Two days after Frida Larios, a senior at California State University, Los Angeles, landed in Seoul for a study-abroad scholarship, she received an email stating that her money was in limbo. The State Department enacted a funding pause on grants in mid-February, affecting the longstanding international exchange and study-abroad programs that connect Americans to the world, including the Fulbright-Hays and Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship programs, according to several groups that support international education. But no one has turned the funding tap back on, leaving thousands of students and others involved in the programs worried they will be stuck abroad without money or may not get to go on scheduled trips at all. The State Department, which funds the programs but does not administer them directly, did not comment.Ms. Larios went to Seoul on a Gilman scholarship, which is meant for students with limited financial means. She was expected to receive about $3,000 from the program, which would have contributed to her living expenses for her trip. “The scholarship is the only reason I was able to come abroad because I’m a Pell grant recipient,” Ms. Larios said. “I was shocked, yes, but at the same time, I could feel it coming.” The confusion over the international programs is a small piece of the chaos unleashed as the Trump administration takes an ax to federal government spending. The administration has argued it is ending wasteful spending and identifying programs driven by left-leaning ideologies. Critics have said the cuts and uncertainty are diminishing America’s influence in the world. Melissa Torres, president of the Forum on Education Abroad, said that even the temporary pause in the funding could “cripple our field’s ability to implement the programs.” “We’re being asked by students and their families, ‘What’s going on? Are we able to go abroad? What are you doing to assist my student who’s abroad right now?’” she added. “Unfortunately, the answer is: ‘We don’t know.’” Grant recipients like Ms. Larios received only a terse, vague email from the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit that administers the Gilman and Fulbright scholarships. “I.I.E.’s funding for the Gilman program comes from a U.S. Department of State award,” the email said. “I.I.E. has not received scheduled cash reimbursements. We have no further information at this time.” The institute did not respond to messages on Friday. Hannah Ferreira, a psychology and political science double major at Middle Tennessee State University, plans to study in Austria over the summer — which would be her first trip to Europe — as part of the Gilman program. But now she doesn’t know where her trip stands. “This is the first time that a presidential action has impacted me like this,” Ms. Ferreira said. Ms. Larios said she feels stranded in Seoul. She said she reached out to everyone she thought could help at her university. She was offered student loans, which she was trying to avoid. “Ever since I received that email, I’ve been stressed out about my finances,” Ms. Larios said. “I’ve been trying to spend as little money as possible. I’m literally living off of ramen.”

The police in Baton Rouge, La., on Friday announced the first of a series of expected arrests in the fraternity hazing death of Caleb Wilson, a 20-year-old Southern University student who they said was repeatedly punched with boxing gloves at a warehouse last week and was unresponsive when he was dropped off at an emergency room. Caleb McCray, 23, a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, was charged with manslaughter and felony criminal hazing, according to court records. The authorities said at a news conference on Friday that two other suspects could soon be arrested. Mr. McCray was identified by witnesses as the person who punched Mr. Wilson, the arrest warrant affidavit said. He turned himself in to the authorities on Thursday and was booked into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, the police said. The people who brought Mr. Wilson to Baton Rouge General Medical Center told employees on the night of his death that he had collapsed after being struck in the chest while playing basketball before they fled the hospital, the authorities said. But investigators said that they had learned that was not true. As part of a hazing ritual for the Beta Sigma chapter of Omega Psi Phi, Mr. Wilson and several other pledges were lined up and hit four times each with boxing gloves in their chests, the authorities said. The repeated blows caused him to collapse to the floor and suffer what had appeared to be a seizure, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. “Caleb Wilson died as a direct result of a hazing incident where he was punched in the chest multiple times while pledging to Omega Psi Phi fraternity,” Thomas S. Morse Jr., the Baton Rouge police chief, said at the news conference. On Thursday, the university, a historically Black institution, ordered the fraternity chapter to cease all activities and suspended pledging for all Greek organizations for the rest of the academic year. “The university will continue to fully and actively cooperate with law enforcement as this case moves forward,” Dennis J. Shields, the president of the Southern University System, said during the joint briefing on the case. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The fraternity could face civil penalties under a Louisiana anti-hazing law. Dallas Thompson, a representative for Omega Psi Phi said in a statement on Friday that the organization was “saddened by the tragic situation at Southern University” and was “committed to cooperating with, and supporting, all ongoing investigations to uncover the truth.” If convicted of manslaughter, Mr. McCray could face up to 40 years in prison. Hazing can rise to a felony charge in Louisiana under the Max Gruver Act, which is named after a Louisiana State University student who died of alcohol poisoning as part of a fraternity ritual in 2017. It can result in a prison sentence of up to five years in cases of bodily harm, death or if a victim’s blood alcohol level is .30 percent or higher, which is more than three times the legal limit to operate a motor vehicle. In a statement, Phillip M. Robinson, a lawyer for Mr. McCray, urged the public not to prejudge his client. “At this time, I have not been presented with any evidence to support such serious accusations,” he said. “I maintain my client’s innocence and urge the public to withhold rushing to judgment until all the evidence is heard.” None of the evidence collected suggested that Mr. McCray had intended to “cause death or great bodily harm to any of the pledges,” the arrest warrant affidavit said. Investigators said that Mr. Wilson and the other pledges wore gray sweatsuits during the hazing ritual, but that his clothes were changed before he was driven to the hospital in the passenger seat of a Dodge Challenger that was seen in security camera footage. “At no time did anyone call 911,” Chief Morse said. The death of Mr. Wilson, a junior who was studying engineering and was a member of the university’s “Human Jukebox” Marching Band, has drawn an outpouring of grief and tributes. “I encourage all the young people out there to make better decisions,” Sid Edwards, the Baton Rouge mayor, said at the news conference. “We’ve got to do better, Baton Rouge.”

For three decades, “college for all” was an American rallying cry. The goal inspired a generation of educators, offered a north star to students and united political figures from George W. Bush to Bernie Sanders. Thousands of new K-12 schools were founded to achieve this ambitious vision, often focused on guiding low-income students toward bachelor’s degrees. Even after decades of bipartisan effort and billions of dollars spent, about 40 percent of students who start college never finish, often leaving with life-altering debt. Across the political spectrum, higher education institutions are less respected and trusted by the public, whether because of sticker shock, perceived left-wing bias or doubts about their ability to prepare students for the job market. In response, some high schools that once pushed nearly all students toward four-year colleges are now guiding teenagers toward a wider range of choices, including trade schools, apprenticeships, two-year degrees or the military. Among them are schools that are part of KIPP, the nation’s largest charter school network. For many years after KIPP’s founding in 1994, the network was known for its single-minded focus on getting low-income Black and Hispanic teenagers to and through four-year colleges. “College starts in kindergarten” was a KIPP mantra. Classrooms were named after the colleges their teachers attended. On senior “signing days,” students proudly marched across auditorium stages, waving the banners of their future alma maters. But over the past five years, KIPP has been part of a national rethinking of college for all. KIPP is “broadening the celebration” of what students can do and achieve after high school, said Shavar Jeffries, chief executive of the KIPP Foundation, which supports 278 KIPP public schools across the country. And KIPP is not the only college-focused education player newly experimenting with career-centered learning.Ten years ago, the Geneva-based International Baccalaureate Organization started a “career program” as an alternative to its traditional “diploma program,” which is well-known as a pathway to elite college admissions. The I.B. career option, while still small, has grown exponentially over the past five years, and now serves more than 8,000 American students. The shifts can bring more than a little bit of discomfort for many highly educated educators, who are unlikely to forget the doors that their own college and graduate degrees opened. Mr. Jeffries of KIPP, for example, is a graduate of Duke and Columbia Law School. And young Americans with a bachelor’s degree earned a median salary of $60,000 last year, compared with $40,000 for those with just a high school diploma. Mr. Jeffries acknowledged that some of KIPP’s moves have been influenced by trends in philanthropy and politics. Business leaders have shown a strong enthusiasm in recent years for alternatives to traditional college. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Many politicians and wealthy donors to education causes like KIPP are concerned about student dropout rates and ballooning debt. They have also been influenced by famous tech executive dropouts, by their own personal distaste for campus left-wing activism and by the anti-college populism of the Trump movement.Mr. Jeffries said schools like KIPP’s are trying to walk a line between encouraging students to strive for a four-year degree and also introducing them to alternatives. “We have to be very, very careful, particularly for younger people of color,” Mr. Jeffries said, noting that many apprenticeship and job-training programs are expensive, and may not have a proven track record of placing students in well-paid jobs. While KIPP is enthusiastic about directing students toward what Mr. Jeffries called “credible” job-training programs, “the data is clear,” he said. “A college degree opens up more opportunities.” At KIPP Academy Lynn, in a working-class corner of coastal Massachusetts, almost all students still consider four-year colleges, and about three-quarters enroll. But now, the conversation does not end there. In the fall of her senior year, Moriah Berry, 18, realized that her biggest fear, she said, was “being broke.”To avoid that fate, Moriah has been working with her teachers and counselors to create plans — and backup plans — for life after she graduates from high school. Her big goal is an undergraduate degree in biochemistry or physics. But Moriah is also considering an accelerated, three-year bachelor’s degree from a private trade school, which would qualify her to work as a radiology technician. And because the $56,000 annual tuition there could turn out to be prohibitive, even with aid, she is also looking at two-year programs that offer certification in the same field. “I don’t want to have an outrageous amount of loans,” said Moriah, who lives with her mother, a nurse. “I want to be really realistic.” This school year, for the first time, all KIPP juniors and seniors across the country are enrolled in a two-year seminar called College Knowledge and Career Success. At KIPP Academy Lynn, juniors research career paths — orthodontist, C.I.A. agent, software engineer. Teachers also work to demystify the college application and financial aid process, explaining basics like the difference between a grant and a loan. Students look critically at specific college and training programs, examining their graduation and job-placement rates.During their senior year, students fill out applications, and then do financial planning for the years ahead. The work is pragmatic. KIPP students are overwhelmingly from low-income households, and often the first in their families who might go to college. They earn bachelor’s degrees at about double the rate of other low-income students nationally, according to a 2023 Mathematica study. While more than three quarters of students who attended KIPP for middle and high school enrolled in college, only 40 percent graduated within five years. KIPP Massachusetts has tried to adjust to that reality, renaming its “college counseling” team as “match counseling.” It also removed the requirement for a college degree from job listings for “persistence advisers,” counselors who work with recent graduates to troubleshoot college, career, mental health and financial challenges. Similarly, the Bronx Early College Academy, which offers International Baccalaureate’s diploma program, is also shifting away from pushing all of its students, who are largely from low-income families, into four-year colleges. The I.B. program is well-known for its focus on liberal arts rigor and philosophical thinking. Its most famous course, called “theory of knowledge,” focuses on epistemological questions in politics, culture and the arts. But 18 months after graduation, about a fifth of B.E.C.A. alumni were not enrolled in any sort of college, according to data from 2021 to 2024. “We didn’t have the construct to talk to kids about anything other than college,” said Yvette Rivera, the school’s principal. “But we don’t want to waste kids’ time. We don’t have a lot of time, especially in communities like ours.” Five years ago, Ms. Rivera embraced I.B.’s newer career