The Second Front: State Houses
State legislatures have joined the Trump administration's assault on higher education.
Nate Rosenfield reports on how the attacks on colleges and universities are playing out in state houses across the country – from, among others, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, Mississippi, and Texas.
- MS
While the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education have received significant attention, a quieter parallel battle has been playing out in state legislatures across the country. This year, conservative state lawmakers have been expanding their traditional powers to exert direct control over curriculum and governance.
The proposals have ranged from highly ideological moves, like a new New Hampshire bill that would ban Chinese citizens from attending any public or private university, to practical measures, like an Iowa bill that would freeze tuition hikes. Many of the bills fall into a gray area between the two.
Many of the bills proposed and passed in Trump’s second term have focused on restricting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices at colleges and universities. In 2023, two conservative think tanks, the Goldwater Institute and the Manhattan Institute, introduced model legislation that would cut any staff positions or offices dedicated to DEI, end mandatory diversity training or diversity statements in hiring and promotion, and bar colleges from considering race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions or employment. At least twenty-nine states have passed laws similar to the model bill, according to reporting by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Some states have pushed the boundaries further, passing bills that directly ban classes from teaching about certain subjects. Florida spearheaded these direct incursions on academic freedom with its “Stop WOKE” Act in 2022, which bans instruction in public higher education that promotes certain concepts involving racial and sexual discrimination and injustice. A similar Alabama law passed in 2024 bans instructors from discussing certain “divisive concepts” pertaining to notions of structural racism. In Mississippi last year, a DEI law was enacted that makes it illegal for schools to maintain courses or programs that “promote or endorse divisive subjects” including “transgender ideology.” The Florida and Mississippi laws were blocked in federal court, but a judge denied a similar effort to block the Alabama law. PEN America is keeping a list of similar bills cropping up around the country.
After filing a lawsuit against the Florida bill in 2023, The American Association of University Professors said in a statement that if it was allowed to stand, “it will destroy academic freedom, sabotage higher education, and undermine democracy.”
Other conservative lawmakers have taken a slightly less direct approach to changing the content taught in classrooms. An Iowa bill would require students at its public colleges to take classes in American history and civics that don’t focus on any particular subgroup. An Ohio law passed last year now requires public universities to commit to having speakers that are ideologically “diverse”—a frequent buzzword on the right used to demand more conservative thinkers in higher education. To that end, an Indiana law from 2024 prevents professors from attaining tenure if they don’t promote “intellectual diversity” in their classrooms.
To enforce their agendas, conservative state lawmakers have also brought forward bills to limit the independence of universities and their faculty. Last year, the Texas state legislature created an ombudsman appointed by the governor to ensure that its new laws banning DEI and restricting the role of faculty senates were enforced. The ombudsman was given the power to block all state funding to public universities that failed to comply. An Iowa bill proposed this year would create a similar watchdog and stripped decision-making power from faculty senates.
“These kinds of things are just going to challenge the general viability of higher education,” said Chris Madaio, a former Department of Education official who is now Senior Advisor at The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS)—an advocacy group promoting access to high quality higher education. Madaio said that some of these changes were clearly an attempt “to silence people or to get them to go along with a desired ideological outcome.”
Many schools have also introduced bills to limit academic tenure, requiring routine post-tenure reviews for violations of DEI bans or other infractions. Attempts to fully ban tenure have grown since the 2010s, but no state has taken the leap. This year, Oklahoma came close, banning tenure for all regional public and community colleges, excluding research universities.
Legislatures have often framed these intrusions on schools’ autonomy as a necessary step to hold universities accountable for student outcomes. Many have railed against taxpayer dollars being wasted on expensive programs that put students in debt and fail to prepare them for the workforce.
Iowa state representative Taylor Collins told The Gazette in January that, “My constituents are no longer interested in paying for garbage like the bachelor of science in social justice or gender studies.” Rep. Collins, who chairs a new standing committee on higher education said “that money needs to be redeployed to high-demand fields like nursing, teaching, etc.”
Rep. Collins’ committee has introduced a torrent of bills that has set Iowa apart this year in its aggressive action on higher education. They include measures to strip control from universities and faculty and enforce ideological agendas like a bill banning universities from hiring Chinese citizens.
A slew of proposals in the state also focus on pragmatic policies like affordability and student outcomes. One bill would authorize community colleges to offer some bachelor degrees. Another would temporarily freeze tuition hikes. One proposal would tax public and private university endowments exceeding $500 million dollars and direct the revenue to scholarships for degrees that lead high-wage, high-demand jobs in the state. Another bill would require the Iowa Board of Regents to develop a performance-based funding model based in part on how many graduates remain in the state. Another would make public universities liable for 10% of their students’ defaulted loans.
In this current political climate, where universities are under constant attack by conservative lawmakers, it can be difficult to parse whether some of these bills are good faith efforts to help students or further attempts to punish schools.
Take Iowa’s bill that would make universities liable for student debt. On its surface, it seems to be an effort to incentivize universities to ensure that their students aren’t burdened with debt. The idea is to give universities “skin in the game,” Madaio, the advisor at TICAS, said. But when you look at it closely, “ this bill just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Madaio noted that the bill fails to specify who the schools have to compensate for the debt, the lender or the student, or how the debt is supposed to be calculated. And there’s no cap on how much the schools might have to pay out, threatening them with potentially unlimited liability. Especially for cash strapped community colleges, this could have serious consequences, Madaio said.
Crucially the bill is also attempting to hold schools accountable for something they can’t control. Students default on loans for many reasons, Madaio noted. It could be that their education didn’t lead them to a well-paying job. Or it could be that they had a medical issue that prevented them from working. Either way, the university would have to foot the bill. And this attempt to enforce accountability only applies to public schools, not private universities or for-profit colleges, which have typically been the most reckless in exploiting student debt.
“ It seems punitive of public institutions to only apply this to them,” Madaio said. “ It almost looks like they’re looking for ways to cut funding without like saying they’re cutting funding.”
Many of these Iowa bills have been advancing through committees, but haven’t been up for a final vote yet.
More overt funding cuts may be fast approaching. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill gutted federal spending for Medicaid and SNAP, forcing states to pick up the tab—a move that will likely lead to dramatic cuts on public higher education spending.
Amid this flurry of threats, it can be hard for universities to focus on what the best path forward is for students.
“Higher education is so predisposed right now to be in defensive mode,” said Brittany Matthews, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Center for Higher Education Policy and Practice at Southern New Hampshire University.
“ How are we supposed to have a pragmatic conversation about what actually makes sense for students,” Matthews said, when “ higher ed is just trying to keep its head above water.”
- Nate Rosenfield