Teaching and Learning
Co-Creating the Classroom: Collaborative Ground Rules for Engaged Learning (Angela Rodriguez Mooney, Faculty Focus, May 14, 2025): One underutilized but powerful strategy for fostering classroom connection and motivation begins on the very first day of class.
Why Faculty Hate Teaching Evaluations (Chronicle of Higher Education: College Matters, May 13, 2025): 40-minute podcast. There’s good reason to question whether colleges should be relying on teaching evaluations to inform big decisions about an instructor’s promotion, pay, or even continued employment.
Hands-on, High-Stakes Teaching and Learning (Steven Mintz, May 13, 2025): What higher education can learn from a film program.
What Can College Instructors Offer Their Students in the Age of AI (Donald A. Saucier, Faculty Focus, May 12, 2025): Given a reality in which AI can provide and synthesize information for and to our students at their requests in seconds, it is not completely paranoid to ask the question, “What can we, as college instructors, offer our students in the age of AI?”
A Neuroscientific Perspective on Understanding and Managing Stress (Dr. Julie-Myrtille Bourgognon, Learning Scientists, May 9, 2025): It is crucial for students to learn to manage their stress levels to avoid them reaching chronic levels.
Higher Education and the Trump Administration
Academic Freedom, DEI, Admissions, and Speech
The Pendulum Has Swung Away from Social Justice (Noliwe M. Rooks, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2025): Trump is destroying the DEI regime using the same tools that built it.
Shifting Winds: Students Under Fire, 2020-2024 (FIRE, May 2025): From 2020-2024, FIRE documented 1,014 students and student groups who were either targeted for or recipients of punishment from either their administration or student government in response to their protected speech.
Universities in the Crosshairs
50-Plus Groups Write to Trump Protesting His Attack on Higher Ed (Jessica Blake, May 15, 2025): Dozens of higher education associations publicly called on President Donald Trump to restore the “historic compact” between American universities and the federal government—the latest sign of growing public opposition to the GOP’s attack on higher ed.
Harvard Hit with Further $450 Million Freeze on Grants (Josh Moody, Inside Higher Ed, May 14, 2025): While the federal government previously froze more than $2 billion in federal research funds after university leaders rejected a list of sweeping demands, the latest action follows a war of words between Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Harvard president Alan Garber.
These 32 Colleges Could Take a Financial Hit Under Republicans’ Expanded Endowment Tax (Dan Berrett and Brian O’Leary, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2025): Taxes on endowments could go up under two reportedly different Republican plans, according to a Chronicle analysis.
Few Support Punitive Funding Cuts to Colleges and Universities (AP/NORC, May 9, 2025): Only 27% of those polled favor withholding federal funding unless they comply with requirements related to the president’s goals.
The NIH Is Requiring Grantees to Follow Trump’s Anti-Trans Executive Order (Stephanie M. Lee, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 2025): At least two institutions have been directed to comply with the order as a condition of getting NIH funding, marking a new front in the administration’s efforts to reshape the scientific ecosystem.
West Point Is Supposed to Educate, Not Indoctrinate (Graham Parsons, New York Times, May 8, 2025): A professor of philosophy at West Point writes that the United States Military Academy at West point abandoned its core principles “in a matter of days” under orders from President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
International Students and Scholars
Trump Is Ending Immigration Protections for Afghans, Including Students (Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 14, 2025): Students are “terrified for their families and for their own futures,” said Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac. The impact on students is “not just abstract,” he said. “That fear shows up in real ways — missed assignments, deteriorating mental health, visa uncertainty.”
Georgetown Researcher Released from ICE Custody after Judge’s Order (Salvador Rizzo and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, May 14, 2025: Badar Khan Suri, who has been held in Texas since March, returned to Virginia on Wednesday night after a federal judge found he raised substantial First and Fifth amendment claims.
Trump’s Reshaping of Higher Education Tests America’s Appeal for International Students (Annie Ma, Makiya Seminera, and Jocelyn Gecker, AP, May 12, 2025): “All of the Trump administration’s activities have been sending a message that international students are not welcome in the U.S.,” said Clay Harmon, executive director of AIRC, a professional association for international enrollment managers at colleges.
Tufts Student Rümeysa Öztürk Released from ICE Detention by Judge (Prem Thakker, Zeteo, May 9, 2025): An internal State Department memo admits the department had no evidence showing Öztürk engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization.
Extra Credit Reading
How House Lawmakers Could Reshape Higher Ed (Jessica Blake, Inside Higher Ed, May 15, 2025): House committees put the finishing touches on their sections of the reconciliation megabill early this week. Now, all the pieces of the puzzle are laid out, and higher ed experts say the picture is grim.
Shame on the White House (George Saunders, New York Times, May 13, 2025): The recipient of the Library of Congress’s Prize for American Fiction in 2023 considers the firing of the librarian of Congress.
The Conscience of a Campus Conservative (Daniel J. Solomon, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 2025): A conservative humanist cannot deny that phenomena like race, sex, and sexuality structure human experience and deserve examination in our respective fields. There is no abstract human shorn of particularities and peculiarities.
On Learning and Pleasure (Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 2025): Do people hate learning, or do they just hate school?
A Total Assault on the University (James Chandler, Los Angeles Review of Books, May 4, 2025): Claims of combating antisemitism are a bogus rationale for the Trump Administration’s ongoing assault on universities, from 2017 to the present.
Future Imperfect
Multiple Trump White House Officials Have Ties to Antisemitic Extremists (Tom Dreisbach, NPR, May 14, 2025): NPR has identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a “Nazi sympathizer,” and a prominent Holocaust denier.
SB37 [Texas] and the Criminalization of Capitalist Indoctrination: A Faculty Memo (Brent D. Beal, Inside Higher Ed, May 14, 2025): Among other things, it the bill passes faculty would not be able to “adopt a belief that any…social, political, or religious belief” is inherently better any other. In other words, teachers can no longer suggest that democracy is “superior to” fascism.
Pentagon Orders Military to Review All Library Books for DEI Issues, Conduct ‘Merit-Based’ Admissions to Service Academies (Matthew Adams, Stars and Stripes, May 9, 2025): The Pentagon has ordered senior leaders to pull and review all library books at military educational institutions that address diversity, critical race theory or gender ideology by May 21.
Education Dept. Cancels Fulbright-Hays Applications, at Least for Now (Jessica Blake, Inside Higher Ed, May 9, 2025): The grant programs have supported the international research of students and scholars for more than 60 years.
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Steven Volk (steven.volk@oberlin.edu), Editor
GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning
Co-Directors:
Lew Ludwig (ludwigl@denison.edu)
Colleen Monahan Smith (smith@glca.org)