track as an additional option. The signature course is called “personal and professional skills.” Students take on big ethical questions, a hallmark of the I.B. approach, but also focus on professional writing, public speaking and disagreeing respectfully. Learning about careers is a central part of the program. This fall, Danessa Ayala, a 17-year-old senior, was considering three disparate paths with vastly different educational requirements: automotive mechanics, real estate or becoming a detective. Her parents, a security guard and office administrator, said they would support whatever their daughter chose, but otherwise had not offered much detailed guidance. After Danessa was assigned at school to research her career interests, she realized that it could take many years for a police officer to rise to detective. She began to focus in on real estate, construction and home renovation. This winter, Danessa worked a paid externship for a local arts nonprofit, earning $16 an hour. She gained some familiarity with woodworking, which she knows can be a big part of home renovation projects. She is now applying to local public colleges and planning to take accounting and other business courses that can be helpful in the real estate industry. She plans to keep living at home to save money.Brittney Date, an adviser at B.E.C.A. to students with disabilities, once talked with families mostly about their children reaching high school graduation. She now has much broader conversations with students and parents about skills, dreams and budgets. “The focus has shifted to understanding what students want to do,” she said. “College? Cosmetology?” At KIPP Academy Lynn, Nicholas Pinho, an 18-year-old senior, is also weighing whether a four-year college is worth it. He might go for a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, but he is also thinking about a trade program to become an electrician. Either way, he wants to stay nearby his Brazilian American family in Salem, Mass., he said, where he could work for his family’s kitchen installation business. He was once interested in law school. But during the Covid-19 school closures, when he was chained to a laptop for remote learning, he had trouble focusing. That experience, he said, made him realize “I like to do more hands-on work.”

In the early weeks of the Trump administration’s push to slash funding that colleges and universities rely on, grants and contracts had been cut and, in a few cases, researchers had been laid off. In recent days, the fiscal pain has come to students. At the University of Pennsylvania, administrators have asked departments in the School of Arts & Sciences, the university’s largest school, to cut incoming Ph.D. students. In some cases, that meant reneging on informal offers, according to Wendy Roth, a professor of sociology. Her department had to decide which of the students would be “unaccepted.” Dr. Roth, chair of graduate education, was chosen to explain those decisions to them. “Two of them, I would say, were extremely upset. One person was in tears,” she said. “It’s just the most terrible thing to get that kind of news when your plans are made.” Since taking office, the Trump administration has issued orders that threaten to broadly undercut the financial foundation of university based research, including deep reductions in overhead cost reimbursements through the National Institutes of Health. Court challenges have paused some of the cuts, but universities are bracing for uncertainty. The University of Pennsylvania could face a $250 million hit in N.I.H. funding alone. Members of the administration have cast the cuts as a way to reduce wasteful government spending, sometimes in political terms. Last month, Katie Miller, who is working with Elon Musk’s team to trim federal spending, said the cuts would end “liberal D.E.I. deans’ slush fund.” In some cases, schools are pre-emptively cutting their expenses as a precautionary measure. North Carolina State University announced on Feb. 14 that it was freezing most hiring. Stanford University announced on Feb. 26 that it was freezing staff hiring, citing “very significant risks” to the community. At the University of Louisville in Kentucky, President Kim Schatzel announced an “immediate pause” on faculty and staff hiring until July. She cited the potential loss of $20 to $23 million in N.I.H. research funding. Dozens of other schools have announced hiring freezes or “chills.” Many of the cuts are now hitting graduate education, too, which is highly dependent on research grants, leaving students who had dreams of pursuing Ph.D.s with nowhere to go. A graduate program in biological sciences at the University of California, San Diego, usually enrolls 25 new graduate students a year. This year, the number will be 17. The reduction may seem small, but Kimberly Cooper, a biology professor, said