The programs, which also are being tried at some private schools, would require 90 credits instead of the traditional 120 for a bachelor’s degree, and wouldn’t require summer classes or studying over breaks. In some cases, the degrees would be designed to fit industry needs.

Indiana recently enacted legislation calling for all state universities there to offer by next year at least one bachelor’s degree program that could be completed in three years, and to look into whether more could be implemented. The Utah System of Higher Education has tasked state universities with developing three-year programs under a new Bachelor of Applied Studies degree, which would still need approval by accreditation boards.

More than a dozen public and private universities are participating in a pilot collaboration called the College-in-3 Exchange, to begin considering how they could offer three-year programs. The public universities include the College of New Jersey, Portland State University, Southern Utah University, the Universities of Minnesota at Rochester and at Morris, the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Utah Tech University.

Proponents of the three-year degree programs say they save students money and set them on a faster track to their working life. But detractors, including some faculty, say they shortchange students, particularly if they later change their minds on what career path they want to follow.

The Utah Board of Higher Education in March approved the new three-year degree category. Various areas of study would be tied to specific industry needs, with fewer electives required. These degrees are broader than two-year associate degrees, but narrower than a full four-year bachelor’s.

“We told the institutions to start working on them now and developing the curriculum,” Geoff Landward, commissioner of the Utah System of Higher Education, said in an interview. “Also, we want them to find industry partners that would be willing to hire people with bachelor’s degrees of this type.”

He added: “We created a sandbox for our institutions to play in.”

Once created, individual programs would need both national accreditation and state Board of Higher Education approval.

Landward said he has taken note of criticism that the three-year programs might “cheapen” the bachelor’s degree by shortchanging students who wouldn’t receive a broad college education. But he said students could save on tuition, get a head start in the workforce and meet the needs of industries that are looking for certain skilled workers to address shortages in the state.

That includes nursing, he said, where requiring a four-year degree means taking lots of electives that have nothing to do with the career.

Utah State University’s current four-year nursing program, for example, suggests several electives along with the required anatomy, math and biology courses as prerequisites during freshman and sophomore years.

“We think if we are partnering with industry and they help us develop it, I don’t think it cheapens the degree,” Landward said. “I think it creates a very specific degree.”

Robert Zemsky, a University of Pennsylvania professor and founding director of the university’s Institute for Research on Higher Education, began proselytizing for the three-year college movement about a dozen years ago.

He said the idea has gotten traction recently because “we are wading in the deep waters of righteous anger” at colleges and universities because of the perception that four-year degrees are not worth their high costs.

A Pew Research Center survey released last week found only 1 in 4 American adults said it is extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree as a means to getting a good-paying job. Only 22% of the respondents said the cost is worth getting a four-year degree even if the student or their family has to take out loans.

Zemsky suggested that a shorter time span also would lead to higher college completion rates. More than a third of students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree in fall 2014 at a four-year school failed to complete their education at the same institution in six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Zemsky said 27 colleges and universities have embarked on creating three-year pilot programs and predicted 100 would be doing so in another year.

Over the past 10 years, Zemsky said, schools have been ignoring the desires of students and instead creating their curricula around the preferences of faculty — which is where most of the opposition is coming from.

Last year, at a conference of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, a bargaining unit for professors, President Kenneth Mash said the overwhelming number of college faculty nationwide “have a visceral disdain for the idea.”

In an interview with Stateline, he said three-year programs would hurt students too, creating a “two-tiered” system under which wealthy students would get a full four-year education and lower-income students a cheapened three-year degree.

“If it’s going to be a four-year degree, they should name it something that indicates it’s not a B.A.,” said Mash, who also is a political science professor at East Stroudsburg University. “We don’t know that employers will treat them the same.

“I’m on board, as most faculty are, with the notion that people want to increase their job opportunities. But that’s not all there is to a college degree,” he said. “Degrees prepare you to be a better citizen, a better parent, and on and on.”

And he said a broad education is what makes it possible for students to change jobs and careers many times during their working lives. “It’s really that baking in liberal arts … that makes it possible for people to do different things in their lifetimes.”

Indiana’s new law

Indiana enacted a law in March that requires each public institution that offers bachelor’s degrees to review all the four-year degrees with an eye toward making some of them three years. And the law requires that by July 1, 2025, each state university offer at least one bachelor’s degree that can be completed in three years.

Indiana state Sen. Jean Leising, a Republican who sponsored the measure, pointed out that every extra year of college costs the students, their parents and the state.

But she noted that not all degrees lend themselves to compressed curricula. “If you’ve got a kid in pharmacy [studies], they are not going to able to get through it in three years. Engineers aren’t going to be able to do it in three years. But some of the other kids will.”

Chris Lowery, Indiana’s commissioner for higher education, said the law will encourage schools to think about how to create 90-credit-hour bachelor’s degrees: “How feasible is this, would you still have the quality, would you still have the agency?”

