Updates May 25, 2025

(Congressional budget is a hot mess, budget-specific update TBD)

Federal

• Anti-Chinese/Sinophobic actions:

  • The State Department is planning large-scale effort to revoke existing Chinese student visas, drawing parallels to the Red Scare, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and actions within the CCP itself against students. The administration also attempted to block Harvard’s admission of international students, also claiming the university’s ‘collaboration’ with the CCP as part of its justification (in addition to ongoing unsubstantiated claims of antisemitism).

• International students

• The State Department has paused interviews for all new international students applying for visas as they plan to require social media vetting. This applies to student F, vocational training M, and J-1 exchange visitors, including professors, research scholars, teachers and medical residents and fellows). The current action against Harvard admission of international students has been blocked in court so far.

• Civil Rights

• The Department of Justice created a new unit, the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative, to launch False Claims Act cases against universities for DEI, antisemitism and transgender sports participation. Furthermore, the administration is encouraging private citizens to file similar cases, to which they are entitled to a portion of the proceeds in the event that the institution is found guilty and required to return funds to the federal government.

• Higher Education Accreditation

• Extending from the Executive Order re: higher education accreditation, and the Department of Education's push to foster new accreditors:

  • The Liaison Committee on Medical Education voted to remove Element 3.3, which covered diversity standards for medical school accreditation. While previously criticized for its limited specificity, school admissions and DEI leaders also noted that the standards nevertheless offered a key path towards reforms. (As noted last time, ACGME already suspended their standards for another year.)

• The WASC (Western Association of Accredited Schools and Colleges) announced a temporary suspension of DEI accreditation standards.

• After instituting bans on affirmative action (effective July 11), Arkansas also enacted new legislation forbidding schools from providing diversity information to accreditation bodies, or allowing accreditation bodies to make decisions based on schools' diversity information.

• To further remove itself from external accountability, the University of North Carolina is proposing to form its own accreditation agency.

• Research

• The administration issued an Executive Order "Restoring Gold Standard Science," justified in part by claiming DEI in science as 'politicized science,' (as well as other examples, e.g. COVID-19 guidance) calling for agency heads to implement the listed standards in practice and use for employee evaluation.

• HHS Secretary RFK Jr announced that he may bar government scientists and those receiving federal funds from publishing in journals  including New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and Lancet, setting the stage for restricting publication in any journal with which it disagrees. HHS may also create its own in-house publications.

• American Indian/Native American/Alaska Native Rights

• The heads of the Small Business Association, Health and Human Services (re: Indian Health Service), and the Dept. of the Interior confirmed that anti-DEI executive actions do not apply to AI/AN and/or Native American groups.

States (included because some federal actions are following state examples, eg Arkansas)

• Faculty

• In a newly emerging strategy that could undermine faculty equity, UNC Board of Trustees has paused awarding tenure this year for all faculty except for health sciences faculty.  

• Academic Freedom

• Texas has proposed legislation for medical schools not only banning race, ethnicity, gender and national origin considerations in admissions (which it already had banned a while ago) but also (1) schools must prioritize standardized test scores,(2) Use letter grades A-F, and (2) curricular and admissions changes must be submitted to the state legislature in addition to the state board of education for approval.

• Transgender rights: The administration threatened to withhold funding from California, state interscholastic federation quickly changed its rules, and the Justice Department launched an investigation into whether the state rules allowing transgender girl participation in sports discriminates against cisgender girls.