Compiled by SUSAN JONES

The University of Virginia, facing immense pressure from the White House, struck a deal with the Trump administration on Oct. 22 that removed, at least temporarily, the threat of a federal investigation.

As part of a new deal with the Trump administration, the University of Virginia won’t have to pay money. It won’t have to write apology letters or adopt any specific policies. Several federal investigations into its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have been halted.

The university will have to report back regularly to the Justice Department on compliance with civil-rights law. Even there, the details are scant — a contrast with previous agreements between Trump and colleges, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Oct. 22

• Michigan State University is laying off 99 faculty, staff and executives this month amid rising costs and other budget pressures, President Kevin Guskiewicz said in a public message. The university had cut an additional 83 employees since March because of the Trump administration’s revocation of federal research funding. Taken together, the job cuts represent 1.3% of Michigan State’s workforce. Officials expect the job eliminations to save the university $50 million annually. In addition, The University of Northern Colorado plans to lay off about 50 staff members in early November and eliminate roughly 30 vacant roles, CFO Dale Pratt said during a town hall last week. The layoffs come as the university tries to close a projected $7 million budget shortfall for fiscal 2026 and shrink its scale to meet lower enrollment levels

• Most polled Americans, 70%, disagreed that the federal government should control “admissions, faculty hiring, and curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities to ensure they do not teach inappropriate material,” according to a survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute. The majority of Americans across political parties — 84% of Democrats, 75% of independents and 58% of Republicans — disagreed with federal control over these elements of college operations, Higher Ed Dive reported.

Oct. 17: The State University of New York system has lost about $32 million in federal grants due to the Trump administration’s cuts, system chancellor John B. King announced, according to Spectrum News 1. That's out of about $700 million in federal grant funding that the system receives annually. 

Oct. 16:

• Harvard University reported a $112.6 million net operating deficit in fiscal 2025, its first shortfall since the pandemic and the largest that the private nonprofit has racked up since 2011. The deficit — a steep decline from last year’s surplus of $45.3 million — shows the toll the Trump administration’s financial war against the institution has taken on its finances.Despite its fiscal challenges this year, Harvard remains the country’s richest university. At $82.4 billion, its total assets grew 7.3% year over year in fiscal 2025, thanks to donations and strong investment returns.

• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce alleged in a lawsuit that President Donald Trump’s proclamation placing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas is a “plainly unlawful” expansion of executive authority that violates the Administrative Procedure Act and federal immigration laws. This is at least the second such lawsuit against the fee proclamation, following a separate filing earlier this month by plaintiffs in California.

Oct. 15: Officials at the University of Texas at Austin blocked the Graduate Student Assembly from considering two resolutions against Texas state laws last week, arguing that the student-run body must follow institutional neutrality policies, Inside Higher Education reported. Mateo Vallejo, a first-year master’s student and representative in the GSA for the School of Social Work, drafted two resolutions for the assembly to consider: one condemning Texas SB 17, which bans diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at Texas public institutions, and another against Texas SB 37, a state law that, among other changes, put faculty senates at public institutions under the control of university presidents and boards. 

Oct. 14: Indiana University Media School Dean David Tolchinsky announced that campus leadership decided to end print editions of the Indiana Daily Student starting this week, just hours after he fired Director of Student Media Jim Rodenbush. After IU paid off nearly $1 million in debt for the IDS last year, it created a Student Media Plan that ended weekly printing to curb its deficit. The IDS was still permitted to publish special themed editions, such as one planned this Friday on homecoming. Rodenbush told editors in an Oct. 7 email that administrators expected “that edition should contain nothing but information about homecoming — no other news at all, and particularly no traditional front page news coverage.” Eventually, Purdue University's paper, The Exponent,  delivered special edition Exponents to the IU campus with editorials from past and present IDS editors.

Oct. 13: California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have allowed colleges to give a admissions advantage to applicants who descended from people who were enslaved in the U.S. In a memo explaining his veto of AB 7, Newsom called the bill unnecessary, writing that colleges “already have the authority to determine whether to provide admissions preferences like this one.” 