Three-year degrees allow for choice, he added. His daughter, for example, had enough AP credits after high school to make a college degree feasible in three years, but opted to go to school for four, because she wanted to have enough time to study so that she could get “straight As” as well as to have time for extracurricular activities.

“But for a lot of students, the finances are tighter,” he acknowledged.

Credentialing requirements

At both public and private universities, the new three-year degree programs that require fewer credits would need national accreditation.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, a regional credentialing agency, accredited several three-year bachelor’s degrees at two private schools, Brigham Young University-Idaho and Ensign College, last year. The degrees are in applied business management, family and human services, software development, applied health and professional studies.

Sonny Ramaswamy, the commission’s president, said in an interview that the three-year programs underwent two years of evaluation before being awarded accreditation.

He said the evaluation showed that competency in many professions could be attained in three years instead of four, and that graduate schools were willing to accept three-year bachelor’s as a credential for the pursuit of higher degrees. He noted that European college degrees often are completed in three years.

“We said, ‘We will approve you, but this is a pilot,’” Ramaswamy said. The schools will provide data to show their students have earned a good education, he added.

“My intuition is that it will head in the right direction,” he said. “The public is calling for innovation.”

Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit organization that says its mission is promoting academic freedom, excellence and accountability at colleges and universities, said “fluff” courses strengthen the case against a 120-credit hour bachelor’s degree.

“Let people get a good foundation with a strong general education core, strong skills and some electives,” Poliakoff said in an interview. “That’s what a responsible university should be doing.”

The council does an annual survey of higher education institutions and grades them A through F on what the group calls “core curricula” — the proportion of courses dedicated to mathematics, literature, composition, economics, laboratory science, American history and government, and foreign languages.

Poliakoff said the amount of debt students are accumulating over four years is “sinful” and unnecessary. Colleges and universities must meet the concerns of students and their families, he said.

“A 90-credit baccalaureate degree is a pretty good way to tighten up the bolts,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Stateline on May 30, 2024.

The post Universities try 3-year degrees to save students time, money appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The public university launched the Office of Campus Resources and Support on Jan. 1, one day after shuttering its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in response to the DEI ban.

At the time, UT Dallas said the new office was created to comply with the law, and it was not just a rebrand, web archives show.

But now, the new office is gone, too.

It closed April 30 “as a result” of continued efforts to comply with Senate Bill 17, university President Richard Benson said in a statement shared with The College Fix.

The law, which has led to similar closures at other Texas universities, prohibits DEI programs at public higher education institutions and the use of “race, sex, color, or ethnicity” as factors in hiring practices.

However, some universities have appeared to comply with the state law by simply renaming their DEI offices.

Brittany Magelssen, university communications director, declined to answer The Fix’s questions about the school’s efforts to ensure there are no DEI offices or staff, its hiring practices, and the reaction to the closure from students on campus. She pointed to The Fix to Benson’s statement.

Magelssen also did not respond to two follow-up requests for comment this week asking for more information about the closure and the university’s response to those who say it looks as if the newly closed office was just the DEI office renamed.

In his statement, Benson said administrators decided to close the four-month-old office as they continue to “evaluate our SB 17 response and how to realign many of the programs impacted by the legislation.”

Benson said about 20 jobs will be eliminated. He also said the decision “will not be welcomed by many in our campus community” and he will continue to ensure that UT Dallas is a “supportive community.”

On its website, the university said it created the Office of Campus Resources and Support “to ensure UT Dallas can continue to meet the needs of our campus community in a manner that is fully compliant with SB 17,” according to web archives. The webpage recently was removed.

The office “is entirely separate and new” and “will lead activities that are SB 17 compliant,” it stated, adding it is not just the DEI office “renamed.”

According to web archives, the university stated it was still working to determine “the entire scope” of the new office, but its “mission will include enhancing student community-building and supporting employees and employee resource groups.”

One of the office’s projects was to help “facilitate opportunities to foster a welcoming university climate through professional development, employee engagement, and student and employee success initiatives,” according to web archives.

Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said the closure means the university administration finally “rightly recognized” how they must comply with the law.

“The Texas law does not simply call for a superficial reshuffling of offices and employees but a real commitment to ending programs that discriminate or give preferential treatment on the basis of identity characteristics,” he told The Fix in an email Monday.

He pointed The Fix to a series of statements Benson made last year about the DEI ban.

Along with promising no one would lose their job, Benson told the Dallas Morning News at the time: “We’re going to continue doing those things. And so it’ll go under a different name. But I don’t think anyone would have a problem with the actual actions of what we do.”

The University of Texas at Dallas just closed a new office to comply with a state ban on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programming after opening it a few months ago to adhere to the law.

The public university launched the Office of Campus Resources and Support on Jan. 1, one day after shuttering its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in response to the DEI ban.

At the time, UT Dallas said the new office was created to comply with the law, and it was not just a rebrand, web archives show.

But now, the new office is gone, too.

It closed April 30 “as a result” of continued efforts to comply with Senate Bill 17, university President Richard Benson said in a statement shared with The College Fix.

