Compiled by SUSAN JONES

The University of Georgia’s president and head football coach both sounded the alarm over the rising costs of athletics during the SEC’s summer meeting, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

Kirby Smart, the head football coach, said that he is worried that exploding expenses for his sport threatens to crowd out Olympic sports, and that other universities are unable to spend at the rate that Georgia is, according to ESPN. Mike Elko, head football coach at Texas A&M University, said the growth in spending on name, image, likeness, or NIL, costs is unsustainable. “If we don’t get some level of regulation within the market, a lot of people are going to go bankrupt,” he said.

Jere W. Morehead, Georgia’s president who attended the same meeting, said college athletics are approaching a state of “anarchy” and are in need of regulation a year after the House v. NCAA settlement went into effect. Institutions participating in that settlement will increase the amount they pay athletes to $21.3 million this summer.

MAY 27

First-year and transfer applicants to Yale College will be required to submit either their SAT or ACT scores beginning this fall, according to the Yale Daily News. The change, which Yale announced in a press release after updating its webpage on standardized testing, reinstates a pre-pandemic mandate after six admissions cycles in which SAT and ACT score submissions were not required. In the University of California system, more than 800 professors, including seven of nine math department chairs, are calling on system leaders to reinstate SAT/ACT testing requirements for applicants to STEM majors, citing a “widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom.” 

MAY 26

• Enrollment at Portland State University — where former Pitt Provost Ann Cudd is president — has declined by more than 20 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cudd is now pushing to lay off faculty and eliminate two departments — conflict resolution and university studies — despite objections and no-confidence votes from employees, Inside Higher Ed reported. Cudd has scaled back designs for cuts she announced in March and says the plan won’t be set until after the latest campus comment period ends June 13. But her current provisional plan includes axing 52 members of the union representing the university’s full-time faculty and nonfaculty academic professional workers. Leaders of that union, PSU–American Association of University Professors, say a dozen tenured faculty are among those on the chopping block.

• Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania is the latest institution to promise free tuition to any student whose family earns under a certain income threshold. Beginning fall 2027, the institution’s financial aid will cover at least the cost of tuition for students from families with incomes under $200,000, the college announced.

• The U.S. Department of Justice sued the University of California system, alleging that UCLA violated civil rights law by being “deliberately indifferent” to harassment against Jewish and Israeli students since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, according to Higher Ed Dive. The DOJ asked a judge to order UCLA to pay back all federal grants it received while allegedly “noncompliant” with Title VI, which bars federally funded institutions from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. The agency also wants permission to stop paying UCLA the remaining money owed on its existing federal grants. 

MAY 24

A Baptist church is stepping in to fund the Legion of Black Collegians, the University of Missouri’s historic Black student council, after the university moved to cut the student governing body’s designated annual funding, Inside Higher Ed reported. Mizzou leaders announced last month that they planned to stop official funding for the Legion of Black Collegians and at least several other minority affinity groups, starting in July, in response to a U.S. Department of Justice memo restricting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The Rev. Howard-John Wesley, the pastor of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Virginia, told churchgoers on Sunday that “we decided we are not going to let that student organization fail to have programming.” The church helped the student council create its own 501(c)(3) to receive the funds.

MAY 22

Caltech will compete to operate and manage the Jet Propulsion Lab, a federally funded research and development center it launched in 1936. On Friday, NASA announced plans to conduct a competition and awards process for JPL “to ensure continued accountability and strong value for U.S. taxpayers.” Caltech has managed the lab for NASA since 1958, when the space agency was established, through a contractual relationship. Its current 10-year contract, with a potential maximum value of $30 billion, will end Sept. 30, 2028. 

MAY 21

The University of Texas System’s board unanimously approved new rules making it easier for its institutions to eliminate programs and cut faculty. The revised policy allows presidents in the UT system’s nine universities to cut programs without faculty review and to remove individual faculty roles under a stripped-down appeals process. 

MAY 19

• The State University of New York at Fredonia is sunsetting 10 undergraduate majors, four graduate programs and seven minors as it tackles an $8.1 million budget deficit, according to the university. After this fall, the public institution will stop taking new students for the programs being discontinued, which include economics, mathematics, physics and political science. Students currently enrolled will be able to complete their studies at SUNY Fredonia. The school is about 65 miles north of Pitt–Bradford, which offers in-state tuition to New York students in several surrounding counties.

