Jon Fansmith: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the April 1st edition of dotEDU Live. It is with some regret that I announce that this will be our last dotEDU Live ever. Sarah and I have decided to leave government relations and enter into a field that's less stressful. No, I'm kidding, of course, and it's April Fools. Happy April Fools. We are going to be doing these, I don't know, until you all stop wanting to listen to us talk about-
Sarah Spreitzer: Until the end of time.
Jon Fansmith: Until the end of time, maybe. It just feels that way, Sarah. But I should introduce myself. I am Jon Fansmith, ACE senior vice president for Government Relations, and Sarah, you've already jumped in, Mushtaq, you should have jumped in. Sarah Spreitzer, Mushtaq Gunja, super colleagues, amazing staff at ACE here. How are you guys doing?
Mushtaq Gunja: I'm doing well. I wasn't in your meeting this morning. I was a little bit worried that this was the last dotEDU Live.
Sarah Spreitzer: That that was the discussion in the meeting that you missed, Mushtaq? We would obviously consult you.
Mushtaq Gunja: Unfortunately, Michelle, this does not mean that the HHS bloodbath is also a prank. We will be getting to that in just a second. If it's okay with you, Jon, Sarah, I think I'm going to try to keep this conversation moving, and we have so much to get to, as we so often do. It's nice to see the couple of thousand folks that are online. Thank you for joining. Thank you for so many of you sending questions in advance; they're very helpful for us as we structure this conversation. Please feel free to put questions in the chat, questions in the Q&A, and we'll try to get to it.
Last time that we met a couple of weeks ago, Sarah, Jon, we were meeting in the wake of some very significant cuts at the Department of Education. I mean, something like half the staff or so was slated to be cut. One of the things we had been waiting for was the executive order that was going to come either before or after from the president about the dismantling of the Department of Education. I understand that it came in the last couple of weeks. What did it say, and what effect, if any, does that have on how things are going to unfold from here?
Jon Fansmith: It's really been a funny process. Maybe not funny is the right word, but I think we had three times where it was very clear that a signing ceremony had been scheduled for this executive order only for it to be pulled back. And there's a variety of reasons, whether they were upset with a media outlet for leaking that they were going to do it was one reason why. There was concerns had been raised about what this might mean for school lunch programs that caused it to be pulled back. But even maybe more interestingly, everyone, not everyone, but a lot of people in DC saw drafts of this executive order starting weeks before it was actually signed and implemented. And if you looked at the language in the original drafts, it was very expansive; it was very rhetorically strong.
The actual executive order that was finally signed after all this start and stop process was very short. It was almost entirely focused on K-12. It talked a lot about money that has been spent on K-12 without resulting improvement in test scores and then really this pivot to the idea of returning education to the states, which certainly, state support for public institutions, state roles in a lot of states for state financial aid... Those are not small things, but really when you talk about returning education to states, that's a K-12 focus. This idea of community schooling and everything else. Higher ed has always had a much different sort of national relationship with the federal government, so in a lot of ways not so relevant to us.
Of course, some mention about DEI and getting rid of DEI across the board, but not what we saw in the initial drafts, not what I think we expected to see. Not really that much in there, although at that point, as you pointed out, Mushtaq, half the Department of Education staff had been eliminated in some ways. It already been publicly acknowledged they need Congress to pass laws to get rid of the department. The executive order in some ways was kind of, went with a whimper, not a thud, right? There just wasn't much to it, and at that point it was a foregone conclusion what they're attempting to do.
Sarah Spreitzer: But the signing was very impressive with all the students sitting at their desks. I mean, I actually think it happened because after the RIFs or the reduction in force at the department, when they got rid of entire offices such as all the staff from the Title VI international programs, everybody at IES, a lot of the regional FSA offices, the regional OCR offices, we had started talking about, "Why would you even do an executive order? You're already halfway there. You're using the executive authority to dismantle the department. The next thing would be for Congress to do something. Why do you even have to do an executive order?" And of course, when we started thinking that way, that was when the executive order got issued. But I'm with Jon. It wasn't surprising. We knew what was going to be in it, and those actions had already been taken.
Mushtaq Gunja: Some of them. The EO and other statements from both White House officials and congressional Republicans has been, "We're going to move this back to the states. We still care about education. It's just going to be the states that are going to do this. They're closer to the people." Okay. How are state governments going to be able to deal with the higher ed parts of their portfolio? At the K-12 level states have always been the primary driver of education; on the higher ed level it's a little bit different. How do you guys think about how our institutions should be thinking about the state parts of this? And what, if anything, do they need to do to prepare?