The law, which has led to similar closures at other Texas universities, prohibits DEI programs at public higher education institutions and the use of “race, sex, color, or ethnicity” as factors in hiring practices.

However, some universities have appeared to comply with the state law by simply renaming their DEI offices.

Brittany Magelssen, university communications director, declined to answer The Fix’s questions about the school’s efforts to ensure there are no DEI offices or staff, its hiring practices, and the reaction to the closure from students on campus. She pointed to The Fix to Benson’s statement.

Magelssen also did not respond to two follow-up requests for comment this week asking for more information about the closure and the university’s response to those who say it looks as if the newly closed office was just the DEI office renamed.

In his statement, Benson said administrators decided to close the four-month-old office as they continue to “evaluate our SB 17 response and how to realign many of the programs impacted by the legislation.”

Benson said about 20 jobs will be eliminated. He also said the decision “will not be welcomed by many in our campus community” and he will continue to ensure that UT Dallas is a “supportive community.”

On its website, the university said it created the Office of Campus Resources and Support “to ensure UT Dallas can continue to meet the needs of our campus community in a manner that is fully compliant with SB 17,” according to web archives. The webpage recently was removed.

The office “is entirely separate and new” and “will lead activities that are SB 17 compliant,” it stated, adding it is not just the DEI office “renamed.”

According to web archives, the university stated it was still working to determine “the entire scope” of the new office, but its “mission will include enhancing student community-building and supporting employees and employee resource groups.”

One of the office’s projects was to help “facilitate opportunities to foster a welcoming university climate through professional development, employee engagement, and student and employee success initiatives,” according to web archives.

Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said the closure means the university administration finally “rightly recognized” how they must comply with the law.

“The Texas law does not simply call for a superficial reshuffling of offices and employees but a real commitment to ending programs that discriminate or give preferential treatment on the basis of identity characteristics,” he told The Fix in an email Monday.

He pointed The Fix to a series of statements Benson made last year about the DEI ban.

Along with promising no one would lose their job, Benson told the Dallas Morning News at the time: “We’re going to continue doing those things. And so it’ll go under a different name. But I don’t think anyone would have a problem with the actual actions of what we do.”

McGuire also outlined a series of problems with university DEI programs.

He said, “DEI offices are not classrooms,” they are administrative offices that “cannot claim the privilege of academic freedom.”

McGuire, whose organization promotes academic freedom, said DEI offices “often violate these principles” by “advancing viewpoint discrimination with institutional support and sponsoring trainings and programs that expect participants to accept that individuals are inherently oppressed or oppressors based on group membership.”

While public universities need to welcome all students, he said “DEI offices and programs often work against this standard.” He pointed to the use of DEI in hiring, which leads to the exclusion of certain views.

He said the money saved by closing DEI offices could be redirected to better purposes, such as need-based scholarships for students who otherwise could not afford to go to college.

McGuire said nondiscrimination also should extend to “intellectual and ideological nondiscrimination.” He said “if universities cannot guarantee free expression and intellectual diversity on their own, then others, including legislators, need to make that happen.”

Other Texas universities also have eliminated their DEI programs as a result of the law, The Fix previously reported. The University of Texas at Austin recently canceled its special graduation celebrations for black, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQIA+ students as well.

This post appeared on The College Fix on May 8, 2024.

The post UT Dallas closes new ‘support’ office to comply with DEI ban appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

“Some colleges are banning free speech on college campuses. Well, no more because I’m about to sign a law that protects free speech on college campuses in Texas,” Abbott said in 2019.

And six months ago, during a celebration of Free Speech Week, University of Texas at Austin administrators touted the school’s expansive protections for free speech on campus — including speech that was anti-war or considered hate speech.

“Hate speech is not a category of speech the government can restrict,” Amanda Cochran-McCall, the university’s vice president for legal affairs, said at a school-affiliated Free Speech Week in October. “Imagine if the government at the whim of a political party could just decide at any time what constitutes hate speech, and then just start arresting people for engaging in it.”

But since last week, Abbott has deployed the Department of Public Safety to help crack down on separate protests at the University of Texas at Austin that he vociferously disagreed with. Campus leaders have defended their orders to students to disperse or face criminal trespassing charges.

As state troopers pushed students to the ground with black batons, Abbott cheered the arrests.

“Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled,” he said Wednesday on social media platform X.

In Texas and across the country, pro-Palestinian demonstrations in response to the Israel-Hamas war have put state and university leaders’ prior free speech commitments to the test. UT-Austin’s heavy-handed response to the protests — and the state GOP leaders’ support of the arrests — are a stark contrast to their vigorous celebration and defense of protected speech in previous years.

“The big irony here is that the political right has been for years and years and years criticizing campuses for not enabling enough free speech,” said Kevin McClure, a professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “And now they are vociferously arguing in favor of repressing students’ free speech rights.”

UT-Austin officials have said they had reason to believe that protest organizers planned to take over school spaces, like pro-Palestinian demonstrators have done at other campuses across the country. But free speech advocates wonder whether those fears were enough to crack down on protesters, raising questions about when speech is protected in Texas universities — and who gets to enjoy those protections.

