Vanderbilt University recently announced plans to phase out its College Scholars Honors Program, replacing it with a new one that is more inclusive and “accessible to all students.”
The honors program will close at the end of the academic year, but current students will be able to remain in it until they graduate.
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The University of Tennessee’s (UT) Knoxville campus will begin offering a new agriculture-based Ph.D. program in Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communications beginning in the Fall 2025 semester, the university announced this week.
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President-elect Donald Trump plans to assist the nation’s population without a college degree by creating the online “American Academy” which would make higher education available to all U.S. citizens for free.
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The rate of freshman enrollment at colleges across the country, from private to public, has dropped to the lowest levels since before the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Daily Caller, freshman enrollment at public universities decreased by 8.5% in 2024 compared to 2023, while private enrollment dropped by 6.5% in the same span of time. This comes despite the fact that freshman enrollment rose slightly in 2023 compared to 2022, with a mere 0.8% increase.
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Tennessee students could have a third option for a college entrance exam along with the ACT and SAT if legislation that Rep. William Slater, R-Gallatin, is proposing passes in January’s session.
Slater plans to again propose a bill allowing the Classic Learning Test as an option for students at public colleges and universities along with qualifying for the state’s Hope Scholarship program.
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Some of the most prominent elite universities in the nation have been ranked lowest for freedom of speech, according to a report released Thursday.
Harvard, Columbia, New York University (NYU), the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and Barnard College make up the bottom five in a free speech ranking of 251 universities, according to a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse. The report cited several incidents of “suppression of free expression” at the schools, including disruption of events and sanctions on students and staff for expressing their views as the reasoning behind the schools’ low rankings.
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The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request to reinstate the Biden administration’s latest student loan forgiveness plan.
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The gender gap in higher education is growing – and it may be due to how universities admit students and help them pay for school.
Men earn 42 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 38 percent of master’s, and 44 percent of doctorates, according to the American Institute for Boys and Men.
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Ideological litmus tests have no place in higher education. They weaponize loyalty and contradict the university’s purpose of fostering academic inquiry and informed debates. Scholars cannot pursue truth or progress if they are denied academic jobs based on their devotion to a specific political ideology or philosophy.
I applaud states like Florida, Alabama, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Texas that have banned varied Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements that mandate loyalty to its agenda. But we need to go further. Congress can deny federal funding to universities that impose DEI on faculty, administrators, and staff. Conservative lawmakers are already trying to “dismantle” DEI in the federal government and others are currently weighing defunding universities over Title VI violations. They should extend defunding to universities that require DEI.
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In an ideal world, wrongdoers face swift and exact justice for their misdeeds. In reality, the legal system is costly. Justice comes at a steep price, one that I, and others whose works were allegedly plagiarized by Harvard’s Claudine Gay and others cannot afford.
After months of turmoil and legal back and forth, it is with a heavy heart that I announce that my intended copyright infringement case against former Harvard President Claudine Gay and the Harvard Corporation — a legal complaint that would have requested a jury trial — cannot be filed as planned in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. The inability to raise sufficient funds for a trial (a steep minimum of $100,000 to $250,000) and the knowledge that the losing party could be ordered to cover the legal expenses of the victors, to which no limits exist under federal copyright law, gave me pause.
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A recent survey found that 3 in 10 college students or recent graduates had job offers rescinded as a result of their “pro-Palestine” activism.
Intelligent surveyed 672 students or recent college graduates who have engaged in anti-Israel activism and found that 29% of them had a job offer rescinded in the past six months and 55% believe there was bias against them in the hiring process because of their activism.
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On August 31, 2023, Yale’s 23rd president, Peter Salovey, announced he would be stepping down. Since this announcement, much has transpired in the world of American higher education: the resignation of Harvard and UPenn presidents, the creation of campus encampments nationwide, and the cancelation of commencements at Columbia and USC. These developments point to an American higher education system that is malfunctioning. The breakdown we are witnessing at Yale’s peer institutions will continue until leaders are chosen for their courage to apply wisdom to divisive issues.