Jon Fansmith: The states aren't going to do this. I want to be really clear, right? Federal programs are in statute; Pell Grants are in statute; student loans are in statute. Those are laws that are directed to federal agencies to administer and manage and to provide the funding for. There isn't really a way that you simply transition these efforts to the states. And let's be really clear: the states don't want to do this. They do not want to take up the funding obligations. They do not want to take up the administrative obligations. They do not want to take on expanded roles in managing these programs. So, even if you could theoretically get Congress to support this idea too, you'd have an awful lot of red state governors who would say, "There is no way I want to have to now spend the time and money, especially, and staffing and other obligations to try to effectively implement this at a state level."
It's just, the concept of returning to the states, like you said, Mushtaq, K-12, you can see the argument for it and there's definitely some historical overlap. Higher ed, it just doesn't work that way. The state rules are pretty clearly defined, the federal rules are pretty clearly defined, and almost all of that's encapsulated in existing law that would need to be changed.
Sarah Spreitzer: I would slightly disagree with that, Jon. I think that the governors want federal funding. I think that you're thinking about it, if Pell Grant were to look as it does now where it would be awarded to an individual student, I think that would be very hard for the states to actually go in and implement. But if they go to some sort of block grant where there's an amount of money that's given to a state based on the number of low-income students they may have in the state, I think the governors would welcome that funding. I don't think it would be spent out in any way in a standardized format the way that we now have on the federal side, and I don't know if it would actually go to the neediest of students. But again, all of that would have to be decided by Congress, and it's not going to happen in the next month or so.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with you entirely. I think governors would love to get a giant block grant in place of federal funding that goes directly to institutions or students. Why wouldn't they? But as you pointed out, that's not what the law says, and if they're the ones who then have to start administering, if you want to take Pell Grants and keep Pell Grants in place but have the states make aid eligibility determinations and award the funding and do Return to Title IV and all of the things that the Department of Education does that are tedious and complicated and require specialized skills, I don't think there's a lot of interest by governors' parts to taking on that kind of work. They would love a block grant. Every governor would love a block grant, blue or red, but that's not really what's on the table at this point.
Mushtaq Gunja: I have nightmares of my Return to Title IV conversations when I was at the department, because I suppose .. I don't know if I'd describe it as tedious, but man, it was complicated and I'm yet to get way down in the weeds. And there's a reason that we do it at the federal level and not make 50 states try to figure that all out for themselves. It's just not particularly efficient. Now, of course, there are statutory requirements, as both of you have alluded to here, and the EO references as dismantle it, but it all has to be done lawfully. What is the state of legislation here as it relates to the Department of Education dismantling, and what are senators saying, what's Congress saying?
Sarah Spreitzer: I like how both of you are very hung up on this idea that it's in statute, it's in law, you can't do things without changing the statute, but obviously this is an administration that's really pushing as much as they can their executive authority. But Mushtaq, to your point, we have heard that there is going to be legislation introduced. I think the latest was Johnson or Cassidy, who's chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, is expected to introduce it. I don't know what's in it. I mean, I think that it will likely try to address some of these questions. We have had conversations about, how do you move that type of legislation? Do you likely want to get the 60 votes in the Senate, but could you move it under some sort of reconciliation process? And I know Jon's going to say, "No, you cannot move it under a reconciliation." I'm going to argue, I bet they're going to try.
Jon Fansmith: Sarah, you always have an easier argument, because you just get to say, "They could do it, right?" And I get it. There's frustration in the comments about the fact that there are multiple cases, I don't disagree, where the administration is either pushing the boundaries of what the law allows or in many cases just clearly violating the law. So I get the concern about why do I keep talking about what the law requires? One is, it's just impossible to try and envision a scenario in which the law doesn't apply. Two, we have actually seen the courts in many, many, many cases pushing back and enforcing law. Three, honestly, just for the purposes of Congress, it's a whole lot easier to administer these things with some guidelines, because they don't have unilateral authority. They don't have the ability to make these things happen on their own.
I get the fears. I totally understand it, but it's worth keeping in mind there are still some barriers and some guide rules. We will see, right? I think reconciliation, there's always surprises about what the parliamentarian allows and what they don't. We're undergoing that process, I know we're going to talk about later, but I don't think this is the sort of thing it historically would not be relevant. The other thing is you push to do things like that, there are precedents there that open the floor for the other side to come in and implement the kinds of changes they want in reconciliation. I think there's reasons for some reasonable restraint as to what exactly we might see happen, but it's always easier to throw out your scenario, Sarah, than to be my calm pragmatic voice.
