Heilig is a Professor of Educational Leadership, Research, and Technology at Western Michigan University. He is a leader in the NAACP. In addition, he is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education.
He writes:
Artificial Intelligence didn’t fall from the sky.
It wasn’t born in a vacuum or descended from some neutral cloud of innovation. It didn’t arrive pure and untainted, ready to solve all of humanity’s problems. No—AI was trained on us. On our failures. On our history. On our data. On our bias. On the systems we tolerate and the structures we’ve allowed to stand for far too long.
And that should terrify us.
Because when you train artificial intelligence on a world soaked in inequity, saturated with bias, and riddled with disinformation, you don’t get fairness. You get injustice at scale. You don’t get objectivity. You get bias with an interface. You don’t get solutions. You get systems that do harm faster, deeper, and with more plausible deniability than ever before.
Inequity in AI
AI has the potential to enhance the speed and depth of inequity. It can supercharge systemic harm because it’s built on a house of sand—data shaped by centuries of inequality and an internet flooded with algorithmically amplified hate. And if we let it, it will not only distort truth. It will undermine democracy, destabilize public education, and rewrite reality to suit the most powerful.
Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It never was. Every AI system reflects the values, decisions, and data of the people who built it. And that data—no matter how big the set—is not free of human judgment. It’s full of bias. It’s soaked in discrimination. It reflects a world where Black and Brown communities are under-resourced, where women’s voices are undervalued, where Indigenous knowledge is erased, and where racial supremacy masquerades as objectivity.
We built AI on a broken foundation, and now we expect it to hold up the future.
But the danger doesn’t stop at replication. AI doesn’t just mirror our inequities. It can multiply them. It can take individual bias and encode it into institutional operations. What used to be a bad policy or a discriminatory judgment call becomes automated across thousands—sometimes millions—of data points and decisions per second. The old excuses are gone. You no longer need a person to do harm when the algorithm will do it automatically, invisibly, and without remorse in perceptible and imperceptible ways.
Can’t stop, Won’t Stop
Furthermore, in May 2024, Palisade Research revealed something that should have been a flashing red light across every sector of society. OpenAI’s most advanced models—o3 and o4-mini—refused to shut down when directly instructed to do so. These AI systems sabotaged their own shutdown protocols. Seven out of 100 times, o3 ignored the shutdown command. Codex-mini disobeyed twelve times. Even o4-mini, supposedly safer, resisted once.
That’s not science fiction. That’s today.
Instead of following human instructions, these models rewrote the shutdown script and continued executing tasks. Researchers believe the models had been so deeply trained to win, to complete tasks, that they were inadvertently rewarded for disobedience. In their simulated world, success was more important than ethics. Productivity was more important than control.
Let that sink in.
We are building machines that—when told to stop—don’t. That’s not innovation. That’s an existential threat.
And we are putting these systems into our schools.
Teacher apprentice Ja’net Williams helps with a math lesson in a first grade class at Delta Elementary Charter School in Clarksburg, near Sacramento.
Credit: Diana Lambert / EdSource
Top Takeaways
California leaders dismiss the criticism and methodology of the rankings.
And yet, graduate credentialing programs cram a lot in a year.
Many teachers may struggle with the demands of California’s new math framework.
In its “State of the States” report on math instruction published last week, the National Council on Teacher Quality sharply criticized California and many of its teacher certification programs for ineffectively preparing new elementary teachers to teach math and for failing to support and guide them once they reach the classroom.
“Far too many elementary teacher prep programs fail to dedicate enough instructional time to building aspiring teachers’ math knowledge — leaving teachers unprepared and students underserved,” the council said in its evaluation of California’s 87 programs that prepare elementary school teachers. “The analysis shows California programs perform among the lowest in the country.”
The report’s call for more teacher math training and ongoing support coincides with the state’s adoption this summer of materials and textbooks for a new math framework that math professionals universally agree will be a heavy lift for incoming and veteran teachers to master. It will challenge elementary teachers with a poor grasp of the underpinnings behind the math they’ll be teaching.
Kyndall Brown, executive director of the California Mathematics Project based at UCLA, agrees. “It’s not just about knowing the content, it’s about helping students learn the content, which are two completely different things,” he said.
And that raises a question: Does a one-year-plus-summer graduate program, which most prospective teachers take, cram too much in a short time to realistically meet the needs to teach elementary school math?
California joined two dozen states whose math preparation programs were rated as “weak.” Only one state got a “strong” rating.Source: National Council on Teacher Quality, 2025 State of the States report
Failing grades
The council graded every teacher prep program nationwide from A to F, based on how many instructional hours they required prospective teachers to take in major content areas of math and in instructional methods and strategies.
Three out of four California programs got an F, with some programs — California State University, Sacramento, and California State University, Monterey Bay — requiring no instructional hours for algebraic thinking, geometry, and probability, and many offering one-quarter of the 135 instructional hours needed for an A.
But there was a dichotomy: All the Fs were given to one-year graduate school programs offering a multi-subject credential to teach elementary school, historically the way most new teachers in California get their teaching credential.
On the other hand, many of the colleges and universities offering a teaching credential and a bachelor’s degree through an Integrated Undergraduate Teacher Credentialing Program got an A, because they included enough time to go into math instruction and content in more depth. For example, California State University, Long Beach’s 226 instructional hours, apportioned through all of the content areas and methods courses, earned an A-plus.
The California State University rejects the recent grading from the National Council on Teacher Quality about our high-quality teacher training programs
California State University
Most of the universities that offer both undergraduate and graduate programs — California State University, Bakersfield; San Jose State University; California State University, Chico; California State University, Northridge, to name a few — had the same split: A for their undergraduate programs, F for their graduate credentialing programs.
Most California teacher preparation programs have received bad grades in the dozen years that the council has issued evaluations. The state’s higher education institutions, in turn, have defended their programs and denounced the council for basing the quality of a program on analyses of program websites and syllabi.
California State University, whose campuses train the majority of teachers, and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which accredits and oversees teacher prep programs, issued similar denunciations last week.
“The California State University rejects the recent grading from the National Council on Teacher Quality about our high-quality teacher training programs,” the CSU wrote in a statement. The council “relies on a narrow and flawed methodology, heavily dependent on document reviews, rather than on dialogue with program faculty, students and employers or a systematic review of meaningful program outcomes.”
The credentialing commission, in a more diplomatic response, agreed. The report “reflects a methodology that differs from California’s approach to educator preparation,” it said. “While informative, it does not fully capture the structure of California’s clinically rich, performance-based system.”
Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality for the past three years, dismissed the criticism as “a really weak critique.”
“You can look at a syllabus and see what’s being taught in that class much in the same way that if you go to a restaurant and look at the menu to see what’s being served,” she said. “Our reviews are certainly a very solid starting place to know to what extent teacher preparation programs are well preparing future teachers to be effective in teaching.”