the Trump cuts would ricochet through the university. “I hate to sound fatalistic,” said Dr. Cooper, who specializes in the study of limb development. “But at this point I think they’re trying to break the academic enterprise. And cutting academic science has impacts on the educational mission of the entire university.” At Penn, cuts to graduate programs were made across the board in the school’s 32 programs, professors said. The history department, for example, was asked to offer Ph.D. slots to only seven students, not the usual 17. In English, the normal cohort of 9 to 12 incoming students will be reduced to a maximum of six. A letter signed by professors in 22 departments at Penn warned that the school’s decision would cause reputational damage. Asked to comment, the university pointed to a statement signed by J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s interim president, posted on the school’s website, which noted that the cuts “represent an existential threat across our university and American higher education.” Dr. Jameson said the school was pursuing “cost containment measures and new sources of revenue.” He added: “We will remain judicious, measured, deliberate and focused on sustaining our mission when determining any action.” As the Trump administration vows to target schools over antisemitism and diversity initiatives, other programs that directly touch undergraduates, such as scholarships, could be affected, too, if the administration clears legal hurdles. David Kazanjian, graduate chair of comparative literature at Penn, said the cuts to graduate students would reduce opportunities for undergraduates. With fewer graduate student teachers, class sizes may increase, for example. The cost-cutting measures are taking effect across a variety of schools, from the Ivy League and large public research universities to smaller public schools. The administration’s decision to cap overhead reimbursements on National Institutes of Health grants to 15 percent could cut millions that schools have come to rely on to cover facilities and staff. The overhead rates normally vary depending on the grant recipients, but in some cases provide up to 60 percent of the grant in additional reimbursements. Columbia University, which receives about $1.3 billion a year in N.I.H. funding, could lose up to $200 million a year from the formula change, according to one analysis by a group of university faculty and staff members and alumni called the Stand Columbia Society. A graduate-student union at Columbia reported in a news release last month that university officials had proposed even more draconian cuts than Penn: eliminating up to 65 percent of incoming Ph.D. students in the School of Arts & Sciences. Following criticism, the cuts at Columbia were ultimately scaled back, and no firm numbers have been released. The graduate workers at Columbia argued that there was no need for funding cuts, citing the university’s endowment, which grew to $14.9 billion at the close of 2024 from $13.6 billion in 2023. Yale, for example, one of the largest recipients of N.I.H. dollars, has announced that it would provide temporary funding from its own coffers for scholars. A Columbia University official said that university endowments are generally restricted by purpose and in many cases could not be used to support Ph.D’s. But this week, the Education Department said it would review all of Columbia’s federal contracts and grants, accusing the school of not doing enough to curb antisemitism on campus. The administration identified $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government that could be subject to stop-work orders. Schools with large endowments may also be a target of increased taxation. Endowments, generally accumulated with donor funds invested over decades, had largely been considered off limits for taxes because the universities operate as nonprofits. But in 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, Republicans led a charge to impose a 1.4 percent excise tax on the investment income of large private university endowments. Now there are discussions of raising it to 14 percent, or even 21 percent. The threatened N.I.H. cuts and the endowment tax comes on the heels of other major cutbacks at public land grant universities. Among the Trump administration’s first targets was a U.S. Agency for International Development program called “Feed the Future,” which funded 19 agricultural labs in 17 states. Many of those laboratories are now being shut down. At U.C. San Diego, which was already facing state budget cuts, Dr. Cooper, the biology professor, said the fallout would have repercussions beyond universities if fewer students passed through their programs, and could affect entire sectors of the economy. “The bigger issue in all this is that, this is our future biomedical work force,” she said.