Sarah Spreitzer: Okay. I'm just saying.
Mushtaq Gunja: In the meantime, can I just make sure—there are questions in the chat about this and in the Q&A—Have institutions been receiving their financial aid, their grants through Title III and the rest, TRIO, their block grants, have they been getting those dollars in the ways that they were getting them, or have the reductions in staffing at the Department of Education, anything in this EO affected any of the dollars, at least in the short term?
Jon Fansmith: There's a couple of different aspects to this. The first is that we have not been hearing from campuses, and the folks in the comments are seeing a different experience. We have not been seeing issues around FAFSA determinations and other things. Those with the department, there were immediately after the reductions there are a number of things, FAFSA collapsed. We've also seen that the department went back and rehired a bunch of people in the Federal Student Aid office, a lot of them who were systems administrators and others who were fired because they could fire them but are pretty critical to operating all the functions of the department in these very purely non-partisan, non-political, non-policy ways, just administratively. We haven't seen that yet.
I don't know if we want to talk about this now. I know we're going to talk about Congress and the budget, but there are some things that are happening right now that are pretty concerning about federal funding and what that might mean for student aid, Title III and Title V and TRIO, based on what they did in the continuing resolution. But do we want to come back to that, Mushtaq? I mean, you're-
Mushtaq Gunja: No, I think we're here, let's talk about it a little bit. What does this mean? What is what's happening in budget reconciliation, what does that mean for our institutions and funding? By the way, I should just say, I'm happy to break any ties between you and Sarah. I've been holding on.
Sarah Spreitzer: As long as you're keeping score.
Jon Fansmith: Sarah's way more, I periodically check the comments. It's always something like, "I agree with Sarah," so I'm in the minority here, that's fine. I think the tie has been broken, Mushtaq.
I want to be really clear: there are two parallel things that are happening. One is this effort to abolish the Department of Education. We've already talked about the law that creates Pell Grants and determines the funding formula and the eligibility criteria. Those all remain in place. We have seen no indications currently that the Department of Education is doing anything different to try to change the laws or to upend those programs. That said, what Congress did when they passed the continuing resolution, the funding bill that essentially said, "We're halfway through the current fiscal year, fiscal year '25," to fund the rest of the government out through the end of September, they did something that they haven't done before, which is unusual. Which is instead of saying, "We're going to give X amount of money to Pell, we're going to give X amount of money to Work-Study, we're going to give X amount of money to SEOG," they just funded categories. Which is partly what they normally do, but then they usually delineate what program gets what. The reason that matters is without actually saying so much goes to each program, within those various buckets what they're allowed to do is now, the administration is now allowed to shift the money within those buckets so long as they spend all of it within the bucket. And I'm being a little bit vague, what that could theoretically look like is something like, because Pell, Work-Study and SEOG are all in the same bucket, you could move all of the money from Work-Study and SEOG, fully in compliance with the law at this point, and use it to fund Pell Grants.
Do we think they will do that? No, we don't think they'll do that. The department has put out a letter saying that they plan on funding out the rest of this year along the lines of what they did in the preceding year. It's really worth being concerned about, though, because things like, say, institutions that have now received their eligibility for Title III and Title V, whether you are an HSI or you are an HBCU or you're an AANAPISI, whatever your institutional status is, you should get that money because you've now been determined to meet the criteria. With the flexibility within the budget that the administration has, they could very well theoretically say, "Well, we've tended to see TCUs and HBCUs as in a different category than other institutions." In fact, they've made comments about things that institutional aid that's dependent on the percentage of students of a certain race or ethnicity at those institutions is discriminatory, so maybe they shift that funding.
What Congress did allowed for a lot of that to happen. Now, you might ask, "Why would they do this? Congress generally likes to dictate what the administration does." One of the reasons probably is that they care less about '25 and disrupting '25, but what they'd like to do is start setting the stage for the current... Fiscal year '26 starts October 1st, but the budget discussions are underway. Starting to actually look at these things, the cuts at the Department of Education, reduced programs, Title III, Title V, and saying, "These are the areas we're going to cut. We're going to reduce spending." And the executive branch now has some authority to implement those cuts in advance of that fiscal year starting, which creates a justification for reducing the overall funding in those areas.
Members of Congress, particularly on the House side, have talked well before the CR about the fact that '25 was almost irrelevant, that '26 was the target year, '26 is the year that will reflect DOGE cuts, '26 is the year that will reflect the administration's priorities. What the Congress did in the CR gives them a lot more flexibility to start laying that groundwork in a very, very specific way.
