Compiled by SUSAN JONES

More than 100 state lawmakers are supporting a unionization attempt for Penn State University faculty, the Tribune-Review reported. A vote to unionize could come this spring.

Minority Leader Sen. Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills, sent a letter to Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi on behalf of 102 state legislators from the House and Senate asking university administrators to be neutral toward faculty unionization.

In their letter, the lawmakers ask Penn State to allow a free and fair process for faculty to form its union and bargain collectively. They asked Penn State to spend no state funds, taxpayer dollars or tuition dollars “on union-avoidance tactics” or engage with “union-avoidance firms.”

In December, Penn State faculty members filed to form a union with the Penn State Faculty Alliance–⁠SEIU Local 668. The union will represent thousands of faculty, including tenured and contingent, full-time and part-time faculty across all campuses.

FEB. 25

The National Science Foundation’s chief management officer says the agency, a major federal research funder, is seeking approval to hire more employees after the Trump administration’s cuts last year left it without enough staffing, Inside Higher Ed reported. Micah Cheatham also told the National Science Board, which approves NSF policies, at Wednesday’s board meeting that the agency is trying to “consolidate” solicitations for grant awards to half, or less, of the usual amount of these funding opportunities — raising concerns that fewer researchers will receive funding.

FEB. 24

• The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division sued the University of California system on Tuesday over allegations that its largest campus didn’t do enough to quell workplace antisemitism, Higher Ed Dive reported. In its complaint, the DOJ accused UCLA of failing to properly investigate what the agency said were dozens of civil rights complaints filed by Jewish and Israeli employees since Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas attack on Israel erupted into a yearslong war. In an emailed statement, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications Mary Osako said the university under Chancellor Julio Frenk — who took over the role at the start of 2025 — has taken “concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies, and combat antisemitism in a systemic and sustained manner.” 

• The Iowa House passed legislation that would strip private colleges of state tuition grant funding if they maintain diversity, equity and inclusion offices. The Iowa Tuition Grant Program provides Iowa residents between $7,500 and $8,500 in state funding annually to attend private, nonprofit colleges.

FEB. 23

After years of investigating complaints related to campus sexual violence and related Title IX violations, the Education Department has largely stopped doing so, according to a coalition of sexual violence prevention organizations, Inside Higher Ed reported. In a letter sent to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the organizations cited data showing that the Office for Civil Rights “resolved zero complaints of sexual harassment or violence in 2025 and has opened fewer than 10 sexual violence investigations since March 2025.”

FEB. 20

• The American Bar Association is poised to eliminate its diversity and inclusion requirement for law schools amid legal uncertainty and political pressure, Reuters reported. The arm of the ABA that oversees law school accreditation advanced a proposal to remove its diversity and inclusion rule altogether, after it was suspended last year. A final decision is expected as soon as May, following a public comment period.

• Liz Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania who resigned in December 2023 after a contentious congressional hearing on antisemitism, has been named the new dean of Georgetown University’s law school.

• Beginning this summer, professors at Florida’s 28 public colleges must use a state curriculum framework to teach their introduction to sociology courses, Inside Higher Ed reported. Aligned with the state-sanctioned sociology textbook, the framework requires that the courses do not “include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or one that “is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” Robert Cassanello, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida and president of the United Faculty of Florida union, said, “People in the union are really upset. They see this as a threat to academic freedom. They see the revised textbook through the Board of Governors’ approval as a censored text.”

• The University of Texas at San Antonio is dissolving its Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The San Antonio Express-News reported. The department — which houses undergraduate majors in African American studies; Mexican American studies; and women’s, gender and sexuality studies — launched in 2020. But effective Sept. 1, it will be combined with the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies, though officials did not disclose a new name or leadership for the new department.

• The City University of New York is overhauling how it handles discrimination, harassment and campus conflict,  rolling out an enhanced incident reporting system, mandatory civil rights training for all full-time faculty and staff, and what officials are calling the most ambitious constructive dialogue initiative in the country. At the center of the effort is an upgraded, system-wide reporting platform overseen by the CUNY Center for Inclusivity and Equal Opportunity, which centralizes the submission, tracking and analysis of incidents involving discrimination, harassment and retaliation. 

• Nearly one in four student loan borrowers with a payment due is now delinquent — almost triple the pre-pandemic rate — as the Trump administration's rollback of borrower protections has triggered what researchers are calling an unprecedented default crisis, according to a new report released last week week. The analysis, conducted by The Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers, found that roughly 7.9 million borrowers entered delinquency during the first three quarters of 2025, with the overall delinquency rate climbing to 25 percent — up from 9.2 percent before the pandemic payment pause.  

FEB. 19

• The University of Texas system board approved a policy that asks faculty members to “eschew topics and controversies that are not germane” to their classes. Faculty said the new standards are vague and will, by design, encourage self-censorship that will ultimately cheapen education at one of the largest university systems in the country. Following a public comment period during which all 10 speakers criticized the policy, the nine-member Board of Regents unanimously passed it without discussion during its regularly scheduled meeting.

• Utah lawmakers released $8.8 million in withheld state funding to Utah State University last week, following a legislative audit of the university’s governance and spending controls. Utah State President Brad Mortensen said in a public message that the unanimous vote by the Legislature’s Executive Appropriations Committee reflects “positively on USU’s response to the audit.” 

• Bard College’s board of trustees has retained the outside law firm of WilmerHale to conduct an independent investigation into communications between Jeffrey Epstein and the college’s longtime president Leon Botstein, The Guardian reported.

