Part 390

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: [U of] Penn International Student and Scholar Services posted guidance for the University community last week regarding a federal court decision vacating United States immigration policies. The June 17 update, written by ISSS Executive Director Rodolfo Altamirano, comes after the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island struck down policies that “suspended, delayed, or subjected certain immigration benefit applications.” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has indicated it will comply with the order while the federal government’s appeal is processed.

According to the ISSS update, affected individuals — primarily from the 39 countries facing restrictions on travel — may notice progress on some employment authorization applications, green card applications, and other USCIS benefit requests. In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Altamirano wrote that the decision is “generally a positive development” for Penn “students, scholars, employees, and departments,” as it “may allow some previously delayed immigration benefit applications to move forward.”

“However, it is important to emphasize that the ruling does not automatically approve any pending applications, significant processing backlogs remain, and the appellate process is ongoing,” Altamirano added...

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/06/penn-international-student-scholar-services-citizenship-policies-trump.

Straws in the Wind - Part 330

From Fortune: The assignment involves no laptop, no chatbot and no technology of any kind. In fact, there’s no pen or paper, either. Instead, students in Chris Schaffer’s biomedical engineering class at Cornell University are required to speak directly to an instructor in what he calls an “oral defense.” It’s a testing method as old as Socrates and making a comeback in the AI age. A growing number of college professors say they are turning to oral exams, and combining a variety of old-fashioned and cutting-edge techniques, to help address a crisis in higher education. “You won’t be able to AI your way through an oral exam,” says Schaffer, who introduced the oral defense last semester.

Educators are no longer naively wondering if students will use generative AI to do their homework for them. A big question now is how to determine what students are actually learning. College instructors across the U.S. are noticing troubling new trends as generative artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated. Take-home essays and other written assignments are coming back perfect. But when students are asked to explain their work, they can’t...

At the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Hammer, an associate professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, now pairs oral exams with written papers in her seminar classes...  Hammer forbids AI use on all writing assignments but tells her class she knows she can’t enforce that. However, if they haven’t written their papers themselves, defending the material face-to-face will likely be “a very stressful situation.”

Hammer’s class is part of “a massive shift toward in-person assessments,” both written and oral, at Penn, says Bruce Lenthall, executive director of the school’s Center for Teaching and Learning. The Ivy League school is one of a small but growing number of universities that have started running faculty workshops on oral exams...

Full story at https://fortune.com/2026/04/23/the-gen-z-stare-meets-the-mysterious-perfect-homework-assignment-in-the-age-of-chatgpt-enter-the-oral-exam/.

Straws in the Wind - Part 328

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: Penn is moving forward with budget reductions across all schools, centers, and administrative units as part of its planning for fiscal year 2027, according to [an] email sent to University faculty. Announced on April 21 by Provost John Jackson Jr. and Executive Vice President Mark Dingfield, the decision formalizes cross-cutting measures first introduced in January. The reductions — which may include staffing changes or modifications to programs and services — will vary across schools and units.“All Schools, Centers, and central administrative units will be making reductions as part of a shared effort to meet this moment,” they wrote in the email, citing rising institutional costs, federal policy changes, and broader economic uncertainty.

According to Jackson and Dingfield, the reductions will be implemented as part of Penn’s finalized FY27 budgets. They wrote that the cuts are intended to address “structural costs deliberately.” ...The latest message highlighted how forthcoming policy changes, such as an increase in the endowment excise tax and to federal student loan program updates, contributed to the University’s financial strain. 

In 2025, Penn implemented several “proactive financial measures,” including a hiring freeze and a review of capital spending. Faculty have since raised concerns that continued reductions could restrict research programs and departmental resources...

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/04/penn-announces-budget-cuts-trump-federal-uncertainty-2026.