Sarah Spreitzer: But Jon, you mentioned FY 26. We have yet to see the president's budget request, which, yes, it's the first year of President Trump's second administration. We know that those are usually delayed, but that's usually what we have in hand to tell what the priorities are, or at least what the administration is going to do to shape the appropriations bills that are coming before Congress. I don't know, people are saying May we may see it, but it seems like the whole appropriations process is already delayed, and I don't think that that's helping with the vagueness that FY 25 was left at.
Jon Fansmith: Right, and we've heard the rumors that we'll see the president's budget at the end of April, beginning of May. That will give us some indications of where the cuts will be. This is called the skinny budget. In the normal year the president, the administration releases a massive budget that's every program level. A skinny budget is usually first year of a new administration, and it has big picture summaries in certain areas and priorities. Again, I think we are fully expecting to see a lot of things proposed in that budget that will look pretty substantial in terms of cuts, especially in areas that we care about.
Mushtaq Gunja: Several comments in the chat about the updates that were supposed to be coming at the end of March being delayed and potentially the FSA website being down. Jon, Sarah, do you know anything about this, and have you heard anything from our contacts either at the Department of Ed or on the Hill?
Jon Fansmith: I don't know anything about this in particular. I mean, I know about it; I don't know necessarily what's the rationale behind it. It's pretty simple to assume given all of the turnover and the reduced staffing and the reduced capabilities just for functionality at the department that it may be related to that, but I get the concerns we're seeing popping up in the chat. We've heard from other people that anything this administration does that creates uncertainty in this case leads to suspicion about what they're attempting to do, and it's probably reasonable.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, I mean, some of it may be just sheer, incompetence is a too strong a word, but just sheer delays, mistakes, lack of staff, right? You lay off half the staff maybe things might not go out as smoothly as it otherwise would, but yeah, it's very, very difficult for us to know whether or not there's something more behind it. But again, we haven't heard anything directly that says, other than this blocking of these dollars on a going-forward basis, that any of the current dollars that should be sent out to institutions will not be. I hear, Jon, Sarah, from both of you some concern about what this is going to look like. Going forward, do you have advice for our institutions here on what we might be able to do individually as campuses and then collectively as a group?
Sarah Spreitzer: Mushtaq, I keep on talking to campuses about remaining flexible. It's not just happening at the Department of Education. Jon and I were talking this morning about the National Science Foundation has only sent out about half of the amount of funding that they usually send out during this time. Within the last two-month period it's down by about 50 percent, and so money is just not flowing out of these agencies. And I think it's for a multitude of reasons, whether it's staff cuts, whether it's DOGE doing stop work orders, whether it's reprioritization within the agencies, it's really difficult to tell. And so I think our institutions remaining flexible and being able to respond is probably the best advice that we can give.
Jon Fansmith: The other thing I'll say, and we've been saying this throughout, but it really is important. I want to underscore it again: talk to your members of Congress, talk to your state legislatures, talk to your governor's office. Let them know what uncertainty... And I'll say, especially in a situation like this, we are in the period in which institutions are packaging aid. We are in the period in which, for institutions that have enrollment decisions, that offers are being made and enrollment decisions are being made. It is a really critically important time for the federal government simply to maintain stability in a lot of these areas.
And again, there may be partisan views or political views about higher education. What your representatives at the state and federal level do know and do care about is if jobs are being lost, if funding is being suspended, if there are real negative impacts that's going to come back, whether it's just for the political reason of they might lose votes as a result of it, but also because they care about their communities. They need to know those things, and that is the single strongest avenue right now for reversing some of these things or at the very least trying to maintain a level of stability in federal operations that, let's be realistic, we're trying to get through this fiscal year at this point and deal with the next one. We don't need change. That's an important message to get forward. Just hold steady for at least the next six months.
Mushtaq Gunja: And we're trying to collect, of course, national data, amalgamate all of your stories. But yeah, I mean, if all of you can be... If you can have a handle on the direct impacts to your students, to your communities and then go to your legislatures about it. I mean, I know we've been saying it every time, I think it's exactly right. Lots of questions in the chat about IPEDS and the future of IPEDS, and I'm going to ask for a friend that may be running the Carnegie Classifications.
Sarah Spreitzer: I wonder who that is.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, Sarah, what is the future here of IPEDS? Do we know anything more in these last couple of weeks?
