Winning the Case, Losing the Ground: How Policy Threats Still Govern—Especially Through Proposed Funding Cuts, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Winning the Case, Losing the Ground: How Policy Threats Still Govern—Especially Through Proposed Funding Cuts

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

April 24, 2026

A court victory can halt a policy. It cannot, on its own, undo the conditions that policy created. The recent injunction against the NIH’s proposed cap on indirect costs is a clear legal win—one that reaffirms procedural integrity and the limits of executive overreach. But the terrain on which universities operate has already shifted, and it has shifted most decisively through the politics of funding cuts.

The Trump administration’s proposed 15 percent cap on indirect research costs—long a source of uncertainty across higher education—ultimately met a significant legal barrier. In a January 5, 2026 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling blocking the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from implementing the cap. The court held that the policy violated federal law, bypassed required procedures, and unlawfully imposed a blanket limit across all NIH grants. The nationwide injunction remains in place. Universities, for now, can continue to rely on their negotiated indirect cost rates (American Council on Education, 2026).

This is, by any reasonable measure, good news.

And yet, without reckoning with the politics that animate it, this is far from the whole story.

Even before the courts intervened, the proposed cap had already begun to do its work. As Zahneis (2025) reports, internal communications at the University of Iowa reveal a striking institutional response: confusion, financial alarm, and a palpable sense of political constraint. Faced with the prospect of losing tens of millions in research support, university leaders acknowledged their “limited ability to publicly fight” the policy. Faculty were advised to speak only as private citizens. Public messaging was deliberately softened—“we will need to tone it down a bit.” Meanwhile, the institution began pausing grant submissions, slowing hiring, and preparing for contraction.

In other words, the chilling effect preceded the legal outcome.

This is what governing through funding looks like. It is also what I have called shadow censorship: a form of constraint that operates not through formal prohibition, but through anticipatory compliance. The policy itself may be blocked, but its signal—its warning—circulates widely. Institutions read that signal and adjust accordingly. Speech narrows. Risk tolerance declines. Strategic silence emerges, not by mandate, but by design.

The First Circuit’s ruling is therefore both a victory and a revelation. It affirms that agencies like the NIH cannot unilaterally rewrite the terms of federal research funding in ways that violate congressional intent or established regulatory frameworks. It also reinforces the role of the courts as a critical check on executive overreach. Importantly, the court’s reasoning is likely to shape parallel cases involving the Department of Energy and Department of Defense, suggesting broader implications for the governance of federal research.

But the decision does not—and cannot—undo the anticipatory effects already set in motion.

The lesson here extends beyond Iowa, beyond NIH, and even beyond this particular administration. We see similar dynamics in Texas under SB 17, in Florida’s higher education restructuring, and in federal policy proposals that signal ideological priorities through funding mechanisms. Across these contexts, the pattern is consistent: policy operates not only through what is enacted, but through what is threatened, implied, and anticipated.

Institutions do not wait for final rulings. They adapt early.

This is why the notion that “the courts will fix it” is, while comforting, insufficient. Legal victories matter—they create space, restore rights, and set precedent. But they do not automatically restore the conditions of open inquiry or institutional courage that may have already been compromised. By the time a policy is blocked, its disciplining effects may already be embedded in organizational behavior.

So yes, this ruling deserves recognition. It is a meaningful check on unlawful governance and a reminder that procedural integrity still matters.

But if we stop there—if we treat this as a resolution rather than a moment of reflection—we risk missing the deeper transformation underway.

The more difficult question is this: What would it take for institutions not only to survive such policy threats, but to resist their anticipatory force? What would it mean to refuse the quieting of institutional voice before the law has even spoken?

Because the central lesson remains unchanged.

Policy does not need to be fully enacted to be effective. It need only create enough risk to reshape behavior.

And in that sense, even a policy that fails in court can still succeed in governing. 

And then we wonder why there is public distrust of higher education.

References 

American Council on Education. (2026, April 13). Higher education associations fight federal cuts to indirect cost rates. https://www.acenet.edu/Policy-Advocacy/Pages/Law-Courts/Association-Lawsuit-NIH-FA.aspx#:~:text=The%20lawsuits%20include:%20*%2022%20state%20attorneys,halting%20the%20implementation%20of%20the%20DOE%20cap

Zahneis, M. (2025, June 16). Facing research cuts, officials at U. of Iowa spoke of a “limited ability to publicly fight this.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/facing-research-cuts-officials-at-u-of-iowa-spoke-of-a-limited-ability-to-publicly-fight-this

Facing Research Cuts, Officials at U. of Iowa Spoke of a ‘Limited Ability to Publicly Fight This’
By Megan Zahneis

June 16, 2025 | Chronicle of Higher Education

Illustration by The Chronicle; Getty Images

The National Institutes of Health’s announcement in late February that it would cap indirect research funding at 15 percent sent universities across the nation into a panic. Emails obtained by The Chronicle via a public-records request offer a glimpse into how one research-intensive institution reacted in the immediate aftermath of the unexpected news — with confusion, concern, and at times, a sense of powerlessness.