On Feb. 8, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University, nervously announced to the online world that she was planning a national protest in defense of science. “I’ve never done this before, but we gotta be the change we want to see in the world,” she wrote in a post on Bluesky, a social media platform. A team of scientists quickly coalesced around her and formed a plan: a rally on the National Mall, satellite protests across the country, March 7. They threw together a website so rudimentary, initially, that visitors had to type the “www” manually, or else the web address raised an error. Within days, the (improved) site received so much traffic that it crashed. The event, dubbed Stand Up For Science, is something of a revitalization of the March for Science that took place in cities around the world in April 2017, not long into President Trump’s first term. But this time, in a greatly sharpened political climate and a post-Covid world, the protests are being organized by a completely different team, and with a distinct vision. “The spirit of it is the same,” Ms. Delawalla said. But, she added, “now we are in a position of being on defense as opposed to offense.”Many of the threats that mobilized scientists during the first Trump administration, such as the widespread deletion of federal databases and deep slashes to the science budget, never came to pass. But this time, within weeks of the presidential inauguration, Mr. Trump has already reshaped much of the federal scientific enterprise, which funds a significant chunk of academic research. Often through executive orders, his administration has terminated funding for global health programs, fired disease screeners at the nation’s borders, gutted climate policy and attempted to suspend funding for nuclear protection. More than a thousand workers across federal science agencies, including the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, have been laid off. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., widely seen as a vaccine skeptic, is now the health secretary. Some scientific associations applauded Mr. Trump’s swift appointment of Michael Kratsios, an expert in technology policy, to the position of science adviser, rather than leaving the position vacant for more than a year, as he did during his first term. Still, the barrage of changes landed as “gut punches,” Ms. Delawalla said. On that Saturday morning in February — her coffee growing cold as she doomscrolled on her phone — Ms. Delawalla was drawn to her bathroom mirror, where she contemplated her reflection with resolve. “Are you somebody who lives by your values?” she asked herself. “If I really believe as a scientist that science is important for America, what am I going to do about it?” Marching for Science The tradition of science activism stretches back through the environmental movement of the 1960s to the antinuclear protests at the end of World War II. “Historically, when scientists’ interests and livelihoods are threatened, they mobilize,” said Scott Frickel, a sociologist at Brown University who studies the relationship between science and society. But the March for Science in 2017, which attracted an estimated one million people to protests in cities around the world, was distinct from past movements, Dr. Frickel said, because it was in reaction to a specific presidential administration, not to U.S. policy.Some scientists worried that taking that step would heighten the perception of science as partisan. In 2017, Robert Young, a geologist at Western Carolina University, published an essay in The Times expressing concerns about the march. “Those who want to characterize scientists as just another political interest group will use that as evidence for that case,” he said recently. A growing body of evidence suggests that scientists and scientific institutions engaging in political action does affect the way they are perceived by the public. One study found that trust in scientists among supporters of Mr. Trump declined after Nature, a prominent scientific journal, endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020. Another concluded that conservative attitudes toward scientists became more negative, and liberal attitudes more positive, as a direct consequence of the March for Science. The organization held additional marches in 2018 and 2019, but they drew much smaller crowds. The movement ultimately fizzled, in part because of competing perspectives among a diffuse set of leaders about what structure the organization should take, what goals it should tackle next and the politicization of science.Eight years later, Jonathan Berman, one of the leaders of the March for Science in 2017, said that the Trump administration had “moved from the theoretical to the experimental in terms of direct attacks on science.” Dr. Berman also expressed mixed feelings about the legacy of the movement that took place during Mr. Trump’s first term. “There are some things I wish I had done differently,” he said, like leading with an explicit mission and policy goals, meeting with members of Congress and a having clearer message about the political nature of science. “I would have more regrets if they hadn’t started organizing this,” Dr. Berman said, referring to the new movement. “They’ve indicated to me that it opened the door for a way of seeing the ‘scientist-activist’ as a kind of scientist you can be.” ‘Everything Is Political’ One of Mr. Trump’s executive orders in particular struck a chord for Ms. Delawalla: the removal of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs across the government, many of