America’s Founders understood the importance of higher education. Of all his great accomplishments, only three made it onto Thomas Jefferson’s headstone: Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and the father of the University of Virginia. Jefferson knew that America’s ability to be great and good – UVA’s motto – depended on the presence of high-functioning universities. America’s first polymath, Ben Franklin, famously said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Framers like Franklin and Jefferson understood the value of academic pursuits, and their example lit a spark that motivated generations of Americans to pursue higher education.
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Higher education is sinking lower and lower. That’s bad news for our country, which has benefited enormously from having the world’s best system of higher education. And it’s bad news for Democrats, who face a tight election. Their party is closely tied to education at all levels, especially at elite universities. It is the party of experts, after all, and the party of the left. Universities are both. Moreover, since the Democrats control the Executive Branch, the public holds them primarily accountable for ensuring social order. Their failures are obvious to the average voter. That’s bound to hurt Democratic Party candidates in November.
Parents with children in college or expected to matriculate soon have every right to expect their kids can learn in peace, hear diverse viewpoints, and speak freely without threats, intimidation, or indoctrination. That’s true whether the parents are Jewish or not. Decent Americans won’t tolerate threats against Jewish students any more than they would tolerate them against blacks, Muslims, Christians, or Asian Americans. Yet they now see those threats against Jewish students every day, and, at many universities, they don’t see administrators standing up for their rights.
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An Ohio lawmaker believes the state’s current political climate creates a negative environment for some speech on college campuses and wants to make sure staff and students are protected.
Rep. Adam Holmes, R-Nashport, said legislation prohibiting colleges and universities from requiring support of specific ideas or political movements is becoming increasingly necessary.
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As the public awaits more details of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s higher education reform plans, Republican legislators offer some ideas of their own.
During a Wednesday press conference, a gaggle of House and Senate leaders pushed for the creation of a grant program that offers scholarships to students who commit to stay in Pennsylvania. They also want to launch a similar deal for out-of-state students to get in-state tuition if they put down roots in the commonwealth.
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The Goldwater Institute (GI) sued the U.S. Department of Education last week over fining Grand Canyon University (GCU) almost $40 million.
The fine was purportedly for “insufficiently inform[ing] PhD students that they may have to take continuing courses while completing their doctoral dissertations,” GI said in a press release. GI noted that the $37 million fine against the Christian university “is 10 times bigger than penalties the Education Department assessed against Penn State and Michigan State for covering up the sexual crimes of Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar.”
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The University of Arizona (UA) announced on Tuesday that it settled all remaining legal claims with the family of a professor who was killed on the university’s campus in 2022.
In a statement on the university’s website, the UA confirmed the school and Arizona Board of Regents “agreed to a resolution of the legal claims” arising from the death of Professor Thomas Meixner in 2022.
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Higher education is making news these days. In Congressional testimony, the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn couldn’t tell whether calling for the genocide of the Jews constituted harassment without knowing the context. The effects of their testimony reverberate.
Days later, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a lengthy report condemning “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.” Prominently featured was a detailed complaint about New College of Florida, where I serve as admissions director.
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A Catholic college in Memphis has announced major cuts to its academic programs and faculty amid an ongoing budget deficit that has plagued the school for years.
“Though difficult, these steps are necessary for the long-term interest of our students and University. These changes will help place CBU in a much stronger financial position, as we work toward full reaffirmation of SACSCOC accreditation,” Christian Brothers University President David Archer reportedly said in a letter to students and alumni.
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Congressman Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., says that universities should be graded in regard to antisemitism on a scale for the public to see.
“On the antisemitic thing, groups ought to come out and rank the universities: A, B, C, D and E,” Grothman said on the Thursday edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “Say if you have a Jewish child. Would you want them to go to this university? What university would want to be labeled an F for Jewish children?”
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The donor revolts at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and elsewhere are the long-overdue wake up calls that their faculty and administrators needed. The overwhelming majority of politically progressive faculty and administrators have long guarded their right to advance their cherished political causes inside and outside the classroom, while punishment has awaited those who challenge the shibboleths. Instead of the free exchange of ideas and the intellectual capaciousness that ultimately advance social justice, it is now clearer than ever that it is not social justice they have fostered but mindless ideology and hate.