Asked by a faculty member what he and his peers could do to help, the University of Iowa’s interim vice president for research suggested only “acting as a private citizen to call our legislators and tell them what a bad idea this is (from your own phone or using your own email).” The campus’s location in a solidly red state hindered it from fighting the policy change, Lois J. Geist seemed to imply in her reply. “Being located where we are we have limited ability to publicly fight this as faculty or as an institution.”

While the funding cap is frozen pending a federal judge’s ruling, the messages exchanged between Geist and other top officials at the University of Iowa provide a rare and revealing glimpse into internal conversations on a campus facing millions in cuts — and clear incentives to stay quiet. (Geist and one of those officials, through a university spokesperson, declined an interview. Four others did not respond to requests for comment.)

‘Tone It Down’

Within hours of the NIH’s announcement, which came late on the afternoon of Friday, February 7, a flurry of emails among Iowa administrators had commenced. The cap, an Iowa associate vice president for research predicted Friday night, “is going to have a significant effect on us (and everyone else).” By early the following morning, efforts were underway to gauge just how significant it would be. A manager in the division of sponsored programs shared a “back-of-the-envelope calculation” that estimated an average annual budget gap of $45 million, based on Iowa’s current reimbursement rate of 55.5 percent for indirect costs.(Often referred to as “facilities and administrative” costs, indirect costs account for money that institutions spend on research but that isn’t tied to a specific grant or project, such as facilities, equipment, and staff expenses.)

While the director of Iowa’s grant-accounting office worked through the weekend on producing more precise figures, others discussed the university’s public response. Peter S. Matthes, vice president for external relations and senior adviser to the president, proposed wording for an update on the webpage where the university posts federal-policy news.

“Overall, the federal transition continues to be a rapidly changing environment,” read the update, which was soon posted under Geist’s name. It said the university was working with organizations like the Association of American Universities and Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities to “monitor and interpret” the Trump administration’s policy changes. Iowa, it promised, was “actively engaging with our federal delegation as well to ensure they understand the profound impact this change would have.”

Administrators also kept tabs on how their colleagues at other institutions were responding, both through email chains (the listserv of provosts in the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Iowa Provost Kevin C. Kregel noted, “is very active!”) and by tracking their public statements. Jennifer Lassner, an associate vice president for research, forwarded a link to a message from the University of Michigan as a “communication example"; in that memo, Arthur Lupia, Michigan’s interim vice president for research and innovation, stressed that the at-risk funding was used to conduct “vital research that saves lives, creates jobs, enhances national security, and improves quality of life for people in every part of our state and across the nation.”

The then-director of strategic communications in Geist’s office responded approvingly — “nice message!” she said of the Lupia memo — and suggested using it as a model for one Geist could send to the campus. The federal-update post, she noted, “is sort of passive — folks will have to go looking for it.” Geist said she was “fine” with issuing a statement, but added: “We will need to tone it down a bit.”

While Michigan and Iowa list one another as peer institutions and share membership in the Big Ten and an R1 designation, their home states operate under opposite political circumstances: Michigan is run by a Democratic trifecta, but Republicans control both houses of the Hawkeye State’s government as well as its governor’s office. Michigan also stands to lose about three and a half times as much as Iowa does under the 15-percent indirect-cost cap, according to a Chronicle analysis.

Indeed, the message Geist sent the afternoon of Monday, February 10 — approximately 72 hours after the NIH announced its policy — was more circumspect than Lupia’s, referring to “high-impact research” that “has tangible benefits for the lives of Iowans” and promising that “we recognize the urgency of the situation and are working to assess potential impacts at the college, department, lab, and investigator level.”
‘We Need the Foundations’

In her message, Geist said that “until we have more clarity,” Iowa would not submit new NIH grant applications and advised researchers “exert extra caution and defer starting new activities.” The university, she wrote, would also avoid hiring graduate research assistants whose salaries hadn’t already been budgeted as a direct cost on a funded project. Within a half hour, at least five faculty members had replied, expressing concern and asking questions. Among them was the faculty member whom Geist told that the university would have “limited ability to publicly fight this.” In response to another email, Geist said that the university would not be joining the lawsuit that 22 states — all led by Democratic attorneys general — brought against the NIH to stop the cap.