Straws in the Wind - Part 312

From Bloomberg: President Donald Trump’s administration has opened a new front in its campaign to reshape US colleges, homing in on racial diversity at some of the top medical schools in the country. The Department of Justice has launched investigations into medical programs at Stanford, the University of California San Diego and Ohio State University, accusing them of giving a leg up to minority applicants. The administration has made similar claims about a swath of universities. But for medical schools, those accusations — and the accompanying risk to their federal funding — are an especially potent weapon.

Medical programs already took a hit last year when the president slashed billions in research grants, which disproportionately affects biomedical fields. The National Institutes of Health alone terminated nearly $2 billion in payments to medical schools as of last June. But even bigger sums could be at stake if the DOJ investigations widen beyond the initial slate of schools.

The NIH awarded over $19 billion to medical programs last year, and students rely on federal aid and loans to afford famously expensive medical degrees. If schools are found to be in violation of anti-discrimination law, they risk getting cut off from all this funding...

Full story at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-08/trump-targets-top-medical-schools-as-next-higher-ed-battleground.

Straws in the Wind - Part 301

From the Philadelphia Inquirer: With continued uncertainty about federal research funding, the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school [last] Friday launched a $200 million fund to finance innovative projects at their earliest stages. The initial fund will support research and educational advances at the School of Engineering and Applied Science over the next five years, the school said.

“The federal government is no longer a reliable partner,” said Vijay Kumar, Penn’s engineering school dean. “And what we’d like to do is to make sure that we can establish partnerships on which our faculty can rely on, going into the future. And that’s through philanthropy.”

It is the largest such venture ever launched by the engineering school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration continues to threaten research funding at the nation’s universities. Penn earlier this year directed its schools and centers to cut 4% from certain expenses in the next fiscal year while keeping in place earlier reductions made in response to Trump administration’s policies and ongoing threats to federal funding. The new fund is not designed to replace lost federal funding, Kumar said. Penn traditionally has received about $1 billion in federal research funding annually. But he said it can fund early-stage research and back research areas the Trump administration may not support, such as climate change and vaccinations...

Full story at https://www.inquirer.com/education/penn-engineering-research-fund-trump-20260328.html.

Disability Creep

There has been increasing concern about the rising proportion of undergraduate students claiming disabilities on college campuses. Most of the UC campuses show that trend. Disabled students can receive accommodations on tests and other assignments. But the rise seems prominent in a number of private universities. The San Francisco Chronicle has a search option for looking at the trend.

From Fall 2013 to Fall 2023:

• Stanford (top of the list in Fall 2023): 7% to 38.2%
• Dartmouth: 7% to 15.8%
• Cornell: 6% to 21.6%
• Harvard: no more than 3% to 21.0%
• Brown: 10% to 22.0%
• Yale: 8% to 19.8%
• Columbia: 6% to 14.3%
• Princeton: no more than 3% to 15.5%
• U of Pennsylvania: 6% to 15.0%
• USC: no more than 3% to 13.0%
• CalTech: no more than 3% to 11.7%

===

*https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/stanford-disabled-disability-student-21361362.php.

The Drumbeat Continues... - Part 2

In a previous post,* we noted that as part of the fallout from the Epstein affair as it affects academia, individuals with little to do with Epstein, but whose name appears somewhere in the file dump, are getting caught. We noted the example of a faculty member at Penn who sent an email inquiring if money for a research project might be available, and got written up in the student newspaper for this inquiry.

Here's another example from Penn: This time a faculty member was found to have attended a research seminar at a facility owned by Epstein. There was no other "relationship." Yet he was also written up:

https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/02/penn-professor-epstein-research-seligman-psychology-trump.

Witch hunts are seldom just about finding witches. They are often about settling old scores, powerplays, or - in this particular affair - Schadenfreude.

===

*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-drumbeat-continues.html. See also:

https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/02/told-you-so.html and

https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2026/02/epstein-in-academialand.html.

The Drumbeat Continues...

Can the Epstein drumbeat sound like a witch hunt? It sure does to yours truly when anyone - no matter how peripheral - gets tainted whose name appears in an email. Example:

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: Penn Psychology professor and Director of the Undergraduate Honors Program Coren Apicella approached Jeffrey Epstein’s foundation for research funding in 2012, four years after his first conviction, according to a newly released email exchange. The email — which looked to garner funding for Apicella’s Human Behavioral Origins laboratory — was originally sent to Epstein’s foundation and forwarded to his personal email alongside a note describing the offer as “interesting.” Apicella personally thanked Epstein for “indirectly” supporting some of her previous research endeavors in the Nov. 15, 2012 message.

“I never knew Jeffrey Epstein,” Apicella wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian. “I sent a single email to the Epstein Foundation in 2012 to ask whether it was accepting grant proposals. I received no follow-up correspondence or funding and I was certainly not aware of any of his horrific crimes when I sent the email.”

The email exchange is one of thousands of files released by the Department of Justice earlier this month. Apicella has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein or his crimes...

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/02/penn-professor-coren-apicella-solicited-donations-epstein.

Straws in the Wind - Part 255

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: Last October, the notorious cybercrime group ShinyHunters infiltrated Penn’s internal data system and demanded a $1 million ransom from the University to prevent the release of the files on the dark web. After the ransom went unpaid, the hackers surfaced online to take credit for the attack and set the record straight. Since 2019, ShinyHunters has gained notoriety in the hacking community for orchestrating large-scale attacks on major corporations such as Google, AT&T Wireless, Ticketmaster, and SoundCloud. This fall, the group set its sights on Penn. “We decided to hit Penn same-day,” a spokesperson for the group said via Signal, an encrypted messaging app. “Some planning and preparation goes into attacking a new organisation, but we can move pretty quickly.” 

Requests for comment were left with a University spokesperson... ShinyHunters released the cache of confidential University files — including dated records and donor contact information — on its website on Feb. 4...

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/02/penn-hack-donor-data-ransom-one-million-shinyhunters-gse-emai.

Foreign Funding

The US Dept. of Education has released a list of foreign funding of US universities in 2025. As can be seen above, having a med school helps in obtaining such funding. But prestige also helps. (MIT doesn't have a med school.) 

UCLA ranks as number 23 with over $750 million.

Source: Section 117 Foreign Gift and Contract Public Transparency Dashboard:

https://www.foreignfundinghighered.gov/.

Global Penn

The student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania made the tabulation shown above of the Undergraduate degrees of undergraduate faculty. Note that fully a third had their undergraduate education outside the US. Note that some faculty who attended US institutions may also have been from foreign countries. So the third may be an underestimate of faculty of non-US origin. One suspects that if a similar tabulation were made for UCLA, the importance of international faculty would also be highlighted. Maybe someone would like to get the data for UCLA?

The chart is from https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/01/penn-professors-undergraduate-institution-degree-data.

Why folks are nervous - Part 2

As blog readers will know, there is nervousness on campus about a move by Murphy Hall to consolidate the various computer systems at UCLA into a single "One IT" system. The Senate has passed a resolution about this matter.

Apart from concerns about individual privacy, etc., there is the record of failures to seamlessly install new computer systems. Blog readers will know about the Regents ongoing lawsuit against contractors involved in a system that was supposed to handle pension payments.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently had a piece about why universities push for centralized, unified computer systems:

Colleges now exist in a world where one human slip-up or system vulnerability can lead to a disastrous data breach that impacts thousands of people’s personal data. In the past two months, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Princeton University have fallen victim to hacks. Earlier in 2025, so did Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and New York University. Those recent headlines have made higher ed’s cybersecurity infrastructure seem particularly inadequate... The reality, tech experts say, is that colleges are constantly being bombarded with cyberattacks. Powered by artificial intelligence, these strikes have become more sophisticated. And there’s only so much that campus IT departments can do...

A fundamental problem for higher ed is that the best IT strategies involve pushing for more centralized control of technology use, which often doesn’t go over well on a college campus. Especially at large private institutions, different schools or departments, such as the business school and the medical school, are more likely to have their own IT teams, said [Anita] Nikolich, [director of research and technology innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] who used to be executive director of IT infrastructure at the University of Chicago. “When you have so many independent IT departments … that itself is a huge risk factor,” she said.

Universities typically resist centralization, Nikolich said, in the name of academic freedom. “It’s a mentality of, if I become centralized and shared, my faculty are not going to be allowed to do what they need to do for their research,” she said...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-cyberattacks-in-higher-ed-keep-proliferating.

What yours truly gathers from the above is that when university computer folks get together in whatever forums they do, central control is now a thing.

Straws in the Wind - Part 198

From the Nashville Tennessean: Medley of Students and Ideas Connecting, or MOSAIC, was an annual event that offered overnight campus stays for prospective students who had already gained admission to the private Nashville school. The student-led group hosted students each spring in conjunction with Anchor Day, an annual campus visit open to all admitted students. The university's decision comes as President Donald Trump and his administration continue to pressure schools nationwide to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts.

...According to its website, MOSAIC partnered with a variety of cultural organizations at Vanderbilt, including the Black Student Association, the Caribbean Students Association, the Association of Latin American Students, the Multicultural Leadership Council and the Vanderbilt Interfaith Council.

... "We regularly review our programming to ensure that we are aligned with the latest legal requirements and that we are having the biggest impact possible to attract the most talented students to Vanderbilt," an emailed Dec. 8 statement from the university read. "Following a recent review, we have decided to expand our on-campus events to all admitted students and no longer offer MOSAIC as a standalone program. This shift will allow us to ensure that every admitted student feels a sense of belonging and engagement at Anchor Days and other added yield events." ...

Full story at https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2025/12/11/vanderbilt-ends-mosaic-trump-dei/87691572007/.

==

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: Penn International Student and Scholar Services issued guidance to students affected by the federal government's expanded restrictions on entry into the United States in a Wednesday announcement. The Dec. 17 guidance urged potentially impacted students to avoid non-essential international travel and to consult advisors before leaving the country. The advice follows a Dec. 16 White House proclamation that widened full entry travel restrictions to include nationals from Burkina Faso, Laos, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Syria. These countries join a list of others already subject to full restrictions, including Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. ISSS added that "individuals traveling on Palestinian Authority–issued or endorsed travel documents are subject to full entry restrictions."

According to the guidance, the restrictions will primarily affect individuals who are outside the United States and do not have a valid visa as of Jan. 1, 2026... Penn's guidance additionally identified the following countries that will face partial entry limits as a result of the new measures or earlier restrictions: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burundi, Cuba, Côte d’Ivoire, Dominica, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. ISSS noted that restrictions on Turkmenistan were modified under the proclamation to permit nonimmigrant entry.

...The FAQs also advised departments to discourage non-essential international travel, anticipate potential delays in arrivals or reentries, and remain flexible with academic and employment start dates. The page instructed departments to refer all immigration-related questions directly to ISSS...

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/12/penn-isss-international-students-travel-restrictions-trump.

Straws in the Wind - Part 178

From the Columbia Daily Spectator: Columbia is absent from the list of 38 universities facing proposed suspensions from a Department of State federal research partnership program, according to an internal memo... The memo and an attached spreadsheet indicate that the department is looking to suspend institutions from partnering with its Diplomacy Lab program effective Jan. 1, 2026, because they “openly engage in DEI hiring practices.” Diplomacy Lab is an initiative between the federal government and over 60 universities that aims to harness “the expertise and fresh perspectives of students and faculty members to conduct research on key foreign policy topics,” according to an information sheet about the program.

A State Department spokesperson told Spectator that all agency programs are under review to ensure they are aligned with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration. The spreadsheet evaluated the hiring practices of 75 universities on a 4-point, color-coded scale... Universities showing “clear DEI hiring policy” were marked red for suspension from the program, whereas institutions showing “merit-based hiring with no evidence of DEI” were marked in green.

...In its July 23 $221 million settlement with the federal government, Columbia pledged not to consider “race, color, sex or national origin” as a factor in its hiring decisions. Columbia has also committed to submitting admissions data to the federal government, beginning with an initial October report...

Full story at https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/11/23/columbia-set-to-retain-embattled-state-department-research-partnership-as-other-universities-face-potential-suspensions-over-dei-hiring-practices/.

From The Guardian: More than three dozen universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Duke have their participation in a federal research partnership on the chopping block after the state department proposed to suspend them over their diversity, equity and inclusion hiring practices. Last week, the Guardian obtained an internal memo and spreadsheet showing that the state department is moving to exclude 38 institutions from the Diplomacy Lab program, which pairs university researchers with state department policy offices on foreign policy projects. The suspensions would take effect on 1 January, and because the list is not finalized, the schools have not yet been informed.

The targeted schools include elite universities such as Stanford University, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University and the University of Southern California, as well as American University, George Washington University, Syracuse University and several University of California campuses. 

Universities recommended to remain include Columbia University, MIT, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia and the University of Texas at Austin. Several of these moved to comply with the administration’s anti-DEI demands earlier this year – Columbia agreed in July to pay more than $200m to the federal government and pledged not to use “race, color, sex or national origin” in hiring decisions, while the University of Virginia’s president resigned in June after the justice department demanded he step down over the school’s diversity practices...

Full story at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/us-universities-cuts-dei-state-department.

Straws in the Wind - Part 168

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: Among the thousands of files leaked in an Oct. 31 cybersecurity attack on Penn were several memos that appear to have been internally circulated among employees with talking points about a range of controversial issues involving the University... One document outlined Penn’s policies on accepting financial donations from donor families with a child actively applying to the University.

“Given the important role that the college application process plays in the lives of so many of our donor families, we must take extra care to avoid the perception, on the part of any individual donor or our broader community, that philanthropy will influence an admissions decision,” the Jan. 20, 2023 document read.

The file added that “many alumni, parents and friends have established philanthropic relationships with Penn,” and that those connections — which include “annual gifts, payments or prior year pledges” — should not be prevented. The initial emails — sent by the alleged hackers — criticized the University’s policy on accepting legacy applicants and students of Penn donors. “We hire and admit morons because we love legacies, donors, and unqualified affirmative action admits,” the Oct. 31 email read...

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/11/penn-cybersecurity-leaked-documents-biden-magill-palestine-writes.

Straws in the Wind - Part 156

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: Penn appears to have experienced a cybersecurity breach... after a series of mass emails were sent to students, faculty, alumni, and parents from accounts linked to the Graduate School of Education. The messages — sent from multiple University-affiliated email addresses — were addressed to the Penn community and contained criticisms of the University’s security practices and institutional purpose, according to copies of the messages reviewed by The Daily Pennsylvanian. Penn’s Information Systems & Computing office wrote in a statement that it is “working with our campus partners to resolve the issue."

“We hire and admit morons because we love legacies, donors, and unqualified affirmative action admits,” the email — which contains profane language and a slur — read in part.

In an email to the Penn GSE community, a spokesperson for the school described the emails as “highly offensive,” adding that they “are in no way reflective of Penn or Penn GSE's mission or actions.” ...

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/10/penn-gse-emails-we-got-hacked-subject-security-breach.

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: Following a series of mass emails alleging Penn had been hacked, individuals claiming responsibility for the security breach released thousands of pages of internal University files on Nov. 1. The documents — which were released by the alleged hacker on LeakForum and reviewed by The Daily Pennsylvanian — include internal University talking points, memos about donors and their families, receipts of bank transactions, and personal identifying information. In a message accompanying the data, the group claimed that it gained “full access” to a University employee’s PennKey account and export data on “1.2 million University of Pennsylvania students, alumni, and donors” from University databases...

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/11/penn-hack-documents-released-gse-emails-data.

Straws in the Wind - Part 150

From the Wall St. Journal: ...Schools that still use legacy preferences are concentrated among private universities, including all eight schools in the Ivy League. That is despite the sharp decline in the practice overall, with about 25% of schools now giving such preferences, down from half in 2015, according to a study by Education Reform Now, which advocates expanding access for underrepresented students on college campuses. Since the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, the number of schools using legacy preferences is down 18%.

Students who claim legacy status and whose families are among the wealthiest 1% of Americans are about five times as likely to be admitted to an Ivy Plus college as nonlegacy peers with comparable grades and test scores whose parents didn’t attend the college, according to research from Harvard University Professor Raj Chetty and his lab, Opportunity Insights. (Ivy Plus schools include the Ivies and other top institutions.)

Some schools say legacy admissions help with fundraising, foster a sense of community and build loyalty. “We think it’s an important part of who we are as an institution that creates a community that persists long after somebody graduates,” Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote recently.

On its website, Princeton says “the legacy preference operates as a ‘tie-breaker’ between equally qualified applicants.”

“The overwhelming majority of alumni children who are admitted—all but about 30 a year—would be accepted without consideration of their legacy status,” the school says.

But more lawmakers and college presidents say they can no longer defend it... In 2024, California, Illinois, Maryland and Virginia joined Colorado in enacting laws that restrict legacy preferences... 

Full story at https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/legacy-college-admissions-preferences-backlash-772c88be.

From Inside Higher Ed: Thanks to a series of settlements and court orders, some universities that had their grants frozen by the Trump administration earlier this year have seen that funding restored. But others are still trying to unfreeze the grants and learn more about why they were suspended in the first place. Since March, the Trump administration has said that it put nearly $6 billion on hold at nine universities. Three universities—Columbia, Penn and Brown—cut deals with the administration to restore the funding, while the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard got the money back via court orders. The fate of the remaining four freezes—at Duke, Cornell, Northwestern and Princeton Universities—remains uncertain. Princeton has seen about half of its frozen grants restored, President Christopher Eisgruber told the alumni magazine in late August. Roughly $200 million was put on hold initially...

At Northwestern, the Trump administration reportedly froze about $790 million in early April, though officials said at the time they never received formal notification about why the funds were put on hold. Since then, Northwestern officials have said they are working to restore the grants—a process that apparently hasn’t gone smoothly. Northwestern University interim president Henry Bienen told The Daily Northwestern in an Oct. 17 interview that “a negotiation really requires two parties, at least, and at the present time, there’s not been anybody on the other end of the line.” ...

Cornell University is also in talks with the administration to find a solution to the freeze. However, President Michael Kotlikoff recently shared new information about the impact of the freeze that calls into question the Trump administration’s figures. Trump officials told media outlets in April that they froze more than $1 billion at Cornell. But Kotlikoff said last week in his State of the University address that Cornell is actually facing about $250 million in canceled or unpaid research funds... Kotlikoff added that Cornell has been talking with the federal government for six months “to identify their concerns, provide evidence to address them, and return to a productive partnership.” In August, Bloomberg reported that the White House wanted to reach a $100 million settlement with Cornell...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/10/29/northwestern-cornell-still-working-unfreeze-federal.

Straws in the Wind - Part 139

From the Guardian: Faculty at the University of Texas at Austin fear entire academic departments may be on the chopping block after the university quietly appointed a committee charged with studying the restructuring of its liberal arts programs. The university – the largest in the public University of Texas system – has not made any announcements about cuts or restructuring, but faculty there have learned the committee was established earlier this semester and tasked with a review that they believe is focused on ethnic and regional disciplines such as African and African diaspora studies, Mexican American and Latina/o studies, as well as women’s and gender studies.

The university did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment and faculty who asked administrators about the committee said they have received no clear answers. On Thursday, UT Austin also announced a taskforce to conduct a “thorough review” of the university’s core curriculum – a set of required courses taken by all students – “to better fulfill the purpose of this curriculum and identify gaps in quality, rigor, or intellectual cohesion”, the university’s president wrote in an email. The taskforce is made up of 18 professors – none from the departments where cuts are feared. Students have circulated an image in private emails and chats mocking the fact that almost all faculty on it are white...

Concerns escalated after a new state law went into effect on 1 September, disbanding the public university system’s long-established faculty senates and giving university administrators near-absolute control over university governance matters. While university senates hold advisory roles at most schools, they are generally a primary outlet for faculty to engage in decisions concerning the university. As the law kicked in, UT Austin’s new president – the first to be appointed without faculty input – announced the establishment of a 12-person faculty advisory board entirely selected by him and “charged with advising on institutional matters and focusing on the best interests of the entire University”...

Full story at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/17/university-of-texas-cuts-liberal-arts.

From the NY Times: Seven of the nine universities that the White House initially approached about a plan to steer more federal money toward schools aligned with President Trump’s priorities have refused to endorse the proposal. On Monday evening, an eighth signaled that it had reservations about it. Only one, the University of Texas, suggested it might be open to signing on quickly.

The University of Arizona rejected the Trump administration’s compact on Monday, joining Brown University, Dartmouth College, M.I.T., the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and the University of Virginia. Vanderbilt University did not directly express a view about the plan on Monday — the deadline the Trump administration initially gave universities for feedback — but its chancellor suggested misgivings about parts of it...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/us/politics/universities-funding-compact.html.

Straws in the Wind - Part 138

From the Daily Pennsylvanian: Penn Abroad has discontinued funding for the Penn English Program in London, bringing an end to the English department’s study abroad program. According to English faculty members, the decision to end the nearly 40-year-old program housed by King’s College London was made abruptly by Penn Abroad at the start of the fall 2025 semester. Though students majoring and minoring in English will still be able to study at King’s College under a typical exchange format, students and alumni who spoke to The Daily Pennsylvanian expressed disappointment towards the termination of the program.

In an interview with the DP, English department Chair Zachary Lesser said faculty were not consulted before the decision was finalized. He added that he had been in conversation with Penn Abroad over the summer about possible cost-saving measures, but that “the final word came down unexpectedly.” Although the department hopes the program could return someday, it will not be active for the foreseeable future, Lesser said...

2024 English program graduate Noah Lewine participated in PEPL during his senior fall...  "Watching the administration continue to undervalue [the humanities] and cut away at them is really disappointing and honestly heartbreaking,” Lewine said.

Full story at https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/10/penn-english-in-london-program-termination.

Turn Around

From the Daily Princetonian: Princeton will require undergraduate applicants to submit SAT or ACT test scores beginning with the 2027–28 admission cycle, the University announced Thursday. The decision will end a seven-year stint of test-optional undergraduate admissions that began during the pandemic. Several peer institutions including Harvard, Penn, and Brown, have announced in the past year and a half that they would require standardized tests, with changes set to take place in the application cycles during the 2024–25 or 2025–26 school years. Yale, meanwhile, has adopted a test-flexible policy allowing students to choose from SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate scores to submit. Columbia has become permanently test-optional. 

Many peer institutions had announced these changes in March or April to begin in the application cycle the next fall. [Princeton] University’s announcement is significantly early in comparison, applicable beginning with the entering Class of 2032, students who will matriculate two admissions cycles from now in the fall of 2028. Like many of its peers, the University said that test scores helped predict academic success among undergraduates...

Full story at https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025/10/princeton-news-sat-act-standardized-test-optional-required-admissions.

Note that the UC Regents dropped testing despite having commissioned a Senate report which suggested otherwise. Maybe now is the time to reconsider. Of course, the Regents have a lot on their plates at the moment. And folks don't generally like to consider the possibility that maybe in the past they made a mistake.