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I am delighted to say that I will be joining the new Thales College, as a professor of humanities. What that means, I shall try to describe by way of contrast.
Let us suppose I am at almost any other American or Canadian college. I am considering Caravaggio’s painting of Mary Magdalen. Right there, I’m skating on thin ice. That isn’t just because the painting has a religious theme. It’s because I can depend upon almost nothing, among even the brightest college students, when it comes to knowledge of the history of art, or of the Renaissance in particular; no understanding of why such a painting was impossible to be executed two centuries before, or of why no one would have conceived the desire to paint such a figure, alone as she is, in a moment of intense introspection, careless of the baubles of her trade that lie scattered about her on the floor — baubles that yet have considerable dramatic power, because Caravaggio supposes that we know, as she does not, what they signify, and what momentous events are in store for her.
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Dr. Lisa B. Spanierman, a faculty member in the psychology department of Arizona State University, teaches that “white guilt” can be used to coerce students into social justice activism. The counseling and counseling psychology professor, and associate dean for academic personnel and faculty success in ASU’s College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, is developing a reputation for pushing this in higher education.
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The University of Tennessee (UT) Tuesday announced that it will expand eligibility for a major scholarship program called the UT Promise.
“The University of Tennessee System announced plans to extend the qualifying income level for UT Promise scholarship recipients once again, this time from $60,000 to $75,000 (adjusted gross income),” the school said on its website. “The university increased the income level from $50,000 to $60,000 in 2021. The announcement was made as UT System President Randy Boyd prepares to tour high schools across the state for the fourth UT Promise tour.”
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On Tuesday, a new Gallup poll suggested that Americans across all demographic groups are less confident in the institution of higher education than they were several years ago.
According to Axios, the Gallup survey in question shows that just 36 percent of Americans report having confidence in colleges and universities. In 2018, that number stood at 48 percent, which itself was a drop from 57 percent in 2015.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, guest host Gulbransen welcomed professor Dr. Stanley Ridgely to the newsmaker line to discuss his new book, Brutal Minds, and left-wing cultish brainwashing in American universities.
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An organization of doctors, healthcare professionals, and policymakers attempting to protect health care from “radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology” is questioning how East Tennessee State University (ETSU) will respond to the state’s new higher education transparency law that rolls back Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements at publicly funded colleges, universities, and medical schools.
“ETSU is just continuing to double down on their DEI efforts,” Do No Harm’s Laura Morgan, MSN, RN, told The Tennessee Star in an interview, explaining that the school’s announced DEI program called “Moon Shot for Equity” is the “kind of program that House Bill 1376 and Senate Bill 817 is going to say you’ve got to get rid of because it’s pretty clear about not having courses or learning” related to DEI.
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As Republican-led states fight for laws to cut Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives on college campuses, other state legislatures are pushing to enshrine the programs into law, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
At least 29 bills have been filed in 17 states to crack down on DEI programs, but states such as New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey are debating legislation that would do the opposite, the Chronicle reported. DEI has become a point of contention as state lawmakers grapple with the role the programs should have on campus, as Democrats argue that the programs help bolster diversity on campuses while Republicans challenge that they stoke division.
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William Block, M.D., dean of medicine at East Tennessee State University’s Quillen College of Medicine, recently sent out an email, in which he defined the words “equity” as “the quality of being fair and impartial,” and “woke” as “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” The email is one of several in which Dean appears to be placing the tenets of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) over those of achievement. It is a position that runs counter to recently passed Tennessee state law, raising questions and concerns with state lawmakers.
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There is no subject of greater importance – and controversy – today in America than that of education. And nowhere is the clash between civilizational order and post-modern anarchy on greater display than with New College of Florida, a tiny liberal-arts college in Sarasota. The New York Times recently described the reaction of “students, parents, and faculty members” to Governor Ron DeSantis’s reforms of the college in a curious way: “a political assault on their academic freedom.”