A third faculty member asked Geist to share concrete numbers to “make these impacts quantifiable.” Turning to an analysis prepared by Maria H. Soliman, the director of Iowa’s grant-accounting office, Geist told him the university would be on the hook for about $50 million. Beyond that, she said, Iowa would “lose grants and the ability to hire people on those grants because the amount of available money will be inadequate.” She also indicated the university would likely rely on outside support: “We need the foundations to weigh in to stop this as it will also impact our ability to do their research.” (The private sector has since faced its own troubles trying to offer patchwork funding.)

A federal judge in April issued a permanent injunction against the 15-percent cap, which the NIH is appealing. Meanwhile, a cohort of organizations that represent research universities has sketched out two alternatives, STAT reported last week; one would vary indirect-cost rates by institution and grant type, and the other would require each grant proposal to list its indirect costs as line items.

Andy Thomason, assistant managing editor at The Chronicle, contributed reporting.
Read other items in What Will Trump's Presidency Mean for Higher Ed? .
We’d like to hear from you — tell us how The Chronicle has made a difference in your work or helped you stay informed. You can also send feedback about this article or submit a letter to the editor.

All Eyes on Iowa: Shadow Censorship in the Remaking of the University in Real Time, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

All Eyes on Iowa: Shadow Censorship in the Remaking of the University in Real Time

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 22, 2026

If we have learned anything over the past few years, it is this: what happens in one state rarely stays there. Florida, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Utah have each, in turn, served as testing grounds for a new model of higher education governance—one that moves beyond critique into control. Now, all eyes are on Iowa.

According to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a single legislative cycle, Iowa Republicans have introduced more than 20 bills aimed at restructuring both public and private higher education. Taken individually, some proposals may appear technical or even reasonable—tuition guarantees, expanded community-college degrees, civics requirements. But taken together, they reveal something more consequential: a coordinated effort to redefine the purpose, governance, and boundaries of the university.

Governance boards would be reshaped, faculty authority diminished, general education scrutinized, DEI eliminated, and even land acknowledgments prohibited. Meanwhile, new curricular mandates would narrow how history and citizenship can be taught, explicitly restricting attention to subgroups. Excuse me? You mean Anglo male history only? To be sure, this is not only unconstitutional per the First and Fourteenth amendments (see Valenzuela, 2026), but an unmistakable signal about which knowledges are now considered legitimate and which are to be erased.

This is not simply reform. It is redesign.

And crucially, it is the kind of redesign that gives rise to what I have elsewhere called shadow censorship (Valenzuela, 2026)—a form of indirect, anticipatory suppression in which institutions begin to limit expression not because they are explicitly ordered to, but because they recognize the shifting boundaries of what is politically permissible. 

Policies like those proposed in Iowa do not need to ban every idea outright. Instead, they reshape the conditions under which universities operate: who governs, what is funded, what is taught, and what is deemed risky. Under such conditions, institutions internalize constraint. Faculty rethink syllabi. Programs narrow their scope. Administrators act preemptively to avoid scrutiny. The result is not always visible censorship, but something more insidious: a gradual shrinking of intellectual life.

This is how governance becomes culture.

Importantly, Iowa is not innovating in isolation. It is assembling. Nearly every element of its legislative package has been tested elsewhere: DEI bans in Texas, governance interventions in both Florida and Texas, curriculum mandates across multiple states, and ongoing challenges to tenure and faculty governance nationwide. What makes Iowa significant is the combination—the bundling of these efforts into a comprehensive policy regime. This is policy diffusion in real time: not simple replication, but refinement and consolidation into a more durable model of control based on what they have learned from other states like Texas and Florida.

The implications are far-reaching. When lawmakers gain the ability to influence spending decisions, reshape governing boards, dictate curricular content, and restrict hiring practices, the line between public accountability and political control begins to collapse. And as that line blurs, shadow censorship becomes normalized. Universities need not be told explicitly what they cannot do; they begin to anticipate it. They adjust. They comply. They silence themselves.

For those of us in Texas, this trajectory is all too familiar. Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 and related efforts have already demonstrated how quickly institutional landscapes can shift under political pressure. Iowa now offers a glimpse of what comes next: a more integrated model of governance—one that operates not only through policy, but through the cultivation of institutional fear and constraint.

So yes, all eyes should be on Iowa. Not because it is unique, but because it is indicative. What is being built there is not just a set of policies, but a governing framework—increasingly shared by a number of states, including Texas. It is one that produces compliance without always needing to command it.

And that is precisely how shadow censorship works. 

Reference

Valenzuela, A. (2026, March 20). Shadow censorship: How fear is rewriting higher education in Texas. Educational Equity, Policy & Politics in Texas. Politics and Policy. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/03/when-fear-governs-sb-17-shadow.html

All Eyes on Iowa

In recent years, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, and Utah have taken turns leading conservative efforts to make colleges less woke, less expensive, and more work-force-oriented. Here comes the Hawkeye State.