Jon Fansmith: We have the same sort of conflicting problem, which is the administration has gutted the people who would do this work. They've canceled the contracts with the outside entities that perform all this work as contractors for the federal government. The counterbalancing rumor, and I want to emphasize this is a rumor, and you hear it not just at Ed, you hear it at other federal agencies, is that a lot of these reductions are going to be addressed. The timeframe is often referenced as late spring, early summer, maybe midsummer, where the administration will now staff back up and there probably will be a heavy reliance on contractors rather than federal employees. But there'll be new hiring efforts for federal employees that whatever the criteria you want to assume will be more aligned with the administration's staffing goals, and that will be the effort to address some of these functions.
A lot of these things like IPEDS reporting, broken record at this point, but there is a statutory requirement to do IPEDS reporting. Frankly, we've seen from the Trump administration in the first term, they have a lot of interest in data on higher education, not necessarily because they are supportive of what campuses are doing, but because they want to know what campuses are doing, even if that's critically. So, there are incentives for them to do this work, but again, it's really hard looking at the reductions we've seen, the IES, Institute of Education Sciences being reduced to just the statutorily required director and no one else on board, incredibly hard to look at that and say, "They are going to meet these functions they are legally obligated to do." Maybe something will change, certainly will need to change in one way or the other, but not clear right now what that will look like.
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, Jon, isn't there a reporting deadline right now that people are submitting information to IPEDS, but it's unclear if there's any staff there to receive it. Is it like on this automated system where the information is coming into the Department of Ed, and if we trust what the administration has been saying, that it's not going to actually impact services or the statutory requirements of what Ed is supposed to performing? But it's hard to imagine doing away with all the staff actually means that you're going to have something that's going to be usable.
Jon Fansmith: Oh yeah. I mean, as people pointed out, the deadline, I believe is tomorrow for filing your IPEDS reports. Can the system accomplish the submission of that and the collection of that data? Seemingly, we haven't heard concerns about people's ability to submit the data, system does not appear to be down. What will then happen with the hundreds of people whose responsibility was to clean, collate? Again, there are sanctions in place that are available to institutions that erroneously or fail to report IPEDS information. There are lots of implications to this and no one to actually administer it. So yeah, I mean, I'm with you, Sarah. They are saying they will do it. As of now we don't have specific pointers who can say, "This has failed." We've had blips, we've had hiccups. But we're also starting to get to the point where it's one thing to reduce the staff and say, "We'll do it." It's another to actually do it, and I think that's where we're going to start to see the problems popping up a lot more frequently.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: I will note that the chat seems to have a few examples, at least, of folks having questions for the IPEDS help desk and receiving answers, so that's encouraging.
Sarah Spreitzer: But I think that's through the contract. I think that's contracted out. I don't believe that that's done actually by the department. I could be wrong.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, Christine Keller from AIR, who's just great friend to ACE and great person generally, is saying just that RTI still has that contract, so they're managing it.
Mushtaq Gunja: Speaking of staff cuts, as we are recording, I'm seeing a little bit of news about what is happening over at HHS. Sarah, I know you track this quite closely. What do we know about cuts at Health and Human Services?
Sarah Spreitzer: Mushtaq, we had heard that there was going to be a reduction in force, or an RIF, across HHS, and earlier this week they did announce that they are trying to shed another 10,000 jobs. That's already on top of the 10,000 employees that they've already either let go because they were probationary or that took the buyout or they have tried relocating. For our institutions this has an enormous impact on the National Institutes of Health, CDC, the FDA, all of the various scientific agencies under Health and Human Services, which is being led by Secretary Kennedy. Some of the first actions that I think were taken with the agency were under this DOGE umbrella, Elon Musk taking these actions to make these staff reductions.The actions we're now seeing are being taken by the secretaries. Now that the secretaries are confirmed, I think they are doing further cuts, but it's really unclear how NIH is going to be operated with these types of reductions to staff.
One of the news reports was that the Director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease, which is the agency that was previously run by Dr. Fauci, she has been placed on administrative leave. And obviously, that's one that would deal with bird flu and other infectious diseases that might be happening. A lot of uncertainty right now, and I keep thinking about the fact that there were proposals last year by congressional Republicans to reorganize the National Institutes of Health, and just like at Ed where the RIF or the reduction in force is really helping to reshape the agency, perhaps that's what we're seeing happen at NIH. You get rid of so many staff members, and then it's easier to restructure the National Institutes of Health, or at least you have less pushback, even if that's going to be something done by Congress.
Mushtaq Gunja: The Trump administration has also taken a whole set of actions against individual institutions, especially as it relates to antisemitism. Jon, what have we seen happen both at the administration level and in Congress?
