By SUSAN JONES
The Trump administration has reached its 60th day in office and the amount of activity is frankly overwhelming. Below, again, are the actions by the federal government impacting higher education during the past two weeks.
March 10: The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent letters to 60 institutions of higher education warning them of potential enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus. Pitt was not on the list, but Temple University was.
March 11: The Education Department announced that it was firing more than 1,300 workers, effectively gutting the agency that manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the layoffs will not affect student loans, Pell grants or funding for special-needs students. “Claiming that eliminating half the Department won’t affect its services — without any clear plan to redistribute the workload — is, at best, naive and, at worst, deliberately misleading,” Beth Maglione, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a public statement reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education. “It also raises serious concerns about how billions of dollars in federal student aid will continue to be disbursed to students without interruption.”
March 11: University of Maine received notice that funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be paused while it considered further “follow-up actions related to prospective Title VI or Title IX violations.” This comes after Trump sparred with Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, over his assertion that Maine was flouting federal law by allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports. The university received almost $30 million from the U.S.D.A. during fiscal 2024 for research and extension services.
March 11: A federal judge in Boston blocked the Trump administration’s plan to cut hundreds of millions of dollars for teacher training, finding that cuts are already affecting training programs aimed at addressing a nationwide teacher shortage. Eight states, which did not included Pennsylvania, had sought a temporary restraining order. See more here.
March 12: The day after the Department of Education announced massive cuts, users experienced an hours-long outage on StudentAid.gov, the federal website for student loans and financial aid. Hundreds of users reported FAFSA outages to Downdetector starting midday, saying they were having trouble completing the form, which is required for financial aid at colleges nationwide. The developers and IT support staff who worked on the FAFSA form were hard hit in the Education Department’s layoffs.
March 13: The Trump administration demanded that Columbia University make dramatic changes in student discipline and admissions before it would discuss lifting the cancellation of $400 million in government grants and contracts. It said the ultimatum was necessary because of what it described as Columbia’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. The government called for the university to formalize its definition of antisemitism, to ban the wearing of masks “intended to conceal identity or intimidate” and to place the school’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership.” Read the letter to Columbia here.
Also a second person who took part in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University was arrested by U.S. immigration agents, after overstaying a student visa, federal officials said.
March 13: Johns Hopkins University announced it would layoff people in 1,975 international positions across 44 countries as well as 247 in the U.S. The layoffs are tied directly to the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which brought an $800 million funding hit to Johns Hopkins, according to Higher Ed Dive. Among the many projects impacted are a program designed to help prevent HIV transmission in India, a tuberculosis research program and a clinical trial in Bangladesh designed to reduce outbreaks of cholera and other diarrheal diseases.
March 13: Attorneys general from 21 states, but not Pennsylvania, sue the Trump administration over the the dismissals at the Department of Education, saying they are “illegal and unconstitutional.”
March 14: The education department began an investigation of 45 schools participating in the Ph.D. Project, which promotes the racial diversity of professors in the nation’s business schools. Carnegie Mellon University is among the 45, which also includes Ivy League schools and public universities. The Ph.D. project, based in Montvale, N.J., said in a statement that it had opened its process to anyone, regardless of race or ethnicity. Read more in the New York Times.
March 14: An appeals court lifted a block on executive orders seeking to end government support for diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The decision from a three-judge panel allows the orders to be enforced as a lawsuit challenging them plays out. The appeals court judges halted a nationwide injunction from U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson in Baltimore. Two of the judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that Trump’s anti-DEI push could eventually raise concerns about First Amendment rights but said the judge’s sweeping block went too far.
March 15: A doctor from Lebanon who arrived at the Boston airport on March 13 with a U.S. visa and a job teaching at Brown University, was deported over the weekend without explanation. A judge had ordered she not be sent back until there was a hearing, but government lawyers said customs officials did not get word in time. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist, was to start work at Brown as an assistant professor of medicine.
March 16: One week before spring break, Brown University advised international community members, including visa holders and permanent residents, to postpone international travel in a campus-wide email, according to the Brown Daily Herald. The email warned that ““Potential changes in travel restrictions and travel bans, visa procedures and processing, re-entry requirements and other travel-related delays may affect travelers’ ability to return to the U.S.”
March 17: The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education over what the union describes as an illegal and abrupt shutdown of student loan relief programs. According to Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, the AFT claims that three weeks ago, education officials under the Trump administration removed application forms for income-driven repayment (IDR) plans from the department's website and secretly ordered loan servicers to halt all processing, effectively breaking the student loan system and violating federal law. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., seeks a court order to restore borrowers' access to IDR plans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness.
March 18: Moody’s Ratings dropped its outlook for higher education in 2025 to negative from stable, according to Higher Ed Dive. In a report, analysts with the credit rating agency said recent or looming federal policy changes could pose wide-ranging risks to colleges, with several being of medium to high severity and potentially affecting all institutions in the sector. Those risks include the potential for heavy research funding cuts, higher endowment taxes, interruptions in student aid, visa restrictions slowing international student enrollment, and pulling funding for institutions that run afoul of the Trump administration’s directives.
March 19: The Trump administration froze $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania over the Ivy League school’s policies supporting transgender athletes. The White House announced the pause in a post on one of its X accounts, accusing the university of “forcing women to compete with men in sports” and heralding the penalty as “promises kept.” A White House spokesperson confirmed the freeze, according to the Washington Post, and said the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services are withholding money from the university as part of a review of discretionary funding.
A Penn spokesman said the university has yet to receive any official notification of the freeze or any details. He said Penn follows NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams and “is in full compliance” with the regulations that apply to all of its peer institutions.
March 19: The U.S. government detained an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, and said he had been deemed “deportable” for violating the terms of his academic visa. On March 20, a federal judge in Virginia ruled that the scholar, Badar Khan Suri, could not be deported from the United States for now, pending further litigation. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Suri was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” but did not provide evidence to support the claim. Suri denied all of the allegations.
March 20: President Trump signs an executive order — “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities” — that would continue the process of eliminating the federal Department of Education. Critics point out that Congressional approval is needed to close a federal agency.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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