Compiled by SUSAN JONES
One of the biggest stories in higher education the past two weeks is efforts by House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee to raise the excise tax that the nation’s wealthiest private universities pay on their endowments.
Under a bill advanced by the committee on May 14, private colleges would face a four-tiered system for endowment taxes. Colleges with $500,000 to $749,999 endowment funds per student would continue to pay the current rate of 1.4%, with interim stops at 7% and 14% before the highest rate of 21% for the nation’s wealthiest universities with $2 million in endowment funds per student. These include Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, MIT, Baylor College of Medicine and Julliard.
As the taxes loom, Princeton asked all departments and University units this week to prepare “separate plans for 5 percent and 10 percent permanent budget cuts to be phased in over the next three years, with some actions to start later this summer” in an email sent to faculty and staff, according to the Daily Princetonian.
Princeton topped the list of 51 colleges that would be taxed on their endowments under the plan, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2023, the school had an endowment of $33.4 billion, and with only 6,782 domestic full-time equivalent enrollment, that equals $4.9 million per student.
Here's what else has been happening:
May 2: The University of San Francisco announced plans to sell off by June 1 its endowment’s direct investments in four U.S. defense companies — Palantir, L3Harris, GE Aerospace and RTX Corporation — that have contracts with the Israeli military. A USF spokesperson told KQED that moving forward, the university’s endowment, valued at about $566 million, will be exclusively invested in index funds “or other commingled funds, in which it will not be possible to make individual security selections.”
May 5
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The Education Department said Harvard will receive no new federal grants until it “demonstrates responsible management of the university” and satisfies federal demands on a range of subjects. It applies to federal research grants and not federal financial aid students receive to help cover tuition and fees. The administration previously froze $2.2 billion in federal grants to Harvard, and Trump is pushing to strip the school of its tax-exempt status.
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Carnegie Mellon is one of 12 universities to join in a new lawsuit filed by the Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education and the Association of Public Land Grant Universities challenging the National Science Foundation’s recently announced 15% indirect costs cap on all future grants. Pitt is a member of all three national organizations. The other named universities are MIT, Caltech, Princeton, University of California, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Arizona State, Cornell, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, and University of Minnesota.
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Faculty and staff at Columbia, Tufts, Georgetown and Boston University held silent protests against the detention of three international students by the Department of Homeland Security. They held photographs of Palestinian Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, Indian Georgetown postdoctoral researcher Badar Khan Suri, and Turkish Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk.
May 7
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The leaders of Haverford College, a small private liberal arts college near Philadelphia; DePaul University, a private Catholic research university in Chicago; and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, a public institution in California, testified before the U.S. House’s Committee on Education and the Workforce about how they’ve handled alleged incidents of antisemitism in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. Read more on Higher Ed Dive.
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New York police arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters after they occupied part of the main library at Columbia University. Two university security officers were injured when protesters forced their way into Butler Library, according to a statement from the university president, who called activists' actions “outrageous,” according to the BBC. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the visa statuses of those involved would be reviewed.
May 8
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The Department of Education announced on the Federal Register that it had canceled this year’s competition for three Fulbright-Hays fellowship programs. The decision will affect doctoral students and faculty who applied for the Group Projects Abroad, Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad and Faculty Research Abroad programs — all of which focus on expanding American expertise in critical languages and are congressionally mandated, Inside Higher Ed reported.
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The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is suing the state’s governor, Mike Braun, over a new law giving him full control over the selection of Indiana University’s trustee board, according to Higher Ed Dive. Last month, Republican lawmakers added several last-minute changes to Indiana’s budget bill that expanded the state’s control over its public colleges. One provision empowers the governor to appoint all nine members of Indiana University’s board, eliminating the institution’s longstanding tradition of alumni trustee elections.
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The National Science Foundation will further reduce its workforce amid a major restructuring of the agency, according to an internal memo obtained by Politico’s E&E News. The memo was issued on the heels of a major announcement, first reported May 8 by Science, that NSF would abolish all 37 divisions across its eight directorates — which include categories ranging from biological sciences to computer engineering — and remove the senior executives that lead them. The memo, sent to staff by the agency’s chief management officer, Micah Cheatham, said that NSF had initiated a reduction in force of its Senior Executive Service, which houses its key leadership and managerial positions. As of Jan. 20, the memo noted, this service included 143 occupied and vacant positions, which will be cut to 59 positions.
May 9
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A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student, saying that her continued detention could potentially chill “the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.” Ozturk, a doctoral student from Turkey, had been in detention since March 25, when ICE agents in masks and plainclothes surrounded her outside her home in Somerville, Mass., while she was on the phone with her mother. The main evidence against her appears to be an essay that she helped to write in a Tufts student newspaper last year, which criticized of Tufts administration’s response to pro-Palestinian advocates demands.
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Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a law that explicitly prohibits encampments on university and community college campuses throughout the state. The new law specifically targets temporary shelters — including tents — installed on campuses for overnight stays or “prolonged periods of time.” Under the law, university administrators are required to take immediate action when encampments appear, including directing individuals to dismantle shelters, warning of potential criminal trespass charges, and initiating disciplinary proceedings against students who fail to comply, according to Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released a memo ordering all military service academies to no longer consider race, ethnicity or sex for admissions, according to Military.com. The move appears to not only effectively end affirmative action efforts at the three military service academies, which were spared from a Supreme Court ruling on race-based admissions two years ago, but goes even further by including ethnicity and sex.
May 12
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In a response to a recent Trump administration announcement that the federal government will not provide any new grants to the university, Harvard President Alan Garber sent letter a outlining the many changes underway at the school — and he reiterated that “Harvard will not surrender its core, legally-protected principles out of fear of unfounded retaliation by the federal government.” Garber acknowledged that the university has more work to do to ensure it is a welcoming and pluralistic place. But he argued that Harvard’s efforts to improve in important areas, such as combating antisemitism and other bigotry and upholding academic excellence, “are undermined and threatened by the federal government’s overreach into the constitutional freedoms of private universities and its continuing disregard of Harvard’s compliance with the law,” according to the Washington Post.
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The University of Maryland, Baltimore announced it is laying off 30 full-time staff and eliminating 30 vacant positions after federal cuts to NIH and other research funding. In addition, “modest salary reductions” will impact about 1,000 university employees and save the school about $3 million, according to The Baltimore Banner. The salary cuts are expected to impact employees at UMD's medical school and will include University President Bruce Jarrell and other university leadership.
May 13: The Trump administration’s antisemitism task force terminated another $450 million of Harvard University’s research grants from eight federal agencies, further escalating the federal government’s fight with the nation’s oldest and wealthiest higher education institution. The new cancellations are on top of $2.2 billion worth of federal grants frozen last month.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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