Jon Fansmith: The highest profile one so far had been Columbia, and I know we've talked a little bit about that before and won't go into that in great detail, but Columbia is now in a place where their interim president has resigned. Their board chair has stepped in as the interim president. They are in some process of negotiations with the task force, which includes Department of Justice, Department of Education, General Services Administration, following their threat to suspend or terminate $400 million in grant and contract funding to Columbia. There was a demand letter from the task force in terms of changes they wanted Columbia to make. Differing accounts over the weekend whether Columbia has fully agreed to those changes, has reached some accommodation there. I think we're still trying to learn more about where that will resolve and especially with the leadership transition makes that even a little bit murkier.
What is very clear is that the administration sees what they have been doing with Columbia as a playbook for moving forward with other institutions. There were 10 institutions that were identified as targets of the antisemitism task force; Columbia was certainly one of them. Harvard is another, and they received on Monday a notice very similar to what Columbia received .Both received them on a Monday. Both were told that existing federal grants and contracts, in Harvard's case, I believe about $260 million of existing grants and contracts were being put under review, as well as an additional $9 billion in existing federal grant obligations for review, whether Harvard is, according to the task force, sufficiently protecting students from antisemitism on their campus. A little bit different with the Harvard announcement. The task force's press release had some actually relatively positive things to say about Harvard. They talked about strides Harvard had made. They talked about the role of Harvard within American higher education in ways that were relatively positive, but ultimately we're seeing the same effort we saw with Columbia.
I want to emphasize something here. What the administration is doing, back to this whole point of legality, is not legal. You cannot simply suspend funding to institutions because you don't like them or you don't like something you have perceived that they have done. There are very clear processes for which funding to campuses is suspended or terminated, and that follows investigations and findings and determinations and efforts of resolution and a number of other steps. None of those have gone forward here. Harvard has not yet engaged in a way other than putting out a statement in response saying they're taking it seriously. The fact that Columbia began negotiating is a very different approach. It's not clear that Harvard will take that same approach. It's worth saying that when you are talking about hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, understandably the leadership at these institutions has concerns about what that might mean.
Even if the legal authority to fight them is on their side, there may be other repercussions you have to consider. I think maybe even more troubling to me than the announcement at Harvard, I think in some ways we expected to see more institutions targeted the way Columbia was. We also just saw today Princeton announced that a number of research grants at that institution had been suspended. The agencies that have been identified with some press reports included NASA, Department of Defense, Department of Energy.
The reason I find that one particularly concerning, Princeton has not been really in the spotlight for campus protests or antisemitic acts on the campus. I won't say that I know with great detail whether any of those incidents have occurred or not, but certainly they have not been the target of focus. Princeton's president did have a very well received and I think widely read op-ed about the efforts by the administration in which he likened it to McCarthyism and the Red Scare. And so, you wonder a little bit about an institution like Princeton that again was not on that list of 10 institutions, has not really been the focus, now coming under scrutiny, seeing their funding suspended, if that is punitive because of public views that have been expressed by its leadership. That to me is a much more concerning. Look, it's all very concerning. I'm not minimizing the impact for any of these institutions. But if we're moving from an effort where at least there have been ongoing OCR investigations, some pretext for an engagement with the institution, to other institutions where just politically they're expressing viewpoints the administration disagrees with, that's an escalation that's really problematic.
Sarah Spreitzer: Jon, you talked about how unusual this is, and I think you also talked about whether or not this is unlawful, but for those people who don't work in offices that deal with Title VI or Title IX compliance, I mean, there is a process in statute where there's a complaint, an investigation is carried out, a discussion is held with the agency, and then there may be a resolution reached that is then made public. I don't know of other times when an investigation has been carried out within a matter of days, and then when a public notice, like the one that went to Columbia saying, "These are the seven things you will be required to do," is made public beyond the negotiation between the agency and the institution of higher education. And the way that Title VI is meant to work is that it's meant to encourage resolutions. And I'm not sure that this process is actually seeking to address antisemitism or actions by these campuses, or whether it's a play to punish these institutions, whether or not there's an investigation. I mean, it's just so beyond what has previously been done, and I think many of our institutions are scrambling, because this is not the process that they're used to.
Jon Fansmith: I like that you are more measured than I am. This is very clear in the legal process. I mean, there is a defined process in law. There are clear criteria. You can't simply just say, "We're not going to fund research programs" have nothing to do with antisemitism or civil rights or campus actions because you don't like it, and that's what is happening right here. It is an illegal action in which the administration is ignoring the process the law requires to try to force institutions to comply without an inve... It's not they completed it; there was no investigation. There is no determination; there was no ruling, there was no review; there was no resolution. This is simply an extralegal process.
