Kris Olds

UChicago Freezing Ph.D. Admissions for Multiple Programs The indebted institution tasked committees of faculty and staff with planning for changes. But this week, a dean forged ahead and announced broad cuts. Two other units are also pausing admissions.

UChicago Reducing, Freezing Ph.D. Admissions for Multiple Humanities [& Public Policy] Programs www.insidehighered.com/news/busines...

ASU Projects 18% Drop in International Student Enrollment Arizona State University typically welcomes over 17,900 international students to its four campuses each year, but this fall, due to a variety of complications, the university expects only 14,600 inte...

National self-harm viewed via one prominent US university: www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

The Harvard-Trained Lawyer Behind Trump’s Fight Against Top Universities

The Harvard-Trained Lawyer Behind Trump’s Fight Against Top Universities www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/u...

Trump Administration Threatens to Take Over Harvard’s Patents The move is the latest escalation in the White House’s battle with the Ivy League school.

The Commerce Department threatening to take over Harvard's patents shows the extent to which the federal government is trying to pressure the university into a settlement. They are trying everything possible. (gift link)

New executive order puts all grants under political control All new funding on hold until Trump administration can cancel any previously funded grants.

New executive order puts all grants under political control arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Fluctuating tariffs exacerbate US science funding woes For new faculty and others ordering big-ticket items, the import taxes can be a gut punch.

Fluctuating tariffs exacerbate US science funding woes pubs.aip.org/physicstoday...

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

Purdue student detained by ICE and taken to troubled Louisiana holding facility Yeonsoo Go, 20, was detained after her immigration hearing in Manhattan and taken away by ICE agents.

Go, a college student, has a dependent visa (her mother, an Episcopal minister, is here on a religious worker visa), which doesn't expire until Dec. But when she tried to renew it early, ICE nabbed her and sent her halfway across the US to a detention center.
www.wthr.com/article/news...

Rep. Tom Tiffany targets visa program exception that UW uses to hire for hard-to-fill jobs U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany seeks to end an exception in the H-1B visa program that allows universities to hire an unlimited number of specialized workers from overseas.

Wisconsin GOP Congressman Tom Tiffany introduced a bill that would eliminate the exception that allows colleges and universities to hire an unlimited number of specialized international workers as part of the H-1B visa program. Tiffany said the practice "hands good-paying jobs to foreign workers..."

Vanderbilt Reportedly Considering a San Francisco Campus Vanderbilt University is in talks with the city of San Francisco to establish a campus there, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. A Vanderbilt spokesperson confirmed to the Chronicle that the univer...

Nashville-based Vanderbilt University considering establishing a campus in San Francisco: www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Me literally yesterday when NASA employees did this

www.splinter.com/catastrophic...

U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi stands at a podium and speaks into a microphone. She is a blonde white woman wearing a black suit.

4 Things to Know About In-State Tuition Benefits for Undocumented Students

The federal government is suing states that offer in-state tuition to noncitizens. These state laws were once bipartisan efforts. #HigherEd #EDUSky #AcademicSky bit.ly/44E4zrw

Duke School of Medicine plans salary cuts for tenured faculty who do not meet grant expectations Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the School’s basic sciences units. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasing...

Nice. I worked at Duke for more than seven years. Don’t get me started.

www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

Threats to the Fed go beyond firing Powell Curtis Yarvin’s ideas are going ever more mainstream in Trump’s Washington — and investors should be worried

Threats to the Fed go beyond firing Powell https://on.ft.com/4nV9CeF | opinion

University of California fund ditches hedge funds with scathing rebuke Chief investment officer says stocks and bonds would have prevented ‘all the drama’

University of California fund ditches hedge funds with scathing rebuke www.ft.com/content/1674... via @financialtimes.com

“Our institutions are not acting as if American democracy is under threat,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, contended in an email. It has become routine, Moynihan wrote, for Trump to fire people in independent agencies or civil servants, or to impound funds and even close agencies. All of these things were widely assumed to be illegal. While the courts are not making definitive rulings on such powers, they are allowing Trump to exercise them. Maybe they will clip Trump’s wings later, but in the meantime enormous damage will be done and undoing that damage will be extraordinarily difficult. For example, ending U.S.A.I.D. without congressional action is illegal, but it is happening, and millions will die as a result.