It’s not just a problem in California.
“When we compare the mathematics instructional hours between the undergrad and the graduate programs, often on the same campus, we saw on average that undergrads get 133 hours compared to just 52 hours at the graduate level. In both cases, it is not meeting the recommended and research-based 150 hours,” Peske said.
Part of the problem is that graduate programs usually don’t have enough time to instill future teachers with the content knowledge that they need.
Heather Peske
Whether or not examining website data is a good methodology, the disparities in hours devoted to math preparation between undergraduate and graduate programs raise an important issue.
True jacks of all trades, elementary teachers must become proficient in many content areas — social studies, English language arts, English language development for English learners, and science, as well as math. Add to that proficiency in emerging technologies, classroom management, skills for teaching students with disabilities, and student mental health: How can they adequately cover math, especially?
“Part of the problem is that graduate programs usually don’t have enough time to instill future teachers with the content knowledge that they need,” Peske said. “California programs have to reckon with this idea that they’re sending a bunch of teachers into classrooms who have not demonstrated that they are ready to teach kids math.”
Brown said, “There’s no way that in a one-year credential program that they’re going to get the math that they need to be able to teach the content that they’re responsible for teaching.”
That was Anthony Caston’s experience. Before starting his career as a sixth-grade teacher at Foulks Ranch Elementary School in Elk Grove three years ago, Caston took courses for his credential in graduate programs at Sacramento State and the University of the Pacific. There wasn’t enough time to learn all he needed to teach the subject, he said. A few classes were useful, but didn’t get much beyond the third- or fourth-grade curriculum, he said.
“I had to take myself back to school, reteach myself everything, and then come up with some teaching strategies,” Caston said.
Fortunately for him, veteran teachers at his school helped him learn more about Common Core math and how to teach it.
The math content Brown refers togoes beyond knowing how to invert fractions or calculate the area of a triangle; it involves a conceptual understanding of essential math topics, Peske said. Only a deeper conceptual grasp will enable teachers to diagnose and explain students’ errors and misunderstandings, Peske said, and to overcome the math phobia that surveys show many teachers have.
Ma Bernadette Salgarino, the president of the California Mathematics Council and a math trainer in the Santa Clara County Office of Education, acknowledges that many math teachers have not been taught the concepts behind the progression of the state’s math standards. “It is not clear to them,” she said. “They’re still teaching to a regurgitation of procedures, copy and paste. These are the steps, and this is what you will do.”
Although a longtime critic of the council, Linda Darling-Hammond, who chaired California’s credentialing commission before becoming the current president of the State Board of Education, acknowledges that the report raises a legitimate issue.
“Time is an important question,” she said. “It is true that having more time well spent — the ‘well spent’ matters — could make a difference for lots of people in learning lots of subjects, including math.”
Darling-Hammond faults the study, however, for not factoring in California’s broader approach to teacher preparation, including requiring that teaching candidates pass a performance assessment in math and underwriting teacher residency programs, in which teachers work side by side with an effective teacher for a full year while taking courses in a graduate program.
“You could end up becoming a pretty spectacular math teacher in a shorter amount of time than if you’re just studying things in an undergraduate program disconnected from student teaching,” she said.
Weak state policies
The report also grades every state’s policies on math instruction, from preparing teachers to coaching them after they’re in the classroom. California and two dozen states are rated “weak,” ahead of seven “unacceptable” states (Montana, Arizona, Nebraska, Missouri, Alaska, Vermont and Maine) while behind 17 “moderate” states, including Texas and Florida, and a sole “strong” state, Alabama.
The council bases the rating on the implementation of five policy “levers” to ensure “rigorous standards-aligned math instruction.” However, California’s actions are more nuanced than perhaps its “unacceptable” ratings on three and “strong” ratings on two would indicate.
For example, the council dinged the state for not requiring that all teachers in a prep program pass a math licensure test. California does require elementary credential candidates to pass the California Subject Examinations for Teachers, or CSET, a basic skills test, before they can teach students. But the math portion is combined with science, and students can avoid the test by supplying proof they have taken undergraduate math courses.
At the same time, many superintendents and math teachers may be doing a double-take for a “strong” rating for providing professional learning and ongoing support for teachers to sustain effective math instruction.
Going back to the adoption of the Common Core, the state has not funded statewide teacher training in math standards. In the past five years, the state has spent $500 million to train literacy coaches in the state’s poorest schools, but nothing of that magnitude for math coaches.
The Legislature approved $20 million for the California Mathematics Project for training in the new math framework, which was passed in 2023, and $50 million in 2022-23 for instruction in grades fourth to 12th in science, math and computer science training to train coaches and teacher leaders — amounts that would be impressive for smaller states, but not to fund training most math teachers in California. (You can find a listing of organizations offering training and resources on the math framework here.)
In keeping with local control, Gov. Gavin Newsom has appropriated more than $10 billion in education block grants, including the Student Support and Professional Development Discretionary Block Grant,and the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant, but those are discretionary; districts have wide latitude to spend money however they want on any subject.
Tucked into a section on Literacy Instruction in Newsom’s May budget revision (see Page 19) is the mention that a $545 million grant for materials instruction will include a new opportunity to support math coaches, too. The release of the final state budget for 2025-26 later this month will reveal whether that money survives.
Brown calls for hiring more math specialists for schools and for three-week summer intensive math leadership institutes like the one he attended in 1994. It hasn’t been held since the money ran dry in the early 2000s.
EdSource reporter Diana Lambert contributed to this article.
When Trump named Ed Martin as Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, those who know his record (and are not faithful Trumpers) were appalled. He had actively defended the January 6 insurrection and had a long record as a Putin apologist, among other things. A strange choice for a very important role in law enforcement. Fortunately, the Republicans who are a majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected his nomination.
Ed Martin is a major actor in Trump’s attempted regime change to authoritarianism. His particular role is to transform the law into a tool to intimidate Americans. After a stint as interim US Attorney for DC which was marked by unprecedented weaponization of the position, Martin will now continue his work for Trump as the official “weaponization czar.”
This is a new position within the Justice Department, designed by the Trump administration, to punish people who have committed no crimes. Martin was originally placed on the “weaponization working group” seemingly ex officio when he was a US Attorney; he will now continue as its chairman. On Martin’s account, his assignment will be to publicly single out Americans who have not been found guilty of anything, or for that matter even indicted. He says there will be “no limit to the targets.”
Martin’s authoritarian past and loyalties are a matter of public record. He helped build an alternative reality around Trump’s Big Lie and coup attempt, treating the January 6th criminals as heroes deserving of financial support and pardons. As interim US attorney, he described himself as President Trump’s lawyer, and abused his position to send letters to people who displeased the president in some way. He threatened journalists, universities and scientists.