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As the plague of woke totalitarianism continues to besiege American universities, I note that we are finally beginning to see a little pushback. Public universities in Texas offer typical examples of this yin-yang process.
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Over recent decades, parents, grandparents, and high school students have been subject to a barrage of messages suggesting that everyone should go to college. Higher education is the pathway to more money and more status, we’re told.
Few have asked, “Is this path best for all young people, and is it best for our country?” Many young people are not cut out for college, but they have other talents. The vast majority of jobs in this country don’t require a college degree, although many do require additional training.
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Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that “the Chinese Communist Party’s inside every major American university today with research dollars and with their students.”
“They’re at the University of Pennsylvania, too,” he continued. “And we now know that this Chinese money, these Chinese officials met classified documents in that space.”
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Following the signing of five new executive orders by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Sunday night, TikTok is now prohibited on all state-owned or leased devices.
Just moments after taking the formal oath of office for his second term, Governor Mike DeWine issued five executive orders.
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Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across the nation will receive a large portion of funds from the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package on its way to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature.
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Recently, a number of medical schools have joined the anti-European, anti-Christian, pro-Marxist woke bandwagon. According to physicist Lawrence Krauss, “the American Association of Medical Colleges has approved a Diversity-Equity-Inclusion based curriculum, which the AAMC Council of Deans Chair says is as important as teaching the latest scientific breakthroughs.”
Meanwhile, our military leadership continues to push incoherent gender ideology upon a captive audience of young soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And justices at the heights of our judiciary system, because of political correctness, dare not even define the word woman.
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As a mom of two teenagers who will be forging their pathways to adulthood in the coming years, I am particularly interested in new models of higher education. While college admission certainly isn’t a requirement for my children, I hope that if they choose to pursue a Bachelor’s degree or beyond, the experience is engaging and enlightening, exposing them to a variety of ideas and perspectives.
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Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey recently signed two House Bills (HB) which aim to lower certain license costs for veterans, including business and hunting licenses.
“Our veterans give us so much and Arizona is dedicated to finding more ways to honor them,” Ducey said in a press release. “This session, we delivered. We followed up on our State of the State promise to launch a program to waive in-state higher education tuition for the dedicated husbands and wives of veterans who have served and sacrificed as well. Arizona will continue to lower barriers and give back to this selfless and courageous community.”
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The pandemic has not been kind to Pennsylvania higher education: Its colleges have seen a 6.4% enrollment drop for freshmen since spring 2020.
The data, from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, is a reminder that Pennsylvania’s shrinking population of college-aged youth has made it harder for colleges to fill seats. The two-year decline means that 22,738 fewer students are on campuses now.
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State Rep. Eric Nelson (R-Greensburg) on Wednesday announced a proposal to redirect $580 million previously allotted to three major Pennsylvania universities to a college voucher program.
Under the representative’s measure, students from households with up to $100,000 in annual earnings would receive yearly grants of as much as $8,000 per year for higher education. Those from households earning between $100,000 and $250,000 would get vouchers of $4,000. These payments would be managed via an expansion of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE), an agency Nelson said has demonstrated an ability to efficiently oversee Pennsylvania students’ financial assistance.
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May is National College Decision Month, when 1.2 million Class of 2022 high school seniors must commit to the institution where they’ll spend the next four-to-six years.
Two of those high school seniors, Bill and Jane, will soon graduate and both will attend a very selective, but very different, institution in the fall. Let’s explore and project the net return on their decisions, six-years from now, based on facts and national averages.
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In case you missed it, on Monday MIT announced that they would be reinstating their SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. Like many universities, MIT had ditched the tests during the pandemic.
Even prior to the pandemic, however, there had been a widespread push to abandon these tests to enhance diversity.
“Data shows tests like the SAT are biased against students from low-income households. Poorer students tend to perform worse on the test,” CNN reported in 2015. “Blacks and Hispanics also consistently score lower on the SAT than whites.” (CNN conveniently left out that Asian Americans score much higher than whites, presumably because it didn’t fit the narrative.)
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University of Minnesota, Twin Cities has sponsored a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) project tailored to first-year students.
