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Listen to the article 4 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: Willamette University and Pacific University are looking to merge after their leaders signed a letter of intent to negotiate a definitive agreement, the Oregon institutions announced Thursday. Under the plan, the two private nonprofits would operate as a single institution under a shared administrative structure but maintain “their character, identities, and historic campuses.” They would also run separate academic and athletics programs and set their own admissions requirements. Willamette and Pacific officials expect to announce details about the operational and…

Friday Fragments Sara Brady Fri, 12/12/2025 – 03:00 AM Sans-serif fonts, passing along great literature, Middle States. Byline(s) Matt Reed

In a major broadside against the First Amendment, public university systems in Texas are ordering faculty to watch what they say in the classroom, as state authorities have outlined ideas they want universities to stay away from when teaching their courses. The Texas Tech University System ordered its five member-universities to comb through faculty materials to root out any of the state’s disfavored viewpoints, and Texas A&M ordered its faculty not to “advocate” for “race or gender ideology,” or topics concerning sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom, without getting approval for whatever they’re teaching first. On Dec. 1, the Texas…

Listen to the article 3 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief:  College operating costs increased 3.6% in fiscal 2025, according to the latest Higher Education Price Index, which tracks the sector’s inflation. “HEPI inflation rates are again elevated above what many consider the norm, set by expectations from prior decades,” according to a report from Commonfund Institute, which is responsible for the index. For the past five years, the HEPI rate has been above the prior decade’s annual average of 2.2%.  HEPI’s latest inflation rate continues a period of elevated cost…

Rep. Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House committee, said the legislation was an answer to waning public trust in postsecondary education. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images A House education panel voted Thursday to advance two bills aimed at ensuring that students know more about the price of college and their options to pay for it. One of the bills, the Student Financial Clarity Act, would require the Education Department to create a universal net price calculator that would give students an estimate of what they might have to pay for a particular program or institution. That legislation, which passed…

Taariq Ahmed, TDN Northwestern has started to receive the first wave of released federal research funding after signing a Nov. 28 deal with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of…

by Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report December 14, 2025 The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window.  The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor. Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a…

Listen to the article 5 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: The New College of Florida could take control of the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus under a new proposal from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.  Under DeSantis’ 2026-27 state budget,  New College would assume control of USF Sarasota-Manatee’s 32-acre property and related liabilities by July. In exchange, the college would pay USF roughly $166,600 per month for debt tied to the property.  Current USF Sarasota-Manatee students would have a “reasonable opportunity” to finish their degrees at the campus before New…

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter This has been an especially challenging year for Rosalba Ortega’s family.  It’s been a cold, soggy winter in Bakersfield, and Ortega said her two granddaughters, ages 4 and 7, don’t have warm coats for their walk to school. Rent and food prices have been climbing, and as a farmworker, she’s struggled to find work in the fields. Last month’s delays to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — known in California as CalFresh — hit her grandkids at a time when her family is already…

ESU’s outgoing president, Ken Hush, faced backlash in 2022 after laying off tenured faculty. Ethan James Scherrer/Wikimedia Commons Ken Hush, outgoing president of Emporia State University in Kansas, is donating roughly $1.4 million—equivalent to the last four years of his salary—to the university. Since taking the helm in 2021, Hush oversaw a controversial workforce-management policy that included firing 23 tenured faculty members. The American Association of University Professors publicly censured ESU for that decision, and some of the laid-off faculty sued. Emporia officials, including Hush, defended the job cuts, saying they were needed to address a budget deficit and falling enrollment.…