which supported the work of scientists from historically underrepresented backgrounds. That mandate led the National Science Foundation to review currently awarded grants that contained certain words commonly associated with those programs. “‘Woman’ and ‘female’ were on that list,” she said. “They were my words. I’m a woman. I’m female.”Ms. Delawalla had little experience in political activism. Through Bluesky, she connected with four other researchers, and together they formed Stand Up for Science. Those scientists were Sam Goldstein, a graduate student studying women’s health at the University of Florida; Emma Courtney, a graduate student studying disease at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York; Leslie Berntsen, a psychologist based in Los Angeles; and JP Flores, a Ph.D. student in bioinformatics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who had already been gathering organizing tips from the 2017 march leaders. Stand Up for Science is distinct from its 2017 inspiration. The team is small, and the members share a consistent vision, with similar views about how to achieve it. The website lays out a clear set of policy demands, including the expansion of science funding, the restoration of public access to scientific information and the reinstatement of dismissed federal scientists. They chose to protest on a Friday when the U.S. Senate is in session, because they have a clearly defined target audience: American policymakers. And there is no question among the organizers about the political nature of science. “Everything is political,” Dr. Berntsen said. “We did not get to the current moment by accident.” But in their movement’s tagline, the group also emphasizes that the benefits of science extend across the political aisle: “Science is for everyone.” “The law of gravity works for you, regardless of who you voted for,” Ms. Delawalla said. If you used your cellphone today, or knew the name of a bird outside your window or brushed your teeth last night, she added, “it’s because of a scientist.”Since Feb. 8, Stand Up For Science has amassed more than 50,000 followers on Bluesky, has been endorsed by Hank Green, the popular science YouTuber, and recognized by Mark Cuban. Volunteers have organized satellite protests in more than 30 cities. The organizing team filed a protest permit in Washington for a crowd of up to 10,000 on Friday afternoon, although they aren’t sure how many people will show up. That event has attracted speakers such as Bill Nye the Science Guy; Gretchen Goldman, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists; and Francis Collins, the recently retired leader of the National Institutes of Health. “We are standing up for science because we feel like our backs are against the wall,” Mr. Flores said. “March 7 is not the end goal for us. It’s the beginning.”

L. Clifford Davis, a civil rights lawyer who led efforts to desegregate high schools in Texas, sometimes in the face of mob violence, hostility from state politicians and threats on his life, died on Feb. 15 in Fort Worth. He was 100. His daughter Karen Davis confirmed the death, in a nursing facility. Although the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed public school segregation in 1954 in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka — a case on which Mr. Davis had worked alongside Thurgood Marshall in its early stages — many cities and states across the South initially defied the ruling. It was left to lawyers like Mr. Davis to hold those local districts to account. He began with Mansfield, Texas. The town’s only high school was whites only, and Black students had to find their own way to a Black high school, traveling 20 miles to Fort Worth. On behalf of five students, Mr. Davis sued the Mansfield school district in 1955, and a year later a federal appeals court ruled in their favor. But when Black students arrived for the first day of school in September 1956, they were met by hundreds of angry white people, some holding nooses. Burning crosses were on display. Mr. Davis appealed to the U.S. attorney general, Herbert Brownell Jr., for help, but he refused. Mr. Davis then wrote to Gov. Allan Shivers of Texas. “These Negro students are exercising a constitutional right,” Mr. Davis wrote. “I call upon you as Governor to cause to be dispatched additional law enforcement officers to Mansfield to assure that law and order will be maintained.” Governor Shivers deployed the Texas Rangers — but only to keep the peace. He made it clear that he would do nothing to enforce the integration ruling. At one point, a friend of Mr. Davis’s offered him a handgun for protection, warning him about white vigilantes. He took the weapon but never used it. He did, however, receive death threats in the mail, though he shrugged them off. As tensions rose, Mr. Davis decided that the risk to the students was too great, and he pulled back his efforts to bus them to white schools. But he continued to press the cause. In 1959, he brought a class-action suit against the Fort Worth school system, which remained segregated. He won, and this time the system agreed to a plan to integrate its schools. Such work, he later reflected, was the epitome of what lawyers should aspire to do.