“What we’re seeing here is this hypocrisy of big double standards saying we love free speech, not this speech,” said Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Tensions at the UT-Austin campus come five years after Texas Republicans banded together around a new law to boost free speech protections at Texas universities.

The law established all common outdoor areas at public universities as traditional public forums, allowing anyone — not just students — to exercise free speech there. It also prevented universities from considering “any anticipated controversy related to the event” when approving guest speakers on campus.

“Students might be surprised to know that free speech also includes other things, though, things like the right not to speak or the right to wear an item in protest of war or to use strong — even offensive words and phrases — to convey political messages,” Cochran-McCall said at last year’s Free Speech Week.

On the morning after last week’s campus arrests, UT-Austin staff taped “NOTICE” flyers in front of the school’s tower with a notably different tone. Instead of highlighting what was permitted, the flyers detailed the university’s litany of limitations for protests: no masks, no disguises, no encampments, no loud sounds that interfere with learning and no blocking entrances.

Texas universities have the right to create “reasonable time, place and manner” restrictions on free speech activities. When those rules are violated, universities can discipline students, said Steven McGuire, who specializes in campus freedoms at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Free speech also loses First Amendment protections when it amounts to discriminatory harassment or true threats that incite imminent violence or destruction of public property.

Last week’s protest showed no signs of violence before police got involved. Authorities interrupted the students’ march within an hour, forming a barricade at the front of the crowd with their bikes. The officers used loudspeakers to warn students to disperse or face criminal trespassing charges. In total, 57 protesters were arrested. The Travis County attorney’s office dropped all criminal trespass charges against Wednesday’s protesters because they did not find probable cause. DPS is pursuing felony assault charges against one journalist who was covering last week’s protest.

On Monday, law enforcement officers made dozens of arrests again, this time after about 60 protesters formed encampments. Officers used pepper spray and flash-bang explosives to dispel the crowd of demonstrators.

Free speech experts say the university is within its rights to order the arrests of protesters who set up encampments, but they question whether last week’s protest, where authorities got involved early and before any major disruptions, crossed any lines.

UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell’s explanation of the university’s response and the police crackdown last week seemed at odds with the protections the university has previously touted.

In his email to the community last week, Hartzell said he had “credible indications” that the organizers of Wednesday’s protest were “trying to follow the pattern we see elsewhere, using the apparatus of free speech and expression to severely disrupt a campus for a long period.”

Across the state and around the country, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have erupted on college campuses. At Columbia University, administrators called New York Police Department to empty a campus encampment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which resulted in the arrest of more than 100 people.

In an April 25 email obtained by The Texas Tribune — addressed to fundraising staff who would be getting questions from donors about the university’s response — administrators described the intel they had. They mentioned social media postings that used identical language compared to protest organizers at Columbia University and other schools, as well as a concern that a non-UT affiliated group known as the Students for Justice in Palestine had a role in organizing the walkout.

Ahead of last week’s demonstration, organizers never indicated in public communications that they intended to stay past the university’s 10 p.m. curfew, incite violence or start encampments. Instead, in an Instagram post, organizers spoke of teach-ins on the South Lawn, an art workshop and a pizza break, according to an Instagram post from the organizing group.

Though it’s standard for a few officers to be present to manage a sizable peaceful protest like the Wednesday walkout, free speech experts condemned the phalanx of law enforcement that descended on the campus when there was no indication of violence.

Preventing unlawful assembly, as DPS described the governor’s instructions, is a slippery slope that can lead to preventing assembly altogether, free speech experts said.

“Students that are demonstrating and doing so peacefully being arrested so quickly for trespassing does set up a dangerous precedent,” McClure said.

In explaining why law enforcement was called, UT-Austin spokesperson Brian Davis on Wednesday said student protesters had violated their “no masks” rule for demonstrations.

But Savannah Kumar, an attorney with ACLU of Texas, questioned whether a rule prohibiting face masks is enough to trump free speech protections. Immunocompromised students may have reasons to wear face masks. And rules should not dissuade or discourage people from exercising free speech, she said.

McClure said he expects legal challenges will follow the law enforcement response to Wednesday’s protest.

Abbott’s criticism of the protest came weeks after he issued an executive order requiring schools to revise their free speech policies to punish what he described as “the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses.” He singled out groups like Palestine Solidarity Committee, which organized last week’s protest, as potential violators. He did not give examples of how the group may have engaged in antisemitic speech.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have faced similar accusations elsewhere. Earlier this month at Columbia University, protesters drew condemnation after some Jewish students reported feeling unsafe and harassed. Some protesters who appeared to be unaffiliated with the university verbally attacked Jewish students with antisemitic remarks, The New York Times reported. President Joe Biden denounced antisemitism on campuses amid the protests, calling it “reprehensible and dangerous.”

But while Texas’ political leaders have linked pro-Palestinian views with antisemitism, a peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstration shouldn’t be considered discriminatory harrassment, Morey said.

“Someone peacefully protesting and saying, ‘From the river to the sea,’ is not going to be severe, pervasive [or] objectively offensive, such that Jewish students who are offended by that speech are going to be unable to go to class,” Morey said. “It’s not going to hit discriminatory harassment, just because Governor Abbott calls it hate speech or calls it antisemitic. ”

“From the river to the sea” is a common chant at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, alluding to the stretch of land from the Jordan River on the eastern flank of Israel and the occupied West Bank to the Mediterranean sea to the west. Pro-Palestinian activists say it’s a call for peace and equality in the Middle East. The American Jewish Committee has described it as an antisemitic “call-to-arms.”

“There is of course nothing antisemitic about advocating for Palestinians to have their own state,” the AJC says on its website. “However, calling for the elimination of the Jewish state, praising Hamas or other entities who call for Israel’s destruction, or suggesting that the Jews alone do not have the right to self-determination, is antisemitic.”

Former U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan, last week also commented on how Abbott’s comments about arresting students for hate speech violated their constitutional rights to freedom of speech.

“If he’s arresting them for other reasons, then he should say so,” Amash said. “If he’s arresting them for their speech, then he’s violating the law, and his actions threaten everyone in the state, including everyone he claims to be protecting.”

Morey, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said Abbott had engaged in clear “viewpoint discrimination” on Wednesday when he ordered state troopers to get involved in the UT-Austin protest.

“This was shocking. We have never seen anything quite like this where a governor is saying I’m going to preempt protests based on these views,” Morey said. “It sure seems like he is taking real liberties with the letter of the law because he personally, and maybe other folks that are affiliated with him in Texas government, find that speech objectionable.”

This article appeared in The Texas Tribune on April 29, 2024.

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More than a week of round-the-clock sit-in protests at dozens of US colleges and universities produced close to 1,000 arrests, largely ordered by campus presidents accepting the demands of congressional Republicans for crackdowns on expressions of pro-Palestinian sentiment.

The politicians have argued that they are responding to an alarming rise in antisemitic expression, and the institutions contend they are setting reasonable limits on community disruptions.

“Nobody should ever be denied the right to protest or to counter-protest,” said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative-leaning network of about 23,000 trustees at 1,500 public and private colleges and universities that cheers the Republican effort. “But an encampment is an intrusion on to the university” that deserves reasonable limits, especially given the sensitivities of Jewish students, Dr Poliakoff said in summarising the perspective that many campus leaders have decided they should embrace.

For many other experts, meanwhile, the basic logic of the lawmakers and the institutions doesn’t add up. Expressions of antisemitic sentiment in the US have undoubtedly been on an upswing since the October surge in violence between Israelis and Palestinians. But antisemitic voices have long found receptivity among leading US conservatives, while high levels of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence around US campuses and beyond have largely escaped sustained high-level attention – and continue to do so.

And while US university leaders have a genuine interest in keeping their operations open, many over past weeks have been inviting police to arrest their students while making few if any assertions that the protests have involved actual violence or meaningful disruptions to their campuses. Also, while some student protests in past eras have produced strict law enforcement responses, peaceful overnight sit-in demonstrations have routinely been tolerated – albeit begrudgingly and with moments of pushback – on topics such as wars and civil rights, sometimes even producing negotiated outcomes.

At least one institution is doing that now. Portland State University said that it encouraged student activism and would stop taking gifts or grants from Boeing until it could address concerns about the company’s work with Israel’s military. “The passion with which these demands are being repeatedly expressed by some in our community motivates me, as a scholar of academic ethics and a university leader responsible for the well-being of our campus constituents, to listen and ask additional questions,” Portland State’s president, Ann Cudd, said in announcing the decision.

That, however, stands largely as an exception among the responses around the country. The quick and widespread leap to law enforcement tactics followed almost immediately behind a pair of congressional hearings where Republicans repeatedly accused the new female presidents at four leading universities of being insensitive to the fears of Jewish students who encounter campus demonstrations against Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

After the first hearing, in December, the heads of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania resigned, abandoned by their trustees and other wealthy donors who largely aligned with the Republican demands. At the second Capitol Hill hearing, earlier this month, Columbia University’s president, Baroness Shafik, largely accepted the lawmakers’ demands that she aggressively limit pro-Palestinian protests and punish those involved in them.

The Columbia president then called in New York City police to begin arresting more than 100 demonstrators. Yet almost immediately the protesters resumed their overnight encampments on Columbia’s main lawn, inspiring copycat versions around the country and earning the Columbia president demands for her resignation from both sides.

The situation appeared to be working out masterfully for Republicans on several levels, education and political experts said, given the party’s historic alignment with US religious conservatives who prefer that Israelis rather than Arabs maintain control of Christianity’s holy lands, and who regularly describe themselves as champions of law-and-order social perspectives.

In a close election year, it had basically become a modernised nationwide version of the demonise-the-students strategy pursued so successfully in the 1960s by Ronald Reagan, the future US president just then beginning his career as governor of California, said Jack Schneider, professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As University of California students protested the Vietnam War, Mr Reagan described the University of California, Berkeley as beholden to counterculture activists, prompting the firing of the California system’s president, Clark Kerr, and the defunding of public higher education in California and beyond.

“It was politically brilliant, even if it was disastrous for California students,” Professor Schneider said. “I was just sort of surprised that it has taken so long for the Republican Party to nationalise that approach, but that’s definitely what we’re seeing here.”

Other advantages Republicans were realising from the strategy, said another expert, Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, included driving Jewish American voters from their traditional progressive allies. “In general, Jews in America vote 70 per cent to 75 per cent Democratic,” Professor Sabato said. “In a close election such as 2024, every vote matters.”

Examples of that split can be seen in students such as Avi Balsam, a sophomore computer science and maths major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr Balsam said he knew full well that Palestinians as well as Jews were native to the land that now comprises the state of Israel, that Palestinian civilians were being killed in large numbers by the Israeli military, that antisemitism was just one among many flavours of discrimination fouling US society and US college campuses, and that Republican lawmakers weren’t necessarily seeking constructive solutions by heavily politicising the issue.

And yet Mr Balsam also acknowledged that Jewish identity left him and other students highly sensitive to the specific terms and the emotions that some protesting students were using to express their grief over the killings of so many Palestinians. “When you’re speaking about these things,” he insisted, “you have to be very careful what language you use and who you’re triggering, who you’re upsetting.

“If there are Israelis on your campus who have lost family members in the Second Intifada [between 2000 and 2005], maybe don’t call for intifada on our campus. And if there are people on your campus who have Jewish relatives living in Israel, maybe don’t say, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab’, which implies that your family has no place to go, they should be expelled, they should be killed.”

In the end, therefore, as much as Mr Balsam opposed Republicans on most political issues, he welcomed their alliance over Israel.

Leading Democrats have broached the topic carefully. As the House education committee hosted its hearings with the university presidents, the panel’s leading Democrat, Bobby Scott, repeatedly acknowledged the hurt felt by Jewish students while pleading for equal consideration of Arab and Muslim students. And two of the committee’s Democratic members – both with Jewish backgrounds – joined their Republican colleagues in sharply challenging campus tolerance of pro-Palestinian student advocacy.

President Joe Biden, while avoiding any public advice on how universities should handle student protests, has also chosen to single out comments by individual Columbia students that he regards as antisemitic, saying through his media representatives that they should “serve as a wake-up call” for the attitudes among some activists.

US higher education’s national leaders also have trodden carefully. The main US higher education lobby group, the American Council on Education, has largely refrained from criticising either its own members – the nation’s university presidents – or the lawmakers they cultivate for financial and policy support.

“What’s happening on campuses involves really complicated tensions between free speech and safeguarding student safety,” the ACE’s president, Ted Mitchell, said. “It’s certainly not always easy, but college administrators need to be very clear about what their policies are and be consistent about how they enforce those policies.”

The convergence of Republican political interests with the protests over renewed Middle East violence, experts said, dealt US higher education a tough political hand at a time when it was already struggling with fundamental and widespread public concerns about its overall cost and value.

Republicans aligned with Donald Trump might deserve to have questions asked about their sincerity in battling antisemitism, said Christopher Brown, professor of history at Columbia University. But regardless of any actual hypocrisies, Professor Brown said, “the main issue for me is the threat they pose to what is one of the greatest assets this nation has – which is its massive, broad, diverse, varied institutions of higher education across the country”.

And on that measure, he said, despite all the political and emotional baggage of Israeli politics in the US, Columbia’s president had a real chance during her congressional hearing, and immediately afterwards, to have pushed things in a markedly different direction for the entire country. That’s because the executive committee of Columbia’s University Senate unanimously told the president and her team, as she was contemplating using police against the student protesters, “that is a really bad idea”, Professor Brown said. “And they went and did it anyway.

“For higher education, generally, it was a disastrous mistake,” Professor Brown said. “And I think it was a fully predictable outcome – that rather than quieting things down, it would simply inflame them.”

The Columbia leadership has tried since then to work much harder at negotiating with the students, he said. But in the meantime, the spark has been lit well beyond Columbia. Each day since the congressional hearing with the Columbia president and the accompanying arrests, the nation watched the situation spiral, with classes moved online, commencement ceremonies cancelled and students on both sides saying they don’t feel safe and don’t feel heard.

“They took a very difficult, bad situation and made it so much worse,” Professor Brown said. “All of the campus protests that have emerged have arisen after the police were called in.”

Perhaps most dangerously, Professor Schneider said, the raft of negative public attention had created a big new opportunity for Republicans to expand their ongoing work to withdraw public funding for education.

That pursuit had been hitting roadblocks at the school level in the US, he said, as conservatives showed ideological interest in the ideals of privatisation but generally recognised – especially in the small rural communities where Republicans tend to thrive – that their children were well served by local public schools.

