Open Campus

Our local reporters at 14 partner newsrooms wrote more than 500 higher-ed stories this year. Here's a look at the biggest stories and how we approached them:

Join Open Campus this week at #SXSWEDU. Our prisons and higher education reporter Charlotte West will be moderating a session on prison journalism with Yukari Iwatani Kane from Prison Journalism Project and Lawrence Bartley from The Marshall Project on Monday at 2:30 pm, and our EIC Sara Hebel will be speaking on higher education coverage at 10 a.m. on Thursday, March with Christina Shih from Press Forward and Stephanie Wang from Lumina Foundation. We hope to see you in Austin!

Students are criticizing Colorado State University for "preemptive compliance" with a letter from the Trump administration calling on schools to end all race-conscious policies. The school began to make changes to DEI efforts last week when most Colorado universities haven’t since the administration issued the letter earlier this month. Other Colorado colleges previously began to remove references to DEI on their websites and rebrand offices soon after Trump took office. Students have organized rallies, sit-ins, and other protests. The latest from Jason Gonzales for our local partner Chalkbeat Colorado.

Check out this Open Campus article where Carnegie’s SVP of Strategic Communications, Matt Gerien is quoted. His advice to presidents is while they determine how the administration’s directives impact their campuses, they should also openly communicate how they are evaluating the situation and the sources of their information.

Colleges, K-12 schools, and other education institutions across Ohio will require people to use bathrooms that match the gender they were assigned at birth as a new state law takes effect today. Supporters?say it’ll keep people safe?in private spaces. The ACLU of Ohio called it a “cruel invasion of students’ rights to privacy” and said it goes?against transgender people. I wrote something on it for Signal Statewide this week (will link that brief piece in the comments). But I actually want to point to another story from back in November. As the then-bill was making its way through the Statehouse, I asked college leaders specifically if their campuses had seen any related issues. Most didn't want to publicly comment. One made me file a public records request. But a few did talk, and their messages were the same. “The university’s administration has not been made aware of any issues regarding bathroom usage,” a University of Akron spokesperson told me via email.

University of Pittsburgh web pages referencing diversity initiatives began to disappear from the Internet last week after the U.S. Department of Education issued a letter guiding institutions of higher education to remove any scholarships or programs that use race as a criterion for selection. On Feb. 14, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights?issued a letter?to “colleagues” in higher education claiming that institutions have discriminated against “white and Asian students” and asserting that “programs may appear neutral on their face” but “are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations.” The letter instructed all educational institutions to cease “efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race” in programs, or face loss of federal funding. It indicated that the department would begin to act on the threat by Feb. 28. PublicSource identified several web pages that had, until recently, described “anti-racist” programs or those focused on faculty from underrepresented or minority backgrounds that, as of Thursday afternoon, were no longer available online. PublicSource is not identifying those pages at the request of sources who feared their programs would be targeted if they appeared in news stories. From Maddy Franklin for PublicSource

More than 100 students at University of Texas at El Paso students have filed reports with the FBI after not having received any federal student loans since August. UTEP claims that the students were victims of phishing schemes that redirected their funds into scammers’ accounts, but some students blame the institution’s lax security. Read the latest from Daniel Perez for our local network partner El Paso Matters:

Though the temporary pause on potential?#NIH cuts was extended earlier today, it's undoubtedly all still leaving researchers and the institutions they work at reeling. I spoke with J. Michael Oakes about these changes earlier this week. He's the senior vice president for research at Case Western Reserve University. CWRU's the kind of place where simply saying research is a big deal would be quiiite the understatement. It's a huge part of the work and culture there. Oakes stressed the reverberating impact these cuts could have on Cleveland and its economy. But he also just talked about the vibe on campus right now: “[It’s] as if there’s a storm brewing and you just don’t know how bad it’s going to be." More here for Signal Statewide / Signal Cleveland + Open Campus: https://lnkd.in/eQFyZyxu

“We are seeing movement away from generalized degrees for a number of reasons. One of which is … students come to college, they have interests, and taking this sort of grab-bag or smorgasbord of courses doesn’t enable students to pursue their interests,” CCRC's Davis Jenkins said in a recent Houston Landing article.

The Trump administration is attacking higher ed on multiple fronts. For Open Campus this week, I looked at which college presidents, like Case Western Reserve University's Eric Kaler and Louisiana State University's William Tate, are pushing back...and which are staying quiet. College leaders should be transparent with their communities about how they're assessing the situation right now, and be honest about what they're doing, Carnegie's Matt Gerien says. And silence isn't a strategy, Todd Wolfson of the American Association of University Professors told me. “We need them to recognize that, if you don’t stand up now, no institution is safe."