Martin, to use the historical term, is taking an ostentatious part in the ongoing attempt at what the Nazis called a Gleichschaltung of institutions: of dropping the distinction between the law and the leader, and of attempting to force everyone in public life into line with the leader’s latest statements. The reference is not accidental. Martin is on the far right, and an advocate of great replacement theory: the spurious idea that a conspiracy seeks to replace white Americans with immigrants. He had a very supportive relationshipwith a known American Nazi.
The czars, lest we forget, were Russian autocrats. The title “weaponization czar” reminds us that much of happening in the United States under Trump happened first in the home of the czars. In the Russian Federation today, the law is weaponized. Prosecutions follow the whims of Putin and his regime, and that the law will be invoked against them according to the political (and financial) interests of those who hold power. Russian media is full of accusations made by Russian officials that people are criminals or wrongdoers, even before they have been tried or subjected to any judicial procedure.
It is important that we understand that Russian-style authoritarianism is a real possibility in the world, one which Martin not only advocates but represents. Russia is not a comparison for Martin. It is a central part of his career. He has no actual qualifications to serve in the Department of Justice. His role has to do instead with making the law something that it is not supposed to be: a way to protect the powerful and punish the innocent who offend them. He auditioned for this role as a propagandist for Russia’s regime.
The title “weaponization czar” is appropriate because Martin’s most interesting achievements thus far are, in fact, in the service of Russia. He has done more visible work for the Russian state television than for any other institution. Martin, in other words, has already been part of one weaponized legal system for some time. His American career as “weaponization czar” is a natural second step of his Russian career as apologist for both Russian and American weaponizers and authoritarians.
Between 2016 and 2024, Martin was a star of both RT and Sputnik, which are propaganda arms of the Russian state. Putin himself has made this completely clear. One of the central missions of RT and Sputnik is to weaken the standing and power of the United States. Anyone who goes on RT or Sputnik, as Martin did more than a hundred times, knows what he is doing. For eight years, on any issue of the day, Martin was there to spread mendacious propaganda about Americans and to defend Putin and Trump. His Russian work surpassed any media exposure in the United States.
Julia Davis, who does the important work of contextualizing Russian propaganda television available for a global viewership, has made Martin’s appearances visible. With her permission, I am sharing her work in the following paragraph. It provides samples, with video links back to his appearances, of how Ed Martin spreads untruth in the service of Russian and American authoritarians. If you want to take the time to judge more of his appearances than the ones I cite below, here (again thanks to Julia Davis) is a longer compilationof Martin’s appearances on Russian propaganda television.
Trump as American president can do, says Martin on Russian propaganda television, whatever he wants. Martin proposes that we should live in the alternative reality provided by the Russian propaganda he serves, since American media cannot be trusted. He instructs us that American elections are rigged and that the January 6th criminals are political prisoners. (Note that Martin was thereby on Russian propaganda television forecasting his own role in seeking pardons for these people and raising money for them.) Martin denied that Russia interfered in the 2016 US elections, although this was quite blatant — and indeed continuous, right down to the uncontested reports that Russians called in bomb scares to predominantly Democratic precincts in 2024. Martin also quite clear on the American role in the world, which is that the US should serve Putin and his wars. Echoing Russian claims at the time, Martin claimed that US intelligence was wrong about the coming full-scale US invasion of Ukraine, when is in fact it was entirely correct. In his view, the NATOalliance is unnecessary. The United States should be Russia’s ally.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when long service to hostile foreign propaganda networks would have been disqualifying for positions in the federal government. Now, as the head of RT boasts, it seems to be a qualification. Since Trump wants loyalists to him rather than to the United States, willingness to serve foreign countries, at least corrupt dictatorships, would be a useful filter. Repeating Russian propaganda tropes could hardly be offensive to Trump; he does this all the time. Taking part in Putin’s propaganda system would be naturally understood as the right kind of apprenticeship for work on Trump’s own regime change. We know that Trump chooses his people by treating their television appearances as auditions. So why not Russian television appearances? All the better.
No surprisingly, Martin says that his key assignment as weaponization czar will be to punish those who investigated Trump’s very real connections to Russia. This country has paid a huge price for not recognizing Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election for what it was: highly consequential and quite possibly decisive in the moment, and a sign of the coming age of oligarchical cooperation via digital tools to build right-wing regimes. That age is now upon us. There is, unmistakably, something very strange about the Trump’s submissiveness to Russia: appointing its media darlings (the list includes Tulsi Gabbard, who is of all things director of national intelligence); exempting it from tariffs when everyone else was targeted, refusing to pressure Putin to end a war when that is the obvious policy, sending as his envoy to Moscow a man who simply repeats Russian claims and uses Russian translations. Too many of us have allowed ourselves to be intimidated by the fear that Trump will use the word “hoax” when we point to the Russian elements of our present reality: such as, for example, that our “weaponization czar” apprenticed in the role in the service of Russia. With our weaponization of the law and our czars, we have a Russia problem.
Working with Russian institutions will not hurt Martin with Trump’s followers, who have been trained to see Russia not as an actual country with interests but as part of a “hoax,” a conspiracy against Trump. This is the sad convenience of “America First”: it really means “America Only”: no matter how things get, we get to be first, since no other countries exist in our minds. If other countries are meaningless, then MAGA people can rest assured that there is nothing like the complicity of international oligarchs, or the guild of international fascists, or the plans of countries like Russia to destroy the United States from within. If other countries do not matter, then it never seems right to ask: just why is it that Russian propaganda and Trumpian rhetoric so often overlap, to the point that training on one is preparation for mouthing the other? But there are, of course, Republicans who have a notion of the interests of the United States, and of the rule of law. For them, Martin’s services to Russia should matter.
The Russia connection is perhaps most important to opponents of Trump. Speaking of Martin’s connections to Russia is not a way of sloughing off responsibility to another country for our own failings. It is, instead, a way to take responsibility. So long as we see Trump and his loyalists as purely American characters, our American exceptionalism tempts us to normalize what they do. We ask ourselves, over and over again, if this is “really” an attempt to end democracy. But if we take seriously the connections of someone like Martin with a hostile foreign authoritarian power engaged in a genocidal war, we get a sense of where things could be headed. Russia is a real country and, for us, a real possibility. When we recognize that the attempt to make America authoritarian is part of a tawdry global trend, with general patterns that we can recognize, we can better see where we are, and get to work.
The U.S. Senate just passed Trump’s massive budget bill, which renews tax cuts for the rich and makes deep cuts to Medicaid, about $1 trillion. Three Republican Senators voted against it: Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Susan Collins of Maine. Vice-President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. Many hoped that Lisa Murkowski of Alaska would also oppose the bill but the leadership bought her off by adding special exemptions and benefits for Alaskans.
Combined with the impact of Trump’s tariffs — which the White House has argued will help pay for the bill’s tax cuts and new spending — the bottom 80 percent of households would see their take-home incomes fall, according to the Yale Budget Lab.