This guy gets it
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

USC signals layoffs as deficit surpasses $200 million amid 'volatile external environment' Layoffs will be implemented at USC, interim President Beong-Soo Kim said in a letter to the university's faculty and staff on Monday.

USC signals layoffs as deficit surpasses $200 million amid 'volatile external environment' www.latimes.com/california/s...

CM Vol 25 CfP University as Infrastructure Culture Machine Vol. 25 Call for Papers: University as Infrastructure  Guest-edited by: Alexandra Anikina, Johannes Bruder, Megen de Bruin-Molé, Stephen Cornford, Kwame Phillips & Geoff Cox  …

"Universities have become increasingly dependent on a proliferation of outsourced services, database providers + info mgmt systems, w/ spiraling costs... Understanding [the uni as an infrastructure stresses] that the tech it chooses to adopt follow a colonial + extractivist model...

Focus on national security ‘will bring chilling effect’ to UK research - Research Professional News UKRI-funded report finds “sensitive economic areas” leak most knowledge, but crackdown could affect open science

As the UK pivots to defence,
a shift towards research security and away from open collaboration is “inevitable”, says Nicola Searle, whose report found security lapses in “sensitive economic areas”

“Everyone’s going to have to work on it more because of regulations” she told @annamckie.bsky.social

‘It’s a nightmare.’ U.S. funding cuts threaten academic science jobs at all levels “There is a lot of pressure to essentially leave the country or not pursue research,” one Ph.D. student says

“There is a lot of pressure to essentially leave the country or not pursue research.” scim.ag/3Gz4VWW

New from colleagues @geogdurham.bsky.social
@benandersongeog.bsky.social and @ajsecor.bsky.social

Meanwhile the University of Toronto hires a few famous tenured Yale U faculty and hopes for accolades…

As has been often remarked “the Cold War was fought in the Midwest.” Bloomington used to teach 3 years of Romanian and 2 of Hungarian. One of three universities in the country to offer Serbo-Croatian. The biggest library collection of Tibetan materials, etc. Etc.

The Political Economy of Datafication and Platformization: Digital Transformation in Higher Education Platforms, data, and artificial intelligence are impacting higher education systems and universities internationally. Future research is required to examine their concrete effects, and to understand t...

Platforms, data, and AI are impacting higher education systems and universities internationally. @jkom.bsky.social and I have a short piece on the political economy of digital transformation in HE just out ihe.bc.edu/pub/499eknm0...

Research security in Europe needs a more coordinated approach - Research Professional News Survey of national efforts reveals uneven but developing picture, say Andrew James and Kieron Flanagan

Free-to-read opinion: Research security in Europe needs a more coordinated approach, write researchers Andrew James and Kieron Flanagan

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-euro...

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays.

Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn.

arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

Britain’s MI6 spy agency promotes ‘Q’ to be first female head Appointment of Blaise Metreweli comes as agents grapple with competing threats

Anthro degree…Britain’s MI6 spy agency promotes ‘Q’ to be first female head

on.ft.com/4l4Hq6C

In Reversal, Trump Says Chinese Students Are Welcome President Trump said that Chinese international students would be welcome in the U.S. in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday announcing the terms of a pending trade agreement with China.  In exchange ...

Whiplash still = damage www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Fulbright Board Resigns En Masse Over Political Interference Nearly the entire scholarship board quit Wednesday in protest of the Trump administration’s intervention in the selection process, which they say was politically motivated and illegal.

Fulbright Board Resigns Over Political Interference www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...