Higher education, however, seemed much more vulnerable to a sophisticated new round of attack on its already weakened levels of public investment, Professor Schneider said, because universities often did not have the same level of close emotional attachment to their local communities. “You don’t have a ton of folks in the middle of Kansas whose kids are currently enrolled at Harvard,” he said. “So that’s an easier potshot to take.”

Given that dynamic, Professor Schneider said, campus leaders should expect the fundamental conflict to persist – if not with students, then with lawmakers. “It’s not going to pass any time soon,” he said, “because the right has figured out that this is good for business.”

This post appeared on Times Higher Education on April 30, 2024.

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Mr. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French philosopher, novelist, filmmaker, and playwright. For 50 years, he has covered the world’s “forgotten wars,” both independently and on behalf of the French government. He is the creator of many renowned documentaries, including three films on the war in Ukraine: Why Ukraine, Slava Ukraini, and Glory to the Heroes, the last of which will be released in December. In November 2023, he is on the front lines in Gaza and has rallied the West to support Israel’s struggle against terrorism.

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The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) first raised the alarm about the bill in January, and we have been communicating with lawmakers in the General Assembly throughout every step of the legislation’s journey to Governor Youngkin’s desk. Most recently, ACTA Senior Program Officer for Trustee & Government Affairs Nick Down testified against the measure and published an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch arguing against the bill’s passage.  

In response to the governor’s veto, ACTA President Michael Poliakoff, a Virginia resident, stated, “Bravo, Governor Youngkin! The first duty of the boards of visitors of our public universities is to serve the citizens of this state. They do this by prudent oversight of their schools and by creating policies directed at the public good, not at narrow parochial desires that an institutional constituency might demand. When the Commonwealth is the priority of the board of visitors, our universities will fulfill their mission of teaching, learning, and research and enjoy the esteem and support of Virginia’s citizens.”

ACTA is dedicated to holding public college and university leaders accountable to the constituents they serve. We thank Governor Youngkin for his prudent decision to veto Senate Bill 506.

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UT already has existing protections in place to guard students from harassment. According to the executive order, Texas universities must “review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses.” However, it fails to provide clear guidelines as to how universities may do that without infringing on students’ rights to free speech. 

Tyler Coward, the lead counsel for government affairs for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is concerned about the potential legal ramifications of the order.

“Institutions should be on notice that if they adopt an unconstitutional policy, and enforce that unconstitutional policy against students, based on their constitutionally protected political speech on this very important matter today, they risk a First Amendment lawsuit that they will likely lose,” Coward said. “When institutions are weighing whether or not to follow an executive order, or the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, they should always choose the Constitution.”

Because of its broad scope, potential First Amendment issues will rely largely on each individual university’s implementation of the order, according to Steven Collis, Texas law professor and director of the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center.

“If you define antisemitism narrowly to be consistent with free speech law, so for example, you might say, ‘We will not allow direct threats of physical violence to anyone. We will not allow trying to incite imminent lawlessness’ … then you’re consistent with the Constitution,” Collis said. “But if you say we’re not going to allow anyone who is protesting the current actions of the nation of Israel to share their comments, I can almost guarantee you’re going to be violating the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”

However, Michael Poliakoff, American Council of Trustees and Alumni president, believes that this order is both legal and imperative to protect Jewish students. 

Poliakoff said in an email statement, “The Governor’s strong support for freedom of speech and firm prohibition of antisemitism are fully compatible. Speech that threatens imminent racial violence or creates an environment so hostile that students of color cannot pursue their educational goals is both illegal and despicable: the same is manifestly true for antisemitism.”

Poliakoff believes the order is a standard, constitutionally protected measure.

“It is customary for university speech policies to include time, manner and place restrictions in addition to prohibitions on speech that is constitutionally unprotected because it amounts to, for example, discrimination or harassment. It is quite proper that the Governor would require the state’s universities to review their policies, and his order is particularly urgent in the wake of the rise in antisemitic acts on campuses following the October 7 Hamas massacre,” said Poliakoff.

However, the constitutional issue with Abbott’s order lies within its attempted prohibition of dissenting speech, not its protections for Jewish students. The order’s vague wording could allow universities to expand policies to include political speech and criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitism. These broader definitions not only limit the expression of students, but also shifts the focus from student safety to political agendas.

FIRE said in an online statement regarding Abbott’s order, “Anti-Semitism on campus is a real problem. When anti-Semitic speech crosses beyond the First Amendment’s protection, Texas institutions have a moral and legal obligation to take action. But today’s executive order relies on a definition of anti-Semitism that reaches core political speech, including criticism of Israel.”

Coward said Abbott’s order requires institutions to adopt the speech code of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which prohibits certain criticisms of Israel. 

“When the government says, ‘This is the one entity you cannot criticize, but you’re free to criticize whoever else,’ that’s blatant viewpoint discrimination and the Constitution prohibits that viewpoint discrimination,” Coward said. “And that’s why this executive order, if the institutions abide by it, will be adopting unconstitutional policies that will restrict their students’ free speech rights.”