Mushtaq Gunja: I'm going to move us. But I agree with both of you and side very much, this is obviously not following regular process, and I think that it makes it very difficult for our institutions who are used to that regular process. And the Title VI offices on those campuses who are used to having a negotiation, for all that to be upended and quickly makes it difficult for our institutions who are trying to faithfully meet their mission and follow the law. So we'll stay on top of all of this and keep reporting out what we know. Let's see how this plays out.
I do want to make sure that we spend at least a few minutes on all things international, international students. Lots of activity in the chat about this. And I mean, look, I think everybody on this chat probably has some sense that there's been some increased effort to try to deport some international students, at least some high-profile students, scholars for some protest activity.
I think we still don't know exactly the number of students, I saw Secretary Rubio make mention of hundreds of students potentially that may or may not be affected. I think we know some high-profile cases. I think that there may be some lower ones, lower-profile that we just don't know. And it seems like the legality of these actions is absolutely being challenged, at least in some cases, in court. It seems to us that potentially other countries are going to start trying to recruit American researchers. Sarah, you follow this, both of you follow this closely. Sarah, I know this is a particular area of your interest and expertise. I mean, what do we know and what should our institutions be thinking and doing now?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, Mushtaq, it's funny. This is basically what we were just saying about the Title VI investigations. This is not the regular process in any way, or I think anything that our international officers or international student offices are expecting or ready for. What we've seen is Secretary Rubio announcing that they were going to be targeting international students that were in the United States that perhaps had participated in pro-Hamas or taken a pro-Hamas position, perhaps in an op-ed, being very public about that support, and really interpreting a piece that's already in the Immigration and Naturalization Act that says that you can't provide support or espouse the views of a known terrorist organization, of which Hamas is one, and that the State Department would be using AI and other things to scrub social media to target these students who are already here. That started a few weeks ago when we saw some very public cases of ICE showing up to detain these students, some of whom were graduate students, some who had already graduated, and they're being detained, and the courts, I think are currently deciding whether or not they could be deported. But we're also hearing about this expanding, and I think Secretary Rubio said last Thursday that he believed that he had personally revoked around 300 visas, not just student visas, they could also be visitor visas. And he explained that they were being revoked because if they had known the information that they had now, the visas would never be granted.
But what's unusual about this is that the State Department is revoking the visa, and then DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, in the case of students, is going in and deleting their record within the Student Exchange Visitor program. Institutions are not always being informed when this action is being taken, so a student may be getting this message that their student visa is being revoked. There's not a lot of details about why it's being revoked. There's no option of where to appeal, or perhaps if there's a confusion between names and it wasn't the student's social media profile that was actually looked at, there's no one to follow up with. The message just says, "Your student visa has been revoked, and DHS may take actions to actually remove you from the United States." When your visa is revoked, you may not have to leave the United States right away. Really where it's going to impact you is if you leave the United States and you try to reenter. And so this is, they're revoking the visa, they're actually deporting these students or encouraging them to self-deport.
Right now, from the association standpoint, we are trying to get further information about how many students this is impacting, if we can get any sort of guidance on where students can turn if they need to appeal this process. Also, whether there has been a change, because we know that there have been some changes, in student visa policy following President Trump's January 20th executive order that called for additional vetting of all immigration or non-immigration visa applications. And so there's just a lot we don't know right now, but we're very concerned, because it's causing panic among our international students. And I don't think our institutions really understand how best to advise those students, because this is all happening in real time.
Mushtaq Gunja: I mean, Jon, do we have advice for our institutions? I mean, should they be having their international students stay over the summer if they can? I mean, what are we telling them and what are your reactions to all of the-
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I might actually bounce that question back to Sarah. I did want to say two quick things. One is certainly, I mean, Sarah talked about protests, and really the scale is not just students who have expressed views in support of Hamas. It is really we are seeing students who have just been identified in pro-Palestinian or what are considered anti-Israel protests or even other types of protest activity. So the definition is really very expansive in terms of where we have seen students being targeted.
The other thing we heard from some of our colleagues yesterday from conversations with ICE is that they are moving forward with the idea of asking institutions to provide institutional disciplinary records on international students to them as part of enforcement efforts. So going even beyond the areas around misdemeanor enforcement and others that we have seen in effect, really in a lot of ways greatly expanding the scale of what they might seek access to and use to make these visa revocations and deportations. But I think Sarah's probably better suited than me to actually talk about what campuses, I know folks in chat talking about monitoring SEVIS every day and doing other things. But Sarah, you're probably better to answer this than me.