Iowa Republicans are pushing an aggressive agenda to revamp public and private colleges. More than 20 bills have been introduced this month, The Chronicle’s Aisha Baiocchi reports. Among notable proposals:

• Community-college bachelor’s degrees: Two-year colleges could offer four-year degrees that fill unmet local work-force needs. Private colleges say that could put them out of business, The Chronicle’s Lee Gardner reports.
• Public-university governance overhaul: Regents’ terms would be shortened, a student regent would lose voting power, and lawmakers would be added as nonvoting board members, The Gazette reported. The Legislature could reverse spending decisions. Post-tenure review, program cuts, general-education scrutiny, and Faculty Senate limits would loom.
• Civics at public colleges: Undergraduates at public universities would have to take courses on American history and government that couldn’t be “devoted to the study of subgroups,” according to The Gazette. 
• Civics at private colleges: The House Higher Education Committee chair asked private colleges to adopt the same requirements pitched for their public counterparts, citing “a gradual erosion of foundational knowledge about our nation’s history, its founding principles, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship,” the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• State endowment tax: Lawmakers softened an initial proposal but still want to make endowments valued at $500 million or more subject to Iowa’s 7.1-percent corporate tax rate, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• Tuition guarantee: In-state tuition at public universities would be frozen for each incoming cohort of undergraduates, starting in 2027, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• … and more: Other bills seek to tell regents to sign the Trump administration’s higher-ed compact, bar public universities from hiring Chinese citizens on H-1B work visas, prohibit land acknowledgments, and eliminate DEI from general-education courses.

The bigger picture: What’s proposed in one state inevitably resurfaces in another. Much of what’s being discussed in Iowa has been seen elsewhere, but this particular combination is worth watching as a leading indicator of how other big-government conservatives will try to flex their power over campuses.

🎓 Lee’s full story asks whether expanded community-college degrees could fix education deserts. Aisha’s full story explores the back-and-forth over other bills.

Policing Knowledge, Misrepresenting Scholarship: A Response to Brandon Creighton’s Latest Intervention in Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Policing Knowledge, Misrepresenting Scholarship: A Response to Brandon Creighton’s Latest Intervention in Texas Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 16, 2026

Something troubling is happening in Texas higher education—not simply at the level of legislation, but at the level of logic.

According to a recent report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, policies— formerly advanced by former legislator Brandon Creighton who is now the President of Texas Tech University are getting operationalized systemwide. 

Specifically, they seek to prohibit faculty from teaching that a person can be “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive,” that individuals should feel guilt for the actions of others because of their race or sex, or from acknowledging that gender identity might exist beyond a rigid binary.

Let us pause here.

Not because the issue is complicated—but because the framing is so profoundly misleading.

The premise underlying these policies is that universities are indoctrinating students into believing that individuals are inherently racist or oppressive and that professors are somehow in the business of assigning moral guilt based on race or sex.

This is a caricature. And it's offensive.

In logic, this is termed a "straw man" that resides at the center of the policy.

It bears little, if any, resemblance to what scholars in sociology, history, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, education, political science, or law actually teach. Across these fields, faculty engage students in rigorous inquiry into systems, institutions, structures of power, and historical processes—not as ideological exercises, but as empirically grounded and theoretically informed modes of analysis. 

This begs the question: what, exactly, are policymakers reacting to—actual classroom practice, or a politically constructed narrative that bears little relation to the intellectual work taking place in universities?

These frameworks, developed over decades of interdisciplinary scholarship, equip students to examine how policies are made, how categories like race and gender are socially constructed and operationalized, how law and governance distribute resources and rights, how knowledge itself is produced and legitimized, and how inequality is reproduced, resisted, and transformed over time. 

Students learn to interpret evidence, evaluate competing claims, and situate contemporary issues within longer historical arcs. In other words, the aim is not to assign blame or fix identities, but to cultivate intellectual curiousity, develop analytical capacity, promote epistemic humility, and foster a deeper understanding of the complex social worlds they inhabit.

What we teach is that systems can generate inequality even when individuals do not consciously intend it. That insight—central to modern social science—is not a moral accusation. It is an analytical observation.

Indeed, suggesting that universities teach students that they are inherently racist or oppressive misunderstands both the scholarship and the pedagogy. 

Unlike scholars of earlier eras—who often took for granted the inheritability of IQ and other deeply flawed, biologically determinist assumptions—contemporary scholarship overwhelmingly rejects essentialist claims about race or moral character. The study of racism and sexism today proceeds from a robust interdisciplinary consensus that these are historically produced, socially organized, and institutionally mediated phenomena—not fixed traits lodged within individuals. 