The order specifically called out two student organizations by name, the Palestinian Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine. However, Abbott provided no evidence to support the claim that these organizations have participated in or condoned antisemitic behavior on campus. Singling out these groups without substantial evidence could lead to the suppression of certain opinions among students.

“Our activism has never called for harm to be committed against other groups of people. Never. We’ve never called for harm against Jewish people,” said Ammer Qaddumi, a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee. “A lot of Jewish activists here in Austin are actually some of our closest allies and very close friends. This executive order, it mischaracterizes our activism as being antisemitic.”

By enforcing this order, universities risk limiting discussions on important political issues related to Israel and Palestine, which inhibits students’ First Amendment rights and fails to foster freedom of expression in academic environments.

This post appeared on The Daily Texan on April 8, 2024.

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Ambassador Bolton served as assistant to the president and national security advisor under President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019. He was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and served in high-level positions in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. His incisive commentary on world affairs and America’s role has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other major newspapers.

The post Middle East Challenges for America and Israel by John Bolton appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Senate Bill 506, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, dictates to boards of visitors that their loyalty of duty lies primarily with the college or university and secondarily with the commonwealth of Virginia.

Senate Bill 506 would set a dangerous precedent and should not be signed by Gov. Youngkin. Those who are appointed to serve on a governing board of a public college or university should always be accountable to the taxpayers of the state first, and the institution second. He or she serves the people of the commonwealth through the institution. The institution is the means to an end, not the end itself of the board member’s service.

There is a long-held belief that college and university governing boards around the country exist only to raise money for the institution, or to rubber stamp the decisions of the president and administration. This belief is dangerous and misguided. The role of a trustee, first and foremost, is oversight and stewardship of the institution’s mission. The organizational chart of any institution of higher education will show that the governing board sits above the president and the administration, not below it. In other words, presidents serve at the pleasure of the boards of trustees. In the case of colleges and universities that are publicly funded, as in Virginia, these institutions have an extra layer of accountability in the form of the state taxpayer.

Keeping the loyalties of university boards to the commonwealth first, and the institution second, ensures that boards of visitors or trustees are not beholden to any one constituency over another.

Boards of visitors serve the public by considering the common good rather than merely the narrow interests of their institutions. For example, when a college administration proposes a tuition increase, it is the responsibility of the board of visitors to consider whether the citizens of Virginia can afford such an increase. By changing the duty of trustees to serve their institutions first, the only internal check against the narrow interest of each college or university is removed, which weakens the ability of these institutions to self-regulate. This point is reinforced in Governance for a New Era, a 2014 publication produced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that brought together 22 of the nation’s leading scholars, university presidents, trustees and business leaders dedicated to strengthening higher education governance. “Trustees indeed, at their best, can provide a ‘reality check’ on the often self-directed focus of colleges and universities,” the report stated.

Sen. Surovell’s testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education on Jan. 29 was all one needed to hear to understand the origins of this legislation. According to the distinguished senator, the need for this legislation came as a response to confusion from several visitors after an official opinion was released last October by Attorney General Jason Miyares, in which he stated, “In fulfilling the responsibilities to the specific institution it serves, the primary duty of the board of visitors of each Virginia institution of higher education is to the Commonwealth.”

Should Virginia Senate Bill 506 become law, it will cause even more confusion among members of university governing bodies in the commonwealth, as well as imply that these governing boards are beholden to the president of the institution. In reality, university boards of visitors should be receptive to all campus constituencies, but beholden to only the great, general interest and common good of Virginia.

This post appeared on the Richmond Times-Dispatch on March, 5 2024.

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Mr. Down’s testimony reads in part: “Since 1995, ACTA has worked with over 23,000 higher education trustees across the country to ensure that students receive an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price. We believe that the strength of America’s higher education system relies on engaged governing boards that appreciate their independent role. But this bill makes one crucial change to Virginia statute that would undermine this very idea.

“Title 23 in section 1304 of the Code of Virginia makes clear that the boards of visitors’ ‘primary duty [is] to the citizens of the Commonwealth.’ Senate Bill 506 would replace this by reorienting visitors’ primary duty to the university. Let me be clear—this would stand the idea of public oversight on its head. A corporate board has a duty to its shareholders. [Similarly], a public university board has a duty to its stakeholders, in this case the taxpayers of Virginia. When the interests of the university conflict with those of the public, the public’s needs must come first, and the job of determining that is that of the boards of visitors.

“ACTA understands the desire to protect Virginia’s boards of visitors from undue political interference, and we agree that for trustees to fulfill their fiduciary duties, they must be independent actors. However, I urge you to consider an alternative way to secure trustees’ independence, as their duty to serve the Commonwealth should not be misconstrued as a duty to obey any political actor.” Listen to Mr. Down’s full testimony here.

MEDIA CONTACT: Gabrielle Anglin
EMAIL: ganglin@goacta.org

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