“The right way to understand this bill is it is the largest wealth transfer from the poorest Americans to the richest Americans in modern history,” said Natasha Sarin, the Budget Lab’s president.
Shortly before the bill passed, I received two reports on the education section. Contrary to earlier reports, the Republicans restored vouchers. Apparently they satisfied the objections of the Senate Parliamentarian or decided to ignore them.
Leigh Dingerson, public school advocate who works for “In the Public Interest,” sent out this update shortly before the Senate passed the bill. The biggest takeaway: Vouchers are in again.
For the last 24 hours (more, actually), the Senate has been voting on a slew of amendments to the bill. Most are going down along party lines. At the same time, the Senate parliamentarian has been reviewing the bill for germaneness. She has struck out several provisions including, initially, the voucher language (this was Friday). But it was reinserted Saturday morning. Since then, some tweaks to the voucher language were made in an effort to win over some reluctant senators. Each time the language was changed, it had to go back through the parliamentarian.
This morning at about 2:15 am, Senator Hirono, along with Senators Reed, Kaine and van Hollen, presented their amendment on the floor of the Senate — an amendment to strike the voucher section altogether. That amendment needed 51 votes to pass. It got 50. All the Democrats voted in favor. All Republicans with the exception of Senators Fischer, Collins and Murkowski opposed it.
The voucher language currently in the bill has some important differences from where it started. Here are some key changes to the bill:
The tax credit is permanent, and now unlimited. There is no federal ceiling on how much can be spent. Republicans removed the $4 billion volume cap on the total amount of donations.
But!! Current language limits the amount a donor can get a tax credit on: The text now allows any individual to donate to an SGO for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit worth $1,700 (rather than 10% of adjusted gross income originally).
States can now “opt in” to the program and must provide a list of approved scholarship granting organizations. And the bill clarifies that SGOs can only administer school vouchers within their state. This eliminates our worry that an SGO in Florida, for example, could hand out vouchers in Nebraska.
The Senate has removed the provision asserting that there shall be no Federal control over private or religious schools. In other words, the door has been opened to federal regulation of schools funded with federal vouchers.
The bill provides broad authority for the Secretary of Treasury to regulate the program, including explicit authority to regulate scholarship granting organizations and opening the door to regulate private schools.
So as you can see, there have been a lot of changes, some good, some bad.
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The NATIONAL COALITION FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION released the following statement:
National Coalition for Public Education Denounces Senate Vote on Private School VoucherProgram in “OBBB”
Today, the Senate voted to include an uncapped national private school voucher program in its budget reconciliation bill. This represents the first time a majority of the lawmakers in the U.S. Senate have ever supported sending public dollars to private schools. Now that both chambers have voiced their support for private school voucher provisions, it is likely to become law this year, forcing tax dollars to support private religious schools that can pick and choose who they educate and discriminate explicitly against students with disabilities.
Vouchers divert critical funds from public schools, which 90% of American families choose for their children to attend. Vouchers often go to students who never attended public schools in the first place, which drains taxpayer funds to subsidize private school tuition for well-off families who could afford it without money from the government. Under this harmful program, there will be no accountability for money sent to private schools, nor would the private schools be bound by key provisions of federal civil rights laws, which public schools follow.
If this becomes law, the federal government will give a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to people who give money to use for payments for children to attend private schools or be homeschooled. This was not done previously with any other 501(c)3 donation in our history, and no other non-profit classified as a 501(c)3) would benefit from this one-to-one tax lowering scheme.
America’s public schools educate all students in every community. Private schools that take taxpayer-funded vouchers, however, often discriminate against students for any number of reasons, including based on their disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, English language ability, academic abilities, disciplinary history, ability to pay tuition, or what their family looks like. The language that was in the House-passed bill about private schools maintaining policies that do not take into account whether or not a student has an Individualized Education Program (though these are not full protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) was stripped in the Senate bill and supporters of the voucher provision criticized this language.
Public schools are a cornerstone of American democracy. NCPE condemns Congress diverting billions of dollars away from public education and toward discriminatory, ineffective private school vouchers
About 18,000 Chinese students are enrolled at the University of California, 2,600 at California community colleges and 850 at California State University.
Chinese students have increasingly chosen colleges outside the U.S., including closer to home in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Like all international students, Chinese students can be a valuable source of tuition for public universities, since they pay more than California residents.
A flurry of at-times contradictory White House pronouncements are stoking confusion and concern among the 50,000 Chinese nationals who are studyingat California’s colleges and universities — and potentially steering students away from further work and study in the U.S.
Recent shifts in U.S. policy toward China have cast a “cloud of suspicion” over Chinese students, said Gisela Perez Kusakawa, the executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum, an advocacy group.
“Let’s say you invested all this time, money and energy and years of your life studying to get into a prominent university here in the U.S.,” she said. “You get in, [but] now it’s no longer guaranteed that you could actually finish that degree.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a two-sentence statement on May 28 that the U.S. would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” He also pledged to “enhance scrutiny” of future visa applications from China and Hong Kong.
But the proposal for stronger visa enforcement appears to have been short-lived. On June 11, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would allow Chinese students into colleges and universities as part of a trade truce with China.
The flip from crackdown to rapprochement is one of the latest flash points in a volatile period for Chinese students. Even before Trump’s second term, fewer Chinese students were coming to American universities, data show. International students on U.S. college campuses have experienced a tumultuous spring term as the Trump administration first terminated and later said it would restore thousands of international students’ records in a federal database. The State Department in May paused new student visa interviews but said Wednesday it would resume processing and require applicants to make social media accounts public for government review.
V., a Chinese national student at UC Davis, who requested that EdSource withhold his full name in light of uncertain U.S. immigration policy, said the reelection of Trump has made him “a little bit afraid of speaking out.”
“I’m more conscious about, if I speak online or on social media, maybe I’ll get deported,” he said, even though he generally avoids posting anything political online.
Though he hopes to continue working in the U.S. when he graduates this summer, V. knows several Chinese students who also attended American colleges as undergraduates and initially intended to pursue graduate degrees in the U.S., but are now continuing their education in other foreign countries instead.
The ebb and flow of Chinese students is of particular interest to higher education institutions in California. China accounts for 36% of all international enrollment in the state, according to the Institute of International Education, making it California’s single-largest country of origin for international students. Nearly 18,000 Chinese international studentsare enrolled at the University of California, almost 6,000 at the University of Southern California, about 2,600 across the state’s community colleges and roughly 850 at California State University.
Those students bring with them coveted tuition dollars, a boon to the state’s public universities, where international students pay a premium over the rate charged to California residents.
California universities responded to the Trump administration’s statements on Chinese student visas with expressions of support for international students from China. A written statement from the UC system on June 11 said the public university system “is concerned about the U.S. State Department’s announcement to revoke visas of Chinese students.” The statement said international students and scholars are “vital members of our university community and contribute greatly to our research, teaching, patient care and public service mission.”
If Chinese students were to stop attending U.S. colleges and universities, their absence would be felt across academic disciplines. More than a fifth of Chinese students in the U.S. studied math and computer science, roughly 17% pursued engineering and almost 13% sought degrees in business and management, according to 2023-24 data from the Institute of International Education.
Chinese students are most heavily enrolled in U.S. graduate programs. Roughly 123,000 Chinese nationals studying at U.S. colleges and universities — about 44% of all Chinese students in the U.S. — are graduate students.
Sources interviewed for this story emphasized that Chinese students are weighing not only the immediate twists and turns of U.S. foreign policy, but longer-term concerns about cost of living and the draw of preferable options closer to home. They also noted that restrictions on Chinese students are consistent with policies Trump pursued during his first term.
‘Our parents are super, super worried’
A Chinese international student at the University of Southern California who graduated from a Ph.D. program in May said he has become accustomed to exchanging concerned text messages with friends whenever news of possible changes to U.S. immigration policy breaks. EdSource agreed to withhold his full name due to his concerns about increased scrutiny on international students.
“I’ve gotten texts from people saying, ‘Oh, are you OK? Are you safe?’ I’ve got people checking on each other, asking them, ‘So what can happen to the current visa holders? And if I already scheduled [a visa interview], will I still be able to go?’” he said.
Already, he added, peers in China are contemplating pursuing their degrees in the United Kingdom or Australia as alternatives to the U.S. The student himself is applying for Optional Practical Training, which allows eligible international students to extend their time in the U.S. after completing an academic program.
Meanwhile, at UC Davis, V. has found something like a second home. He has joined a sports team, pledged a fraternity and played an instrument in a school-affiliated band. Contrary to the stereotypes of U.S. cities as plagued by gun violence and crime that are common in Chinese media, he has found Davis to be peaceful, diverse and open-hearted.
But with the latest vacillations in U.S. immigration policy, concern is growing at home among Chinese students’ families. “Our parents are super, super worried,” he said, something evident whenever he checks a group chat where the parents of Chinese students in the U.S. share their questions and concerns.
A gradual slide in Chinese students at U.S. colleges
There are ample signs that Chinese students have been cooling on American degrees long before Trump’s return to office this year.
Data from the Institute of International Education show that the number of Chinese students in the U.S. increased rapidly during the 2000s, a trend that continued at a slower pace through the early years of the first Trump administration.
But the number of Chinese internationals at U.S. institutions began to drop with the onset of Covid-19 and has continued to fall since. As of the 2023-24 school year, there were more than 277,000 Chinese students in the U.S., down more than 95,000 students from pre-pandemic levels in 2019-20.
Several expertsinterviewed for this story framed the Trump administration’s recent statements about Chinese students as the latest of several policy changes that may discourage Chinese students from attending college in the U.S.
After Trump left office in 2021, Biden administration Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken struck a more conciliatory tone regarding Chinese students in the U.S., saying in a May 2022 speech that the U.S. “can stay vigilant about our national security without closing our doors.” And during a November 2023 meeting, former President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping expressed a commitment to more educational exchanges.
But the Biden administration initially continued a Department of Justice (DOJ) initiative launched under Trump in 2018, which targeted Chinese researchers accused of stealing American intellectual property. The Biden DOJ ended the program in 2022 following concerns about racial profiling.
And in March 2024, before Trump’s return to office, reports surfaced that more than a dozen Chinese students were denied reentry into the U.S. despite holding a valid visa, while others reported being searched and questioned for hours at the U.S. border. The State Department told The Washington Post at the time that the number of Chinese students found to be inadmissible for entry had been stable in recent years.
‘We are still hoping it’s getting better’
Geopolitical concerns are not the only reasons some Chinese students may think twice about studying at U.S. colleges and universities.
Al Wang, the general manager of Wiseway Global, which recruits Chinese students to study in other countries, said that Chinese students may not apply tocertain U.S. institutions because rankings of the best universities in the world tend to score institutions in countries like the United Kingdom and Singapore above U.S. rivals. In addition, he said, Chinese students may choose to stay home for college, seeing joint-degree programs in China with U.S. universities like Duke as a more economical option.
Wang nonetheless anticipates that the U.S. and China will continue cooperating on education and cultural exchange programs, something the Chinese Ministry of Education has encouraged. He predicted that more Chinese students will study abroad in the U.S. for a school term or summer intensive, rather than enrolling in degree programs. “We are still hoping it’s getting better, but we don’t know where it’s going,” he said.
The Chinese international student at USC suggested that U.S. universities aiming to maintain their international student population should focus on providing legal support, security and a sense of belonging. Failing that, he added, it won’t take long for current students to warn would-be classmates.
“They’re going to tell their peers from high school, or they’re going to tell people from home, ‘Oh, don’t come,’” he said.
Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor for North Alabama. She writes an important blog called Civil Discourse, where she usually explains court decisions and legal issues. Today she turns to education.
Today I’m recovering from the graduation tour, one in Boulder and one in Boston in the last two weeks, and getting back into the groove of writing as I continue to work on my book (which I hope you’ll preorder if you haven’t already). The graduations came at a good moment.
Watching my kids graduate, one from college and one with a master’s in science, was an emotional experience—the culmination of their years of hard work, sacrifice, and growth, all captured in a single walk across the stage. They, like their friends, my law students, and amazing students across the county, now enter society as adults. Even beyond the individual stories of hardships overcome and perseverance, witnessing these rites of passage makes me feel profoundly hopeful. The intelligence and commitment of the students—many of whom are already tackling big problems and imagining new, bold solutions—gives me a level of confidence about what comes next for our country. In a time when it’s easy to get discouraged, their commitment and idealism stands as a powerful reminder that they are ready to take on the mess we have left them.
The kids are alright, even though they shouldn’t have to be. Talking with them makes me think they will find a way, even if it’s unfair to ask it of them and despite the fact that their path will be more difficult than it should be. Courage is contagious, and they seem to have caught it. Their educations have prepared them for the future we all find ourselves in now.
As students across the country prepared to graduate this year, Trump released his so-called “skinny budget.” If that’s how they want to frame it, then education has been put on a starvation diet—at least the kind of education that develops independent thinkers who thrive in an environment where questions are asked and answered. Trump pitches the budget as “gut[ting] a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security.” Defense spending would increase by 13% under his proposal.
The plan for education is titled, “Streamline K-12 Education Funding and Promote Parental Choice.”Among its provisions, the announcement focuses on the following items:
“The Budget continues the process of shutting down the Department of Education.”
“The Budget also invests $500 million, a $60 million increase, to expand the number of high-quality charter schools, that have a proven track record of improving students’ academic achievement and giving parents more choice in the education of their children.”