Indeed, the purpose of this work is to denaturalize inequality: to show how ideas once presented as “common sense” or “scientific truth” were constructed, contested, and sustained over time. That such outdated ways of knowing continue to circulate in public discourse only underscores the importance of this scholarship, not its excess.

Ironically, the policy bans the teaching of an idea that universities themselves overwhelmingly reject.

The Texas Tech memo to faculty reportedly encourages them to consult a flow chart to determine whether course content is “relevant” and “necessary.”

This is surreal.

In a research university—whose mission is the open pursuit of knowledge—faculty are now being invited to filter intellectual inquiry through an administrative decision tree designed to anticipate political scrutiny.

This is not how universities function.

Universities exist precisely because knowledge is complex, contested, evolving, and often uncomfortable. The study of race, gender, colonialism, power, and inequality has always generated debate. But debate is not a reason to suppress inquiry. It is the reason universities exist.

Reducing scholarship to bureaucratic compliance mechanisms does not protect students. It narrows the range of questions they are allowed to ask.

The broader political narrative surrounding these policies suggests that universities are “turning people gay” or confusing students about gender.

This claim is not only inaccurate—it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the research on human development and identity.

Universities do not manufacture sexual orientation or gender identity. Scholars study them. Students learn about them. Social science, psychology, history, anthropology, and public health research have long examined the complexity of human identity, culture, and embodiment.

Teaching about something is not the same as producing it.

If that logic were sound, teaching about capitalism would make students capitalists, teaching about war would turn them into soldiers, and teaching about religion would convert them into believers. At most, education shapes how students understand the world—it does not deterministically produce who they are. 

Human development is far more complex, shaped by family, community, peer networks, media environments, and, in the case of sexuality, a growing body of research indicating that orientation is not something one is taught into being. To suggest otherwise is to confuse exposure with causation, and learning with indoctrination.

The argument collapses under the weight of its own absurdity and, in doing so, exposes the deeper agenda at work: not the protection of students, but the regulation of thought itself and with it—a coordinated legislative effort to restructure higher education governance, limit diversity and equity programs, and increased political oversight of curriculum and institutional decision-making. 

The pattern is clear.

Programs that study race, gender, colonialism, inequality, or social justice are framed as ideological threats. Meanwhile, the policies themselves are explicitly ideological interventions into what faculty are allowed to teach and research.

The irony would be amusing if the consequences were not so serious.

So here is the question that Senator Creighton and others advancing these policies should answer plainly:

What exactly do you believe universities are teaching?

Because the picture presented in these policy justifications—a professor standing at the front of a classroom declaring that students are inherently racist or oppressive—is a fabrication. There may be outliers, for sure, but these are far and few between.

What actually happens in classrooms is something far more ordinary and far more valuable: students encounter history, data, frameworks, arguments, and evidence. They wrestle with competing interpretations. They learn to analyze institutions and power. In short, they develop the intellectual tools necessary for democratic citizenship.

One more thing. Senator Creighton has suggested that universities should focus primarily on careers and salaries rather than “contested ideas.”

But higher education has never been only about job training.

Universities prepare engineers and nurses, yes. But they also educate historians, journalists, teachers, lawyers, communications specialists, and public servants. They cultivate critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and democratic literacy.

A society that insists universities avoid contested ideas is not strengthening higher education.

It is hollowing it out.

The stakes here are not abstract debates about curriculum.

They concern whether public universities in Texas will remain places where scholars can pursue knowledge without political interference—and where students can engage complex social questions without state officials deciding in advance which conclusions are permissible.

If we care about intellectual integrity, democratic inquiry, and the future of higher education in Texas, we should be able to say clearly:

Misrepresenting scholarship is not a foundation for sound policy.

And governing universities through ideological caricatures will not strengthen them.

It will only diminish them.

The Man Behind Texas Tech's Controversial

Brandon Creighton believes colleges should focus on careers and salaries—not contested ideas about race, gender and sexuality.

By Jasper Smith, December 16, 2025

In a sweeping memo sent earlier this month, the Texas Tech University system sharply limited how faculty members can teach about race and sex. The policy bans faculty from teaching that a person can be inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive; a person should “bear responsibility or guilt for actions of others of the same race or sex”; or that there are more than two sexes when discussing gender identity.

The university system encouraged faculty to consult a flow chart to help determine if their course content is both “relevant” and “necessary” to classroom instruction. Many faculty members have criticized the policy and its guidelines as vague and a violation of academic freedom.

Continue reading here.

The Heritage Foundation Drove Trump’s 2025 Higher-Ed Agenda. What’s Its Plan for 2026? By Rick Seltzer | The Chronicle of Higher Education | Feb. 13, 2026

Friends,

In a revealing interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporter Rick Seltzer probes the next phase of the Heritage Foundation’s higher-education agenda following the rollout of Project 2025. What emerges is not merely a technocratic debate over accreditation but a sweeping ideological project. Heritage fellow Adam Kissel calls for severing the link between accreditors and federal student aid, effectively removing a long-standing buffer between federal funds and institutional quality review. 