Oct. 10: The University of Houston has scrapped a previously required class that teaches master of social work students about societal power imbalances, racial prejudice and social justice. The decision was made without any faculty input, sources told Inside Higher Ed.

Oct. 9: The University of West Florida has put forward a proposal that would remove Juneteenth from its list of eight paid employee holidays, raising concerns amid ongoing debates about diversity initiatives at Florida's public institutions. The federal holiday, observed annually on June 19, commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.

Oct. 8: Carnegie Mellon University laid off 75 staffers in its Software Engineering Institute — representing 10% of the institute’s total workforce — in response to federal funding changes, according to the Post-Gazette. Though workforce reductions are a “last resort” for the private university, this decision was “unavoidable,” wrote Theresa Mayer, CMU’s vice president for research, in an email to campus. Prior to layoffs, institute leaders took “extensive measures” to reduce other costs.

Oct. 7:

• Between 2002 and 2022, the percentage of students surveyed who said they expected to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher fell from 72 percent to 44 percent, according to a research brief the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education published. During the same time frame, the percentage of first-generation students who aspired to earn a degree fell from 60 percent to 33 percent; among students with at least one college-educated parent, degree aspirations dropped from 83 percent to 53 percent.

• Purdue University abruptly shut down a federally funded college-prep program that provided programming for more than 13,000 low-income students across Indiana after the Trump administration canceled the $35-million grant it relied on, according to the Indianapolis Recorder. The federal grant, awarded last year, was the sixth largest in the university’s history and was intended to continue until 2031, Purdue officials said. The Trump administration wrote in a grant-termination letter that the program conflicted with the department’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.”

Oct. 6: During an impassioned University of Southern California Academic Senate meeting, faculty strongly denounced and rejected the Trump administration offer to give the university funding preference in exchange for abiding by conservative education goals, according to the Los Angeles Times. In forceful speeches, University of Southern California department chairs, professors, researchers and others who attended the virtual meeting called the compact "egregiously invalid," "probably unconstitutional," "antithetical to principles of academic freedom" and "a Trojan horse."

Oct. 3: Two Democratic Pennsylvania lawmakers — Reps. Malcolm Kenyatta (Philadelphia) and Rick Krajewski (Philadelphia County) want to bar colleges that receive state funding from signing onto the Trump administration’s compact that would give institutions priority for federal research funding in exchange for sweeping policy changes. The two slammed the compact in an Oct. 3 legislative memo sharing plans for a forthcoming bill. Signing the agreement, they said, would “directly threaten the independence” of colleges. 

Oct. 2:

• Berklee College of Music in Boston announced it is laying off 70 staff members, citing budget challenges, according to a letter to the college community.

• Several higher education groups filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, alleging the policy could cause “catastrophic setbacks” to research in the U.S, according to Higher Ed Dive. The American Association of University Professors and labor unions representing tens of thousands of higher ed workers joined groups representing the healthcare, K-12 and religious sectors to challenge the policy, which the Trump administration abruptly rolled out last month. They argued that the fee would likely result in “sharp cutbacks in the employment of highly talented foreign workers and severe setbacks for university research, graduate programs, and clinical care.”

• Harvard announced it will admit PhD students “at significantly reduced levels” in the 2025-26 academic year amid budgetary challenges, The Crimson reports. The head of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which oversees all of the university’s Ph.D. programs, cites research funding tumult and the new endowment tax. The Crimson also reports that, amid union negotiations, Harvard is seeking to freeze wages for nontenure-track faculty through June.

• A federal workers union sued the Trump administration for inserting language into Department of Education employees’ out-of-office email messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. “Forcing civil servants to speak on behalf of the political leadership's partisan agenda is a blatant violation of federal employees' First Amendment rights,” said the complaint, which was filed by the American Federation of Government Employees in federal district court in Washington, D.C., NPR reported.

Sept. 26: The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga says they plan to dissolve some of their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in order to comply with new state laws. The university says they are dissolving the Student Government Association, the Women’s and Gender Equity Center, the PRISM Center, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Office of Student & Family Engagement. In its place, the university says there will be a newly established UTC Center for Student Leadership, Engagement and Community.

Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.

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