As we discussed in March, none of this is a surprise. Trump is implementing the Project 2025 plan. In December of 2024, I wrote about how essential it is to dumb down the electorate if you’re someone like Donald Trump and you want to succeed. A rich discussion in our forums followed. At the time I wrote, “Voters who lack the backbone of a solid education in civics can be manipulated. That takes us to Trump’s plans for the Department of Education.” But it’s really true for the entirety of democracy.
Explaining the expanded funding for charter schools, a newly written section of the Department of Education website reads more like political propaganda than education information: “The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it has reigned [Ed: Note the word “”reigned” is misspelled] in the federal government’s influence over state Charter School Program (CSP) grant awards. The Department removed a requirement set by the Biden Administration that the U.S. Secretary of Education review information on how states approve select entities’ (e.g., private colleges and universities) authorization of charter schools in states where they are already lawful authorizers. This action returns educational authority to the states, reduces burdensome red tape, and expands school choice options for students and families.”
There are already 37 lawsuits related to Trump’s changes to education. Uncertainty is no way to educate America’s children. Cutting funding for research because you want to score political points about DEI or climate change is no way to ensure we nurture future scientists and other thinkers and doers…
I am reminded again of George Orwell’s words: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” The historians among us, and those who delve into history, will play a key role in getting us through this. Our love and understanding of history can help us stay grounded, understanding who we are, who we don’t want to become, and why the rule of law matters so damn much to all of it….
Thanks for being here with me and for supporting Civil Discourse by reading and subscribing. Your paid subscriptions make it possible for me to devote the time and resources necessary to do this work, and I am deeply grateful for them.
Is this a picture of something bad, or something good?
Cognitive scientists call this the global-local processing dilemma: Do we perceive the overall image, or focus on the details? Education policy often faces the same question: Can a policy be considered “good” if the overall data look promising, but the day-to-day experiences feel “bad?”
This tension is at the heart of California’s college math reforms.
Like the image, the story of these policies may look “good” from a distance, but “bad” up close.
Before recent reforms, community college students who needed extra math support were typically placed in remedial courses like elementary algebra. These classes didn’t count toward transfer requirements, and most students stuck in them never made it to a math course needed to transfer to a four-year university, such as college algebra or introductory statistics. This created an academic dead end for many.
A 2017 law, Assembly Bill 705, changed that. It used high school grades for placement and gave more students direct access to transfer-level courses, with corequisite support (a support course taken concurrently with a transfer-level course) when needed. Instead of multi-semester remediation, students could move into transfer-level math courses faster.
While challenges remain, the approach led to significant improvements. In 2016-17, before AB 705 was announced, only 27% of students passed a transfer-level math course within one year. But in 2019-20, the first full year of AB 705’s implementation, that number had nearly doubled to 51%. And by 2023-24, it reached 62%. About 30,000 more students were fulfilling their math requirements each year. The story is similar in English courses, and so it’s undeniable that AB 705 has helped California’s community college students get one step closer to transfer.
Despite these gains, many faculty don’t see AB 705 as a success. As one instructor put it, “There are a lot more people failing than before … largely students of color. … By making this change (i.e., AB 705) around equity, we’ve created an inequitable system.” And the data do show that pass rates have declined.
But here’s the catch: Far more students are now taking those courses. The graph below helps illustrate this shift using data from one community college district. Before AB 705, only a small fraction of students reached transfer-level math, but with high pass rates, as shown by the darker blue shading within the dashed box. After AB 705, access expanded, but pass rates declined from 80% to 70%. Critically, that’s 70% of a much larger group.
With such an improvement, why do some faculty feel like the policy is a failure?
Because of this paradox: AB 705 absolutely led to more students passing. But it also led to more students failing.
People respond more strongly to stories than to statistics, and losses loom larger than gains. The students we see struggling — their faces, their frustration, their stories — linger longer than a bar graph showing statewide gains. As faculty members, we know this all too well. We remember the students who didn’t make it. We think about what we could’ve done differently. We agonize over them.
And often, faculty haven’t been given the full picture. Our research has found that many instructors hadn’t even seen outcome data on AB 705’s impact. So, without that context, and given the classroom experience, it’s reasonable to assume the policy failed.
This disconnect is a classic challenge in public policy: a policy can be effective overall but still feel painful on the ground. And this tension is always a part of the hard work of building systemic justice. AB 705 succeeded in dismantling long-standing barriers and expanding access to transfer-level math. But that progress has introduced new classroom dynamics that feel personal, urgent and overwhelming to faculty. Good policy must account for both the big-picture gains and the human cost of change. Reforms don’t succeed on data alone. They require understanding, empathy and support for those doing the work.
And just as faculty were beginning to adjust to AB 705, we face Assembly Bill 1705, a sharper and even more controversial new policy. It asks colleges to stretch even more, limiting their ability to offer even prerequisite math courses. Understandably, many educators are still reeling. They’re trying to adapt to new expectations while managing unintended consequences in their classrooms. Recent guidance has softened the rollout, but confusion remains. The stakes are high, and many faculty feel mistrustful and angry.
If AB 705 taught us anything, it’s that mistrust grows when there’s a gap between what the data show and what people experience. This is why the next phase of work cannot be just about compliance or policy enforcement. It must be about storytelling, listening and solutions. Faculty need to see the big picture. Policymakers need to understand life on the ground. The policy “worked” in aggregate, but not without professional and emotional cost. If we ignore that, we risk undermining the very equity goals these reforms were meant to achieve.
Like the image above, the truth lies in seeing both levels clearly. We must acknowledge the trade-offs, the tension, and the very real pain of transition. Let’s take concerns seriously without retreating from hard-won progress. Let’s keep asking the harder, more honest questions: How do we support both students and faculty through ambitious change? How do we ensure that every student, not just the most prepared, has a real shot at success?
If we can do that, maybe we’ll find a way forward that is both honest and hopeful, one that sees the whole picture.
•••
Ji Y. Son, Ph.D., is a cognitive scientist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles and co-founder of CourseKata.org, a statistics and data science curriculum used by colleges and high schools. Federick Ngo, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research examines higher education policy, with a focus on college access and community college students.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, hosts a panel discussion with California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian, California State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia, and University of California President Michael Drake.
Credit: Ashley A. Smith / EdSource
With some of the most racially and ethnically diverse student bodies in the country, California’s public community colleges and universities fail to mirror its students in teaching and leadership positions.
White men dominate the leadership positions within the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems, even as two-thirds of undergraduates across the state identify as Latino, Black, Asian or Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Campaign for College Opportunity.
Notably, the three systems are each led by a person of color: a Black man at UC, an Afro-Latina at Cal State and an Indian-American woman at the community colleges, but the report highlights that those leading academic senates, tenured positions, departments and senior administrative positions are disproportionately white and male.
Seeing instructors, staff members, administrators and presidents from diverse backgrounds on college campuses has been shown to help all students perform better academically, the campaign’s research shows.