In its place: state-level control, market discipline, and—ultimately—the privatization of federal student aid. 

The proposal frames accreditors as politicized enforcers of DEI and positions states as more trustworthy arbiters of “intellectual” and even “moral” development. 

Geez, how pathetic if not deeply cynical to cloak a project of political consolidation in the language of quality, virtue, and reform. The shift would dismantle a national accountability infrastructure and replace it with a fragmented 50-state experiment, where access, standards, and protections vary dramatically by geography and political climate.

Most alarming is the open embrace of reduced college access as a policy goal. Kissel states plainly, “I want college access to drop,” arguing that expanded access in the 20th century “overachieved” and left too many students with debt and no degree. The tradeoff, he suggests, is how many lives we are willing to “ruin” in order to help those deemed deserving. 

This stark calculus reframes higher education not as a public good but as a selective privilege governed by market sorting and state ideology. Combined with calls to privatize student loans, weaken federal oversight, and reshape curricula around contested visions of Western intellectual and moral formation, the agenda signals a profound reordering of higher education’s civic mission. 

If enacted, these reforms would not simply adjust policy levers; they would narrow pathways to opportunity, intensify political control over knowledge, and destabilize the fragile architecture that has long mediated between public investment and institutional autonomy. 

Forewarned is forearmed.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Heritage Foundation Drove Trump’s 2025 Higher-Ed Agenda. What’s Its Plan for 2026?

By Rick Seltzer | The Chronicle of Higher Education | Feb. 13, 2026

Project 2025, the influential policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, set a clear agenda for the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to reform higher education in its first year in office. What comes next?

Heritage’s “Themes for Higher Education Reform,” published in January, give an indication. One item high on its list: stripping accreditors of their role as gatekeepers of federal funding. The Trump administration has already sought to shake up accreditation by bringing new agencies into the mix, but the Heritage proposal goes much further.

I dug into that proposal with Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow for higher-education reform at the Heritage Foundation and an author of the report. We started out wonky, but I was surprised to find us veer into deeper questions of moral development and college access. Our conversation shows that higher education and its critics have come to hold far fewer shared assumptions than those on campus might think. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you want to remove accreditors as gatekeepers of federal funding?

The decoupling of Federal Student Aid from accreditation would help accreditors focus on quality improvement, rather than quality assurance — meaning that quality assurance can continue to be done to some degree by the Department of Education, so long as it exists, but also by the states.

In other words, accreditors wouldn’t cease to exist.

Once they are decoupled from Federal Student Aid, there is no reason for them to be registered by the Education Department. They can continue to do whatever they like. I point to low graduation rates and low-ROI programs as evidence that institutional accreditors have dramatically failed to be reliable authorities as to the quality of institutions of higher education.

Without accreditors as gatekeepers, how would you ensure Federal Student Aid goes to institutions providing quality education?

The quality assurance will be certified by the state, either by their own assurance bodies or by third parties that they choose, which might still include accreditors, if that’s their plan.

Why are the states going to be better at this?

Returning education to the states means that we trust the state, and people of different political persuasions may trust certain states more than others, but that’s the 50-state-experiment idea that is integral to federalism.

We trust the states with billions and billions of taxpayer dollars already on a large variety of issues. It’s only Chicken Little scaremongers who would say that we can only trust these institutional accreditors who have demonstrated that they are already not good at it.

Accreditors aren’t just about quality assurance. They’re seen as insulation from politicization of higher education.

Did you read my paper from a year ago, called “The Politicization of Higher Education Accreditation”? [The paper argues that accreditors have used their gatekeeping role to impose diversity, equity, and inclusion on colleges while thwarting conservative reforms.]

I’m familiar with those criticisms. But whether accreditors are upholding the ideal of political insulation is a different question from whether we want direct state control in colleges that include private enterprises. 

Why would a state be better to dictate whether Ave Maria University or the University of Notre Dame can draw federal funding?

States already have a key role. The secretary of state, traditionally, in a state, decides which corporations are allowed to operate and the standards under which they are audited. It’s nothing new for states to decide who can operate in their state.

I’m not asking whether this is a new discussion. I’m trying to get at the inherent tradeoffs.

Ideally organizations would police themselves. They don’t, and that’s why accreditors or other outside parties are needed. And when accreditors also fail to do their jobs, different outsiders will come in, such as state and federal regulators and legislators, and then you’re kind of out of ideas, except to go to the consumer, and then the consumer votes with his or her feet, right?

So ultimately you want the market to police itself, and usually it does a pretty good job over time.

Government feels like it has an important say in the use of those dollars, at least not to discriminate against your own students or your own job applicants, and that’s what colleges do. Have the accreditors ever said “You can stop discriminating” as a matter of being allowed to operate? Has any accreditor ever told a college that its policies violate the First Amendment?

You’re referring to race-conscious admissions, DEI, and that kind of thing?

That was the first part of my comment. But to turn to the second part of the comment: Has any accreditor ever told a college that its policy violates the First Amendment and that matters for accreditation? Maybe never.

Eliminating accreditors from this role is very different than the solution Republicans have been pitching, which is to start new accreditors.

A lot of higher-education reforms have a Plan B. Plan A is politically unfeasible — to privatize student loans, return all money to the states, greatly diminish the amount of money coming from the federal government into education. All that is very challenging today, so instead, use the powers that are available for reform, and that’s Plan B.

I’m surprised we went down this road, because I expected you might talk about protecting the federal investment through accountability measures. The feds are arguably taking on more quality assurance by looking at outcomes measures, which is still a departure from the process review accreditors do. I expected you might talk about states doing the same.

Oh, I think states such as Florida, which have turned dramatically to performance-based funding, have demonstrated success in institutional improvement.

The point is not to have a federal standard for how colleges are assessed, but to have each state have its own assessment plan. I’m not against ROI for most programs, most of the time, but there are other things to do with your college time, such as develop intellectually, morally, and spiritually. Teachers, they barely even understand that there’s such a thing as intellectual development or moral development that they could focus on in college. It would be wonderful if colleges would measure intellectual and moral development, and if some states would figure out how to assess colleges by those standards.

Is it a state’s role to assess the intellectual and moral development of private actors?

Intellectual development, for sure. Moral development can be done in a viewpoint-neutral way, similar to how current accreditors focus on process rather than outcomes.

How much do you trust the state to protect whatever the minority in that state is?

Some will do better at that than others, and that’s part of the 50-state competition that you get.

The 50-state competition is certainly one of the checks that’s built into the country. Another is checks and balances between branches and levels of government. You may disagree with interpretations of the Commerce Clause, but the feds do have some role in governing interstate commerce. And if you’re talking about interstate competition and students crossing state lines, can it get muddy?

The federal government already has a role, separate from the accreditors and states, in assessing financial viability and administrative capacity.

Which it arguably has not done a particularly good job of.

No doubt we can agree on that.

What else would you like to discuss?

Making it much easier for a new accreditor to take its place among existing accreditors has been a priority in the current administration.

Why won’t that become a race to the bottom — to accreditors that offer rubber stamps?

As we get more and more transparency in ROI and syllabi and other areas, it will become more and more valuable for a college to show that it is accredited by an accreditor with standing in terms of high-quality outcomes for graduates. So why wouldn’t it be a race to the top?

Would any reform really change the dynamics that make it difficult to ensure quality instruction?

It wasn’t until a huge amount of money was in the federal system that we had to start working on this problem, and then put Band-Aids on it. The tough love is to rip all the Band-Aids off, privatize student loans and the federal-aid system, and then we wouldn’t have to worry as much about accreditation and accountability for the federal dollars, because there wouldn’t be any.

And then, arguably, college access drops.

I want college access to drop. Why do I want college access to drop? Do you want there to be colleges with a 12-percent graduation rate, 15 percent, after six years? You want federal dollars to go to that school?

We overachieved in terms of access in the 20th century. We took kids who would have had a great career as an electrician or in the military or as an entrepreneur, and we said, “No, go to college.”

They took six years not to graduate. Now they’re in debt, no good degree. They’ve been moved away from their home community for six years. Their life has been ruined because we told them they should go to college and we gave them enough money to do it.

That may apply to some students, but I might hesitate to say it to those who were able to earn a degree of value only because of federal financial aid.

Yep, totally agree with that critique. The tradeoff is how many students’ lives you want to ruin in exchange for helping students who deserve to be helped.

If a state wants to make its public universities merit-based in such a way that the kids who are smart but poor get a full ride, the states could easily do that. A number of state-scholarship programs probably do that.

Then you get into questions about which tier of institution those students should be able to access, which can be a problem in public-heavy states like California.

If you look at the Ivy League core curriculum and then you look at what a student can choose to take to graduate outside of STEM, these are not top-tier institutions. You take Beyoncé, you take Bad Bunny, as your course. I would rather have my niece stay at Florida State than go to Columbia.

Without having taken the classes, I can’t say for sure, but there may be some value to cultural critique.

I don’t think they’re doing cultural critique so much as cultural appreciation. I would rather have them reading the Iliad than listening to a Bad Bunny song.

An interesting thing to me is the idea that there is no space for both.

My critique is about the core curriculum. What are the things that you should expose an 18-year-old to, so by the time they’re 22 they can take their place among educated men and women of America in the West? They already know the Bad Bunny. They don’t need that in college.

A wonderful product of the market, right?

If you’re spending $80,000 a year and you’re saying, “I want to be educated. You all are pretty smart over there. You faculty, can you articulate what I should know and be able to do intellectually and morally?” And they say, “Here’s 400 courses, just choose any of them,” that’s not a very good use of my $80,000.

A shorter version of this interview appeared in Friday’s Daily Briefing newsletter.


We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.

Rick Seltzer
Rick is a senior writer at The Chronicle and author of the Daily Briefing newsletter. He has been an editor at Higher Ed Dive and a reporter and projects editor at Inside Higher Ed. Before focusing on higher-education journalism, he covered business beats for local and regional publications.

Subscribe here to receive the Daily Briefing newsletter in your inbox each day.

Randall Kennedy Is Afraid. He Thinks You Should Be Too. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2, 2026

Friends:

This interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin of Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy is one of the clearest, most sober-eyed assessments yet of what many in higher education are feeling but struggling to name: that we have crossed a threshold. 

Randall Kennedy—long known for his intellectual independence and willingness to critique excesses within progressive politics—states plainly that he now fears for the freedom of American universities. His warning is especially powerful because it comes not from a reflexive institutional defender, but from someone who has repeatedly challenged DEI overreach, due-process failures, and moral absolutism often found on college campuses where any perceived moral failing is treated as disqualifying,

Here is one of my favorite, truly explanatory quotes from this piece:

"Why is it that the right wing is so upset at the universities? Because universities, more than any other place in American society, are actually open to groups who have been historically marginalized."

When Kennedy says the barking has turned into biting, he captures the reality that legal victories, however important, cannot undo the chilling effects of extortionate governance, coerced compliance, and the quiet normalization of fear.

What makes this exchange essential reading is its insistence on perspective. Kennedy refuses false equivalence: the excesses of campus politics, however real, are not morally or politically comparable to a federal government willing to take higher education “by the throat.” At the same time, he does not absolve universities of responsibility for earlier failures to defend academic freedom when it was inconvenient or unpopular to do so. 

That combination—clear-eyed self-critique without capitulation—is precisely what has been missing from much public debate. Read alongside the longer arc of culture-war politics in education, this piece underscores a hard truth: institutional autonomy is not preserved by silence, euphemism, or quiet retreat. It is preserved only when faculty and leaders alike are willing to speak plainly, defend one another, and recognize that what is at stake is not a policy preference or a contested acronym, but the very conditions under which knowledge can be pursued at all—and to this, I might add, the viability of democracy itself.

-Angela Valenzuela

Randall Kennedy Is Afraid. He Thinks You Should Be Too.
The Harvard law professor on federal extortion, DEI overreach, and why defeating Trump in court won’t be enough.

By Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin

January 2, 2026

Randall Kennedy doesn’t shy away from an argument. His classes at Harvard Law

School, where he has taught for more than four decades, are intellectually raucous affairs. As a law student, future President Barack Obama enrolled in one of Kennedy’s courses but, according to David Remnick’s biography, later dropped the course, fearing a “semester-long shout fest.”

Kennedy remains feisty, iconoclastic, and unpredictable. He’s a self-described progressive who’s willing to call out his own side. On questions of race, Kennedy has long considered himself an optimist. His optimism can put him at odds with activists who draw a straight line from 1619 to today. Where they see implacable racism, Kennedy tends to see progress, not perfection.

But he is the first to admit his optimism has been tested over the past decade. On the topic of the Trump administration and higher education, he is deeply unnerved. “Until recently, I never would have said that I fear for the freedom of universities in the United States,” he told us. “I fear for the freedom of the universities in the United States now.”

During an interview over Zoom from his office at the law school — where the walls are lined with blown-up covers of his many books, including Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word — Kennedy was characteristically frank and voluble as we discussed the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education; double standards around diversity, equity, and inclusion; George Floyd and the October 7 attacks; and whether academics are too self-critical. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Evan Goldstein: We last spoke in February, about a month into Donald Trump’s second term. Back then you said: “I have never felt so worried about the state of academia. Fear is palpable. There’s tremendous foreboding.” Are fear and worry still palpable?

Randall Kennedy: I still feel very fearful. Before, there was worry about what might happen. There was concern about the barking. Now there’s been biting. This administration has time and again shown that it cares little to nothing about the law. And it has succeeded. A bunch of institutions have felt compelled to enter into “deals” with the federal government. These universities say over and over again, “These deals do not compromise our autonomy, our independence, our academic freedom.” Of course that’s not true.