Week 14
Figuring out what to focus on now & next in science and higher ed
This newsletter is my part of an ongoing conversation among colleagues who’ve had a rough week. I share two or three pieces of the puzzle that feel are most important, hazard a guess about what to expect next, and offer at least one useful thing to do.
MEETING THE MOMENT: 2025-04-25
Hello friends,
Yesterday, I shared an update announcing the reversal of a grievous funding decision which kicked off a conversation with a stranger. She responded to my post with a kind of frustrated exhaustion. Constant panic is unsustainable, she argued, and even worse if you feel entirely helpless to respond. It’s no wonder that these reversals and walk-backs don’t necessarily feel like things to celebrate. Worse, it might make you start to think that the threats are purely bombastic and that maybe the smart move is to stop paying attention.
I sympathize keenly. I’m not pouring energy and time into these debriefs because I think the threats are anything less than genuine, imminent, and intensifying. AND I also think we are confronting large quantities of high-volume bombast. Understanding it as “both/and” rather than “either/or” is the key. As I said in the post, “we are in 'announcements about announcements' territory,” so the question really is, how much do the announcements matter? Now, there are brilliant people among us who can take us deep into speech act theory and hermeneutics, but I need to talk plainly for a little bit about how important saying things is right now.
Every week, I sit down to write Meeting the Moment because I need to explain our world to myself, in my own words. I need to carve out time to understand how things are connected and figure out just how bad I think our situation is. My Bluesky stranger is right - we can’t respond to all of it, all at once. We have to focus, which means we make judgment calls, which means we open ourselves up to the possibility of getting it wrong.
More on that at the end of this letter, but meanwhile, let’s keep working to get it right? This was Week 14.
What’s happening now
Last week, I wrote that things were starting to shift, and I am happy that universities are finally expressing their opposition. On Monday evening, news broke of a joint letter signed by university presidents speaking out “against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Early on Tuesday morning, it had 173 signatures: as I write this on Friday night, it’s at 503 and counting. Separately, five of the eight members of the University of Michigan Board of Regents signed an op-ed arguing that, “These threats are designed to bring universities to heel… when government officials make unlawful or unconstitutional demands, we must be prepared to assert our rights: publicly, clearly and in court if necessary.”
And it’s not only university leaders taking public stances, either. I appreciated the comment paper Nature published on Thursday, arguing that with resurgent eugenics means geneticists must actively work to stop those talking points from entering mainstream discourse and work to protect their work from being misappropriated. Today, the Lancet formally joined the American Public Health Association and Doctors for America in calling for the resignation of HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. due to his “support for the gutting of the NIH, CDC, and FDA, alongside his espousal of unscientific treatments and theories.”
Yesterday, NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan announced his immediate resignation. This comes amid the cancellation of hundreds of grants worth hundreds of dollars - please note this is on top of the hundreds of NSF grants rescinded last week. You can browse the NSF Grant Termination tracker or submit your own content to it, thanks to Noam Ross, Scott Delaney, and all their contributors. Destructive budget cuts continue at other agencies.
The White House released another set of executive orders this week. Most notable are an attempt to repeal Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a set of seven focused on education that ranged from AI to HBCUs to student discipline. Of those, the one targeting university accreditors is front of my mind right now.
A few more positive updates to wrap us up: dozens of students have had their visa status restored in SEVIS. HHS says they are not building an autism registry and that they’re “ now working to fully restore funding” to the Women’s Health Initiative. Speaking of restoration, Data Rescue Project teams have created a mirrored site of covid.govarchive.us. And finally, although the focus is on K-12, three separate new rulings are blocking the administration from pursuing its re-segregationist/anti-DEI agenda. None of these are without major caveats, but they are progress in better directions.
What’s next
The AAUC university presidents’ letter is still open. If your school is missing, advocate for them to join. If your school has already signed, be sure to celebrate.
And then get ready for International Workers' Day and a National Day of Action on May 1. You might find the National Education Association’s participant toolkit particularly helpful.
What to do
I am going to keep this short and direct, but pull the curtains back a bit. I apply self-determination theory to my work. My ultimate goal is not for you to believe in me or do what I say. My goal is for you to feel more autonomous, more competent, and more connected.
I opened this issue talking about the necessity of actually “saying the thing” :
Autonomy - As Snyder writes in Against Tyranny, “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying.” I encourage you to take a minute to review what I’ve listed as the highlights from the week. I can think of at least three things I would add if I had more bandwidth tonight. Can you write a bullet or two about the things that I’ve missed here? Should you share those anywhere?
Competence - Yesterday, I put out an urgent call to action. Today, I found out that it was a false alarm. In the update and correction I posted, I wrote about the judgment call I made. I had two independent sources, a rapidly closing window of opportunity, and a straightforward action with very little downside. That editorial practice didn’t save me from being wrong this time, but it did save me from feeling humiliated. If we commit to saying things publicly, we need to build systems to get things right as often as possible - and to cope when we get them wrong. Take stock of your own editorial practices. What do you decide to share? How and when do you ring the alarm bells?
Connection - Let’s return to my suggestion of celebrating positive developments. I have been advocating for people to celebrate university leadership when they make choices you like. But what does that look like in practice? Who will benefit from hearing from you? Flex your strategic and investigative muscles to find out. And if your leadership needs to be pushed, it’s better to push together, like the professors who coordinated 600 Penn faculty signatures and then hand-delivered that letter to the university president.
Autonomous. Competent. Connected. I want this for us, and I want the world it helps us build together.
Stay focused, friends!
Liz
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