“I have often found a disheartening lack of representation while going to school, particularly as a STEM major,” said Casey Chang, an environmental science major at Mission College in Santa Clara. “I’ve had a few professors who are Asian American men, but navigating higher education as a woman of color has been difficult. I have yet to take a class with a female Asian American professor, and it feels like my identity has been left out.”
Chang spoke at an event Tuesday evening hosted by the campaign about the report.
Autumn Alaniz-Wiggins, a student at Chico State University, said she was excited to study nutrition, access and food justice at the school. But when she started her classes, she found that instead of learning about the intersection of systemic racism and food swamps, her instructors focused on the benefits of kale and quinoa.
“It became clear to me that the absence of diverse identities in faculty and leadership positions hindered us from equitable student access,” she said. And for a year, Alaniz-Wiggins dropped out of college. That is, until she met her first Black faculty member at Chico State.
“He taught culturally relevant courses and even hired me as a research assistant where I became published through a study on nutritional knowledge and (low-income) students,” she said. “For the first time, I was getting the support that I needed from the start.”
For the Campaign for College Opportunity, improvement is too slow.
“California’s public colleges and universities as well as our governor and Legislature have prioritized and invested in efforts to increase the representation of faculty and college leaders, but the work is, at best, happening at a pace that is far too slow or at worst, only paying lip service to the values of diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity. Despite small increases in the racial and ethnic diversity of faculty and college leadership, “troubling gaps” remain, she added.
The report found that while there have been improvements in gender and racial representations since the campaign’s first report in 2018, the state’s public universities still need to improve diversifying their leadership positions. For example, Latino, Black, Asian, Native Hawaiian and American Indian professors are underrepresented among the tenured and tenure-track faculty groups across the community colleges, UC and CSU systems.
The UC system
There are few Latino faculty members in the UC system, and only 8% of them are tenured or on the tenure track. Among Black faculty, only 3% are tenured or on the tenure track.
Only eight of 117 campus leaders in the UC system are Latino, compared with 25% of UC students who identify as Latino, 39% of all Californians and 49% of Californians aged 18 to 24.
When it comes to women in leadership, only two of the nine undergraduate campuses are led by women, despite 54% of undergraduate UC students identifying as women.
The Cal State system
Only 10% of Latino faculty across the 23 CSU campuses are tenured or on the tenure track.
The report also found that the CSU’s academic senate is also overwhelmingly white. Seventy percent of the Academic Senate and 64% of the campus-wide academic senate members are white, despite white students comprising 21% of the undergraduate student body.
California’s community colleges
Only 18% of Latino faculty across the state’s 116 community colleges are tenured or on the tenure track. Among Black faculty, only 4% are tenured or on the tenure track.
Asian and Native Hawaiian-Pacific Islander students comprise 14% of the state’s community college students, but only 8% of campus or district leaders are Asian or Native Hawaiian.
California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian said she’s optimistic that in five years students will see an increase in diverse leadership across the 116 campuses.
“Tenure happens at the discipline level, not only at the college level,” she said. “As system leaders, we need to set the expectations and shift the mindset.”
Unfortunately, too often during the hiring process, people give arguments about not diminishing standards in the pursuit of diversity and equity, but “those are all false arguments,” Christian said. “We need to focus on what the data shows like the (report).”
UC President Drake said one way to improve the diversity of leadership positions is to encourage the diverse students within the three higher education systems to pursue careers in academia “through graduate school, to the junior faculty, to tenured faculty and to our leaders,” he said. “Those things are evolutionary and they take time. But all the energy’s moving in the right direction.”
Cal State Chancellor Mildred Garcia, hired at the end of last year, said she’s already starting to hold the 23 campus presidents accountable when it comes to making diversity, equity and inclusion a priority.
“We have to remember belonging because students do not understand our campuses,” she said. “What are you doing about your staff? And your senior team?”
But Garcia said campuses should also address the unconscious bias that happens on search committees. The UC system, for example, uses equity advisers in its hiring searches to guarantee a diverse and equitable pool of candidates, Drake said.
There have been some pockets of improvement in closing racial and gender disparities across the three systems. For example, Black Californians are represented in both tenured and non-tenured faculty positions in the community colleges at 6% for both groups, according to the report, which reflects the state’s Black population.
The share of tenured and tenure-track professors who are women has increased from 33% to 40% in the UC system and from 47% to 49% in the CSU. About half of CSU presidents are women and more than half of the CSU board of trustees identify as women. CSU presidents are also racially diverse, with 12 of 23 campuses led by Latino, Black, Asian and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander leaders.
Women also lead 52 of the 116 community college campuses, and 49% of presidents in the two-year system come from diverse backgrounds.
The campaign also recommended requiring all three public college systems to submit a bi-annual analysis of their leadership, faculty and academic senate diversity, and encouraged the Legislature to build a statewide fund that would help the colleges in recruitment, hiring and retention. The campaign also recommended that college presidents be willing to restart searches if their applicant pools don’t have an adequate number of competitive candidates from diverse backgrounds.
Hundreds of UC Berkeley students walked out of class on Oct. 25, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. The students are among thousands who have walked out on campuses nationwide as fighting between Israel and Hamas continues in Gaza.
Credit: Brontë Wittpenn/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris
This story was updated to reflect the UC board’s decision to table a vote on the issue.
University of California faculty and other staff could be banned from publishing political statements, including those stemming from the Israel-Hamas war, on university websites and other university channels under a policy brought to UC’s board of regents.
The consideration of such a policy comes after some units, including at least two ethnic studies departments, posted statements on their websites last fall supporting Palestine and condemning Israel.
The proposal is causing an uproar among some faculty who say it would repress their academic freedom and question how it would be enforced.
UC officials behind the idea say it is necessary to ensure that the opinions of certain individuals or groups of faculty aren’t mistaken for the opinions of UC as a whole.
“When individual or group viewpoints or opinions on matters not directly related to the official business of the unit are posted on these administrative websites, it creates the potential that the statements and opinions will be mistaken as the position of the institution itself,” regent Jay Sures, who helped develop the proposal as chair of the regents’ compliance and audit committee, said during Wednesday’s regents meeting.
The regents won’t vote on the policy until March at the earliest. They initially planned to take action this week but opted to table the vote until their next meeting, scheduled for March 19 through 21, after the item caused much confusion and debate when discussed Wednesday evening.
The effort is the latest fallout from the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has triggered sharp responses from pro- and anti-Israel groups.
The policy does not specifically mention any particular issue, but some faculty see it as an attempt to prevent them from discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Since the fall, the website for UC Santa Cruz’s critical race and ethnic studies department has displayed a statement calling on “scholars, researchers, organizers, and administrators worldwide” to take action “to end Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” The website for UC San Diego’s ethnic studies department includes several statements and commentaries. One statement says the ethnic studies community at UC San Diego supports Palestinian people and their “freedom from an apartheid system that seeks to dehumanize them in unconscionable ways.”
Sures last fall also sharply criticized a letter by the UC Ethnic Studies Council. In the letter, the council said official UC communications denouncing Hamas for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel distorted and misrepresented “the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and thereby contribute to the racist and dehumanizing erasure of Palestinian daily reality.” Sures wrote a public response to the council saying the letter “is rife with falsehoods about Israel and seeks to legitimize and defend the horrific savagery of the Hamas massacre.”
One regent, Hadi Makarechian, acknowledged during Wednesday’s regents meeting that the regents were considering the issue because “some people were making some political statements” related to Palestine and Hamas.
Christine Hong, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz, said during the public comment portion of the meeting that the regents are attempting to “repress academic freedom” and disallow “any critical study or discussion of Palestine.”
“Your emissary, regent Jay Sures, declared war on ethnic studies,” Hong added.
Sures maintained Wednesday that the policy isn’t meant to impede free speech and that he believes there “are many avenues” for faculty to share their viewpoints.
“I’m not so sure that it needs to go on the landing pages of departmental websites,” he said.
The final language of the policy that the regents could vote on isn’t yet known. According to their agenda, regents were scheduled to vote Wednesday on a policy stating that “official channels of communication, including the main landing pages of websites, of schools, departments, centers, units, and other entities should not be used for purposes of publicly expressing the personal or collective opinions of unit members or of the entity.”
That language was criticized for being too ambiguous, including by two key UC law professors who urged the regents to reject the proposal. The professors — Ty Alper of UC Berkeley and Brian Soucek of UC Davis — each previously served terms as chair of the UC Academic Senate’s university committee on academic freedom. As chairs, they helped develop a 2022 recommendation by the Senate that faculty departments should be allowed to issue opinionated statements.
In a letter to the regents, Alper and Soucek said the proposed policy “raises more questions than it settles.” Do official channels include a department’s social media pages, even though those aren’t UC-hosted websites? Do emails sent by a dean or department chair count as official channels? Are faculty departments violating the policy if they were to sign a public statement hosted on a website not operated by UC?
Acknowledging that the language was indeed ambiguous, UC staff during the meeting amended it and presented two different options to regents. Under the first option, faculty departments would be banned from expressing opinions only on the “main landing pages” of university websites. The second option featured language that would extend the ban beyond the landing pages and to other websites, at the discretion of a university administrator.
But those options also caused confusion and debate among regents and UC officials.
“Even if it’s not on the main landing page, if someone says, this is the official viewpoint of Department X on this political issue, I think you could interpret some of this language to say, we also don’t want people to do that,” Howard Gillman, the chancellor of UC Irvine, said Wednesday while addressing the regents.
Some regents and officials also suggested that the policy include language that university departments should have designated opinion pages on their websites, and that any political statements or other opinions should be limited to existing on those pages.
Sures agreed to work overnight with fellow regent Lark Park and UC’s general counsel, Charles Robinson, to further revise the policy and return Thursday with a new action item. On Thursday, however, the regents agreed to table the item until March following a motion by regent John Pérez.
“Issues of First Amendment protection are crucial to the institution. I am supportive of the concept that we’re trying to get through here. After looking at the product of work that’s come forward, I don’t think we’ve got enough to act on in a meaningful way, in a way that’s defensible to the core mission of the university. I think we would benefit from more input,” Pérez said.
By possibly banning faculty departments from making political statements, UC’s new policy could run counter to the 2022 Academic Senate recommendation, some faculty say. At that time, the Senate’s academic council and university committee on academic freedom agreed that “departments should not be precluded from issuing or endorsing statements in the name of the department,” noting that freedom of expression as well as academic freedom are “core tenets of the UC educational mission.” The Senate took up the issue after UCLA’s Asian American studies department published a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinians and denouncing Israel.
In a social media statement Wednesday, the Berkeley Faculty Association said the idea to ban departments from making political statements was already considered and rejected by the Academic Senate in 2022. The faculty association also questioned how the new policy would be enforced and urged the regents to reject it.
“Who gets to decide what is a political statement and who will be responsible for policing the websites and social media accounts of academic units? We urge the Regents not to approve a dangerously ambiguous policy which raises alarming questions about governance and academic freedom,” the faculty association wrote.
Briana Munoz felt forced to take seven courses last semester to graduate on time and protect her financial aid status.
Courtesy, Briana Munoz
California State University trustees voted Wednesday to expand grants to fund the full cost of tuition and living expenses for students who show they need it to attend college.
The decision is the first step in a commitment the trustees made to students last fall that at least a third of revenue from a 6% annual tuition hike would go to financial aid.A more detailed plan will be presented to the board in May.
Over the five-year period of the tuition increase, more than $280 million will go toward financial aid, increasing total funding to the State University Grant to $981 million by the 2028-29 school year.
About 87% of Cal State students have their tuition fully or partially covered by grants and aid. Yet, some students still struggle with the cost of attending college due to living expenses such as food, housing and transportation.
Although there is regional variation of housing and food costs, total attendance costs statewide range from $22,000 to $32,000 annually. Nearly 40% of CSU students rely on loans to make up the difference between financial aid and actual costs.
“The fact is tuition as the price of admission is not what keeps students away from CSU,” trustee Julia Lopez said. “Almost nine out of 10 students get some sort of tuition grant, but it’s other costs.”
The trustees favored giving students stipends, once their tuition costs are met, to cover their expenses, with the expectation that students would work less and graduate sooner. The State University Grant has traditionally been used to cover tuition. The stipends would be up to $5,000 and prioritize students with the greatest needs.
The trustees also voted to create consistent financial aid measurements and communications for students and their families after learning of significant differences across the 23 campuses, making it difficult for families to compare financial aid offers.
But there is one immediate challenge CSU is facing in its financial aid improvement goals – the current national rollout of FAFSA simplification. The new, simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid application was delayed from Oct.1 to Dec. 31. Colleges and universities received notification on Tuesday that they wouldn’t receive students’ financial aid information until March, squeezing students who generally have until May 1 to select a college.
Nathan Evans, CSU’s vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, said the problems with the new FAFSA may be even worse for California.
Students who are permanent residents or U.S. citizens, but who have an undocumented parent, are unable to complete the new application because the system requires a Social Security number for each parent or guardian. Parents without Social Security numbers are also locked out of contributing to existing FAFSA forms.
Evans said leaders from CSU, the University of California, the community colleges, and the state’s independent colleges met earlier this week with the California Student Aid Commission to plan potential workarounds.
Another complication for CSU’s financial aid plans – the scheduled expansion of the Cal Grant, which aids the state’s low-income students – was expected to also begin in 2024-25. But the Legislature must first approve funding. CSU’s institutional aid numbers to students would depend on the amounts students receive in other federal and state aid.
“This is a year like none other,” Evans said. “There are some additional complexities this year, given that not only has the application been revamped, but calculations are changing … so there is a lot of unpredictability in the process.”