• The NAACP is calling on Black athletes, fans, and donors to withhold support from major public university athletic programs in several Southern states, arguing that recent redistricting efforts following a Supreme Court ruling on voting rights are undermining Black political representation. In a campaign launched May 19 called “Out of Bounds,” the civil rights organization urged Black student-athletes to reconsider commitments to flagship universities in Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Georgia. The campaign comes in response to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which weakened remaining protections under the Voting Rights Act and prompted renewed redistricting efforts across the South.

• The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences wrapped up a vote to cap the number of A grades at 20 percent per course, plus or minus four A’s. The policy proposal, which faculty have deliberated over for months, passed in a 458-to-201 vote and will take effect in fall 2027. The new cap is an effort to address grade inflation at the Ivy League university, where 66 percent of Harvard undergraduates earned A’s and 84 percent earned an A or A-minus during the 2024–25 academic year. The number of possible A-minuses will not be limited under the new grading policy. 

MAY 18

• A coalition of 25 Democratic-led states filed a federal lawsuit Monday against the U.S. Department of Education, challenging a new rule they say illegally restricts access to student loans for people pursuing advanced degrees in nursing, physical therapy, and other healthcare fields. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, argues that the Education Department’s May 1 final rule unlawfully narrowed the definition of “professional degree” established by Congress — effectively locking out many healthcare students from higher federal borrowing limits that could make or break their ability to finish their degrees.

• University of Florida interim president Donald Landry is set to receive a $2 million payout as part of an unusual contract provision entitling him to severance pay if he didn’t get the permanent job. On May 18, UF announced that it is moving forward with Stuart Bell as the sole finalist for its presidency. Bell, who previously served as the University of Alabama’s president from 2015 through 2025, must still be confirmed by both UF’s Board of Trustees and the Florida Board of Governors. Landry, a former chair of Columbia University’s Department of Medicine, stepped into the interim role last September after the Florida Board of Governors rejected Santa Ono over concerns about his past support of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

• The U.S. Department of Education is under pressure from college and K-12 groups, as well as a bipartisan group of U.S. senators to release nearly $300 million in funding for education research, according to Higher Ed Dive. The two separate coalitions sent letters to the U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon this month, calling for the Education Department to disperse unallocated money for the agency’s Institute of Education Sciences from fiscal years 2025 and 2026. The FY25 funds will expire after Sept. 30 if not allocated, the letters said. Pitt is an active member of at least two of the groups that signed the letter — the AAU and APLU. Pitt has received millions in funding from the IES. These awards span multiple departments, including the School of Education, the School of Computing and Information, and the Learning Research and Development Center.

MAY 17

As many Big Ten institutions struggle to hold on to their leaders, Michigan State University’s Board of Trustees voted to raise President Kevin Guskiewicz’s salary from just over $1 million to $2 million, Inside Higher Ed reported. The board also raised his deferred compensation from $200,000 to $250,000 a year.

MAY 15

Baldwin Wallace University is sunsetting nine undergraduate majors, seven graduate programs and 19 minors as the institution refocuses around its most popular offerings. The Ohio private nonprofit is discontinuing 10 faculty positions, or about 2.5% of its full-time workforce, due to the cuts, President Lee Fisher said last week in a message to faculty and staff. The undergraduate program closures include economics, human resources, music theory, sociology, sustainability, physics and community health education promotion.

MAY 14

The University of Oregon is freezing hiring and pay as well as capping nonessential travel as it tries to cut $65 million in costs and “avoid an ongoing annual budget deficit in the coming years,” President Karl Scholz said.  The austerity measures, which went into effect the week of May 11, come as university officials now project “significantly lower” enrollment of first-year out-of-state students in the next academic year. 

MAY 13

• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted to reject the appointment of a women’s studies professor whose hire had been approved by faculty and administrators. The decision is the latest example of the UNC trustees using what is typically a rubber-stamp vote to deny the hire of a green-lighted faculty candidate. Kiran Asher, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, first interviewed for the distinguished professor position in January 2025 and followed what she called a “perfectly normal” hiring process.

• After the Trump administration cut $95 million in research funding to the University of Connecticut and its affiliated hospital system, the state is stepping in to help fill the gap. Gov. Ned Lamont announced plans to appropriate $35 million in state funding for research programs at UConn and UConn Health, CT Insider reported. The money will come from a $500 million contingency fund the state set up last year in support of human service programs imperiled by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to federal funding.

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

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