FEB. 18

The National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya will become acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and President Trump will nominate the CDC’s former acting director to lead the National Science Foundation, a White House official confirmed to Inside Higher Ed. The NIH and NSF are among the largest federal funders of university research. Bhattacharya will maintain his current duties while also leading the CDC “until a permanent CDC director is nominated and confirmed.” Jim O’Neill was dismissed last week from leading the CDC, a position he had only held since late August.

FEB. 17

• The Manhattan Institute, an influential conservative think tank, shared model legislation last week that proposes giving states and governing boards greater authority over general education, signaling that state-level efforts to shape classroom instruction could accelerate, Higher Ed Dive reported. The proposal would also weaken shared governance by limiting faculty bodies to advisory roles. Under the model legislation, state funding would be contingent on colleges complying with the general education requirements. 

• The U.S. Department of Education said it “strongly discourages” accreditors from describing themselves as “regional,” according to a proposed interpretive rule published in the Federal Register. It argued that the label has no regulatory significance and can mislead students. In 2020, the Education Department issued regulations that eliminated the traditional geographic boundaries of the seven major accreditors that operated regionally. 

• The Department of Defense is considering ending tuition assistance for active-duty military members in graduate programs at 33 highly selective U.S. universities — plus the London School of Economics and Political Science  due to the institutions’ alleged antimilitary bias and “troublesome partnerships with foreign adversaries,” CNN reported. All of the Ivy League schools are on the list, along with Carnegie Mellon, Duke, University of Pennsylvania and more. The move follows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement last week that his department would discontinue all graduate-level professional military training, fellowships and certificate programs for active-duty service members at Harvard University starting in the fall. 

• A federal court order shielding the University of California system — including UCLA — from a proposed $1.2 billion federal settlement will remain in place after the Trump administration abandoned its appeal. In a filing with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Department of Justice moved to dismiss its challenge to a November ruling by U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California. That earlier decision had blocked the administration’s effort to require UCLA to pay $1 billion in fines and $172 million into a claims fund over alleged civil rights violations. The administration had frozen $584 million in federal research funding to UCLA in late July, asserting that the university violated federal law by using race in admissions, recognizing transgender identities and failing to adequately address antisemitism complaints. UCLA has denied those allegations and said it follows the law.

• The University of North Texas is facing potential cuts as it confronts a larger-than-expected $45 million budget deficit for the 2026 fiscal year. In a message to students, President Harrison Keller warned that addressing the situation would “inevitably require hard choices, and the impact will be felt across our university.” He attributed the fiscal gap to a $32 million drop in state funding for instruction and operations, as well as steeper declines in international enrollment in master’s programs than administrators had projected.

• The Education Department plans to eliminate any race-based eligibility criteria for the McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement award, a $60 million grant program designed to increase access to doctorate-level degrees. The decision, first reported Tuesday by Politico, settles a lawsuit from the Young America’s Foundation that argued the current criteria are discriminatory. But court filings confirm that the agreement was voluntary. The award is named after Ronald McNair, a Black astronaut who died in the Challenger explosion in 1986.

FEB. 13

• The Department of Justice sued Harvard University, alleging the Ivy League institution is withholding information from the agency over an investigation into its admissions practices. The department had asked for applicant-level data, including essays and test scores disaggregated by race, as part of its probe into whether Harvard is adhering to the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning race-conscious admissions practices. 

• The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has opened a directed investigation into the Louisiana Board of Regents to determine whether its Master Plan for Higher Education violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by authorizing racially exclusionary practices in the state's public college system, The Edu Ledger reported. The federal probe centers on language embedded in the Board of Regents' executive budgets for Fiscal Years 2021–2022 and 2025–2026, which set specific performance objectives requiring Louisiana's public colleges and universities to prioritize students of “all races other than white (and) Asian.” The Board's stated goal is to increase the number of such students earning a degree or credential in a given academic year — raising that figure from a baseline of 14,579 in 2020–21 to 16,000 by Academic Year 2025–26. On Feb. 23, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry asked the Education Department to investigate every college in his state to root out any diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which he described as discriminatory.

FEB. 12

• A report by New America, a nonpartisan think tank, identifies 41 universities that appear to be steering low-income families to Parent PLUS loan debt they cannot afford, at the same time that they are providing large tuition discounts to wealthier students. The list includes 23 selective private universities and 18 public flagship and research institutions. At Temple University, the report said, 54% of PLUS Loan borrowers Are parents of Pell recipients.

• A Congressional Budget Office report projects that by the end of fiscal year 2026, which ends Sept. 30, the Pell Grant program will be short $5.5 billion; that number skyrockets to $11.5 billion in fiscal year 2027 if Congress doesn’t make cuts or put in new money, Inside Higher Education reported. And by 2036, the final year included in the CBO’s 10-year projection, the cumulative toll could reach up to $132 billion if Congress doesn’t up its spending to keep pace with inflation. 

• Alan Levine — chair of the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the State University System of Florida — sent a letter to the medical school accreditor Liaison Committee on Medical Education asking how medical schools could retain their accreditation if they endorse gender-affirming care for transgender minors, arguing that “would seem to clearly violate” the committee’s standards related to the scientific method, Higher Ed Dive reported. The letter — the latest salvo in Florida’s fight against traditional accrediting agencies — is in line with Levine’s priorities as board chair.

FEB. 11

Staffing at Yale College, the undergraduate branch of Yale University, will decrease by roughly 7.5 percent in response to the Trump administration’s endowment tax hike, according to an interview of Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis in the Yale Daily News. “The staff will be about 20 people smaller than it would have been. Most of that is people who have left,” Lewis said. According to the Office of the Provost’s website, the increased federal endowment tax will result in a 12.5 percent decrease in the University’s ability to spend from its roughly $44 billion endowment.

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

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