The Gopher Equity Project is a “campus-wide collaboration” that incorporates DEI as an “online module for all undergraduate students” with “follow-up discussions in first-year courses or campus-wide Discussion Groups, and a website with additional resources.”
All undergraduate students are offered and encouraged to take trainings that teach “concepts about equity, power, privilege, oppression, and identity.” In order to transition to UMN’s campus, “first-year students take the online training” and “will have follow-up conversations in their first-year college courses.”
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Rev. Dr. Gregory P Schulz, a philosophy professor and Lutheran pastor, was suspended from Concordia University in Wisconsin following the publishing of his Feb. 14 article “Woke Dysphoria at Concordia.”
“Wokeness appears to be developing into a pathology at my ‘institution of Lutheran higher education’” Schulz wrote in Christian News article, criticizing the direction of Concordia University.
Five days later, Schulz discovered that he was suspended from the university. He apparently did not know why, even after getting locked out of his university email account and banned from all campus properties.
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Following student pushback against a Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) flyer found at the University of California, San Diego, Campus Reform took a deep dive into what other progressive agendas the national student chapters supported.
In doing so, Campus Reform found that YDSA chapters across the country are demanding free tuition and debt forgiveness, advocating for the recognition of student employee unions, and pressing to take “community control” of police departments.
Additionally, these groups have recently hosted rallies, meetings, and book discussions on topics such as abortion, minimum wage, marijuana decriminalization, and Palestine.
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In celebration of Women’s History Month, colleges and universities are hosting events to celebrate womxn, not women.
In an effort to become more inclusive of those that deny biological reality, higher education is in fact erasing women’s opportunities to excel in academics, athletics, and career tracks.
I am proud to be a woman. Women have been pivotal to our society. But making women compete with men undermines females’ ability to achieve success.
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TRANSCRIPT: McCabe: Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, in his new book Red-Handed, reports how the Chinese Communist Party has targeted American institutions of higher learning. Schweizer told The Star News Network how these institutions, after receiving funds from communist China, have worked to suppress criticism of the communist regime there and also have misreported or even failed to report millions of dollars received from China. Schweizer: Section 117 of the Education Act in 1965 is very explicit. It says that if U.S. colleges and universities take in foreign donations, substantial foreign donations, they are required to report those to the federal government. McCabe: Many American colleges fail to report any or all of their Chinese cash haul, Schweizer said. Such as Yale University and the millions of dollars it received from Joseph Tsai, co-founder of Alibaba and owner of the Brooklyn Nets. Schweizer: This is particularly applicable to China today, because hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing to American colleges and universities from Chinese nationals, many of them linked to the Chinese Communist Party and to the Chinese state. He’s donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Yale. He says that they come from his foundation based in California. The…
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The Texas Lieutenant Governor has stated his priority to eliminate tenure in an attempt to stop Critical Race Theory (CRT) from “poisoning the minds of the next generation.”
During a Feb. 18 press conference, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick argued that academia has been infiltrated by “tenured, leftist professors” and called for additional oversight methods to crack down on the controversial curriculum.
Patrick defined CRT as “an offshoot of critical legal studies, which is an offshoot of a socialist program (which says) that everything that happened in life is based on racism.”
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A Vanderbilt University professor recently said that parents who oppose Critical Race Theory (CRT) are “ignorant racist[s].”
“Meanwhile, ignorant racist [sic] are worried about scaring their kids w CRT,” Gilman Whiting tweeted last month after a bomb threat against Howard University, an historically Black college in Washington, DC.
Earlier the same day, Whiting tweeted, “[S]chool boards across the country are banning teaching history while ignorantly calling it CRT.”
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Flyers posted around University of Wisconsin-Madison promising that “Only Socialism Can Defeat COVID” were promoting a Feb. 11 event held by the Madison, WI branch of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT).
According to the flyers, “capitalism offers no solutions” to COVID-19 and only makes things worse, as the organization criticizes solutions that involve “get[ting] back to work.”
As Campus Reform previously reported, The IMT is an organization that supports a “socialist transformation of society.” They have branches across the U.S. and other parts of the world.
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