Mushtaq Gunja: Can I just ask one question though, maybe for either of you? On the latter of those, the disciplinary records, does FERPA apply here? I wish I were a FERPA expert, but I'm not. I mean, what are the institution's obligations here as it relates to sending over some of these records?
Jon Fansmith: I do not want to pretend that I'm the expert on this, but I did ask some people about this when I heard, and what I was told is that while for an American student FERPA would clearly cover their disciplinary record, for international students there's more of a gray area because disciplinary actions can be relevant to their continuing status. And I think I saw someone in the chat is talking about if there's a suspension or expulsion that may suspend their enrollment, but I think it goes even beyond that level of disciplinary function may have an impact on their ability to enforce a visa revocation or change in status.
Mushtaq Gunja: I do just want to say one thing about legal protections that apply to U.S. citizens versus not. I mean, I think that the Trump administration has taken a very strong position that if you're not a U.S. citizen, due process just doesn't apply. And I just want to be really clear that that's too broad a reading of the law. Non-U.S. citizens may not have the full extent to due process, capital D, capital P, under the Fifth Amendment, but that doesn't mean that they don't have any process rights here. And so we should be very careful as we think about what parts of any particular statute apply to international students and don't.
And I know that lots and lots of folks that are working on these things know the ins and outs of these statutes much better than the three of us do. But don't just assume. I'll give just a small piece of legal advice. Just make sure that you check with your general counsel on campus, because I think it's really important for us to make sure that we are giving our students all the abilities and giving them all the rights they are entitled to.
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, and Mushtaq, I don't think these questions have been asked before, because these actions or these types of actions have not been taken. And I would just say we are still expecting some sort of travel ban to come from the administration. We've seen draft copies, just like we saw with the Department of Education executive order. There's been things leaked to The New York Times and to others about what the travel bans might look like. We know that the administration wants to yet again propose a duration of status rule, which would limit the length of a student visa to three or four years. And so we are very concerned about the impact on our international students' enrollments, and we're also worried about our international faculty. And we're even worried about, I think our U.S. faculty being recruited by other countries. So there's a lot of questions swirling about whether or not the United States is going to remain welcoming, I think, to international academics.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sarah, we are now over time. Thank you everybody for staying with. I do want to just double click on two quick topics. We've heard a couple of questions in the chat about international students in summer. I mean, I know that we're going to be loath to give legal advice here, but what's your sense of what institutions should be telling their students about traveling home during breaks? And then anything you want to say about the travel ban just very, very quickly given that we're over time.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I would just say about students traveling, I mean, whenever a student re-enters the U.S. or is entering the U.S. for the first time, they have to go through customs and border protection. We are hearing a lot more reports about social media being checked, about people being turned away at the border even if they have a valid visa, so I think it depends on how much risk an international student wants to take. I think a student traveling to and from the UK is very different than, say, a student who may be on that draft travel ban list, which looks a lot like the first travel ban under the Trump administration. A lot of Muslim-majority countries like Iran, Pakistan, a lot of countries within Africa that may have historic overstay rates. And so I think if you're from one of those countries, it may be more difficult to enter the United States, and it may make sense to remain in the U.S. over the summer.
Mushtaq Gunja: Thanks, Sarah. Jon, any last thoughts before we sign off for this edition of dotEDU Live?
Jon Fansmith: I mean, I'll be quick. I'll reiterate the things that I always say. I know it is really tough in this environment. There's a lot of frustration. I know it's also hard to think about the process and the way forward, but I will just emphasize and say again, what we do is important, what we do is valuable, and no one is better at communicating that than the people on this call and the people in the higher ed space. And you need to be sharing that message with your neighbors and your legislators and everyone else, because that's how we start to push back. That's how change happens. That's how some of these norms get restored and how some of the worst efforts get broken. So keep at it. It can feel tough, it can feel frustrating, but please keep at it. We're going to keep at it. We're engaged every day, all day, all the time, all weekend these days. And your support is critical of making that happen too, so thanks everyone.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, thanks, everybody. Thanks for hanging in there with us, and undoubtedly no April Fools. We will be back in one of these webinars sometime soon. Hang in there everybody.
Sarah Spreitzer: Thanks.
Jon Fansmith: Thanks, everyone.
Thank you for joining us on dotEDU. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback is important to us, and it helps other policy wonks discover our show. Don't forget to follow ACE on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes and other higher education content. You can find us on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And of course, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, please feel free to reach out to us at podcast@acenet.edu. We love hearing from our listeners, and who knows, your input might inspire a future episode.