“The philosophy that was instilled in us in those days was that lawyers were social engineers,” he said in a 2014 oral history interview for the University of North Texas. “It was our job to try to use the principles of law to help bring about equality and opportunity for all people, not just Black people.” L. Clifford Davis (the initial L did not stand for a name) was born on Oct. 12, 1924, in Wilton, in southwestern Arkansas, where his parents, Augustus and Dora (Duckett) Davis, were sharecroppers. Wilton was deeply segregated, and the local Black school system stopped at the eighth grade. Clifford’s parents rented a house in Little Rock, the state capital, where he and five of his six siblings lived while attending high school and college. He graduated from Philander Smith College (now Philander Smith University), a historically Black institution, in 1945 with a degree in business administration. Mr. Davis wanted to go to law school, but there were none in Arkansas that would accept Black applicants, so he moved to Washington to attend Howard University. But finding the cost of living in Washington too high, and feeling that the time was ripe to attempt to desegregate the law school at the University of Arkansas, he applied for admission there in 1947. The school, in Fayetteville, offered him a spot, but with a big caveat: He would have no contact with white students and would have to pay his tuition in advance. Mr. Davis declined and remained at Howard, graduating in 1949. But his efforts did not go to waste. In 1948, Silas Hunt, taking the same offer, became the first Black student at Arkansas’s law school. Mr. Davis initially practiced law in Pine Bluff, south of Little Rock. He moved to Texas in 1952 and settled in Fort Worth, where he became the city’s first Black lawyer to open a practice. He worked with the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights groups, participating in the early phases of the case that became Brown v. Board of Education, led by Thurgood Marshall, the future associate justice of the Supreme Court. Mr. Davis was named a criminal district court judge in 1983, and the next year he won election to the post. He lost re-election in 1988 but remained a visiting judge until retiring in 2004. Along with his daughter Karen, he is survived by another daughter, Avis Davis. His wife, Ethel (Weaver) Davis, died in 2015.Judge Davis was not one to seek the spotlight, but in time it found him. In 2012, the Fort Worth Black Bar Association, which he helped found in 1977, renamed itself the L. Clifford Davis Legal Association in his honor. And in 2017, the law school at the University of Arkansas awarded him an honorary degree. “It never crossed my mind that this would happen,” he told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “I applied 71 years ago to earn a degree. Now they’re going to give me one.”

Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down. Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality. His administration has slashed the agency’s work force, eliminating 47 percent of the department’s 4,133 employees in the first 50 days of Mr. Trump’s return to the website. Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it. Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement. “This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida. Here is how the party got to this moment.Right from the start, Republicans opposed President Jimmy Carter’s signature on a 1979 law creating the department, citing beliefs in limited government control, fiscal responsibility and local autonomy. They argued that education should be primarily managed at the state and local levels rather than through federal mandates.A year later, Ronald Reagan won the White House, his third attempt at the presidency, thanks to a promise that he would rein in a federal government that he said had overstepped its bounds on myriad issues, including education. In 1982, Mr. Reagan used his State of the Union address to call on Congress to eliminate two agencies: the Energy Department and the Education Department. “We must cut out more nonessential government spending and root out more waste, and we will continue our efforts to reduce the number of employees in the federal work force,” Mr. Reagan said. He was unable to persuade Democrats in control of the House to go along with his plan, and the issue started to fade as a top priority for Republicans — but never quite disappeared. Newt Gingrich, then the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, called for the abolition of the agency in the mid-1990s. In the 2008 Republican presidential primary, both Representative Ron Paul and former Gov. Mitt Romney supported either terminating the Education Department or drastically reducing its size.Last year, a proposal to eliminate the agency was voted down in the Republican-controlled House despite a strong majority within the party, as 161 Republicans supported the measure while 60 opposed it. The Education Department’s primary role has been sending federal money to public schools, administering college financial aid and managing federal student loans. The agency enforces civil rights laws in schools and supports programs for students with disabilities. “The history of the Education Department is as a civil rights agency, the place that ensures that students with disabilities get the services they need, that English-learners get the help they need,” John B. King Jr., who served as education secretary during the Obama administration and is now chancellor of the State University of New York, told reporters on Thursday. “Taking that away harms students and families.”Mr. Trump rarely mentioned education during his first presidential campaign in 2016, other than to criticize Common Core standards, which aimed to create some consistency across states. He did occasionally call for eliminating the Education Department, though his administration did not make it a focus. But Mr. Trump is adept at seizing on issