Jeremy W. Peters
New York Times
Excerpt: As conservatives fought against cancel culture on college campuses, they developed a particular fondness for the First Amendment. It was un-American, they argued, to punish someone for exercising their right to speak freely.
Today, however, many of those same conservatives, now in power in state and federal government, are behind a growing crackdown on political expression at universities, in ways that try to sidestep the Constitution’s free-speech guarantees.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: With the Trump administration taking special aim at higher education, conservative policymakers and college leaders are embracing the opportunity to force a cultural reset across academe.
At a forum Tuesday morning called “Reclaiming the Culture of American Higher Education,” the architects of Project 2025, an official from the U.S. Department of Education and four college presidents cast the sector as ripe for reform. The event offered insights into how conservative thinkers operating the levers of power at the Education Department view the current state of higher education and the need for change.
Douglas Belkin and Meridith McGraw
Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: The Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern, according to a Trump administration official.
The federal government is investigating both schools for alleged civil-rights violations, as part of a rapidly expanding crackdown on elite research universities across the U.S. The latest funding at issue relates to grants and contracts with the departments of agriculture, defense, education and health and human services.
Ross Marchand
FIRE
Excerpt: Great news: UConn School of Medicine administrators are going scalpels down on the school’s attempt to forcibly transplant politics and ideology into its incoming student body.
In 2022, UConn finalized its own version of the Hippocratic Oath, which includes a promise to “actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.” Most recently, UConn required the incoming class of 2028 to pledge allegiance not simply to patient care, but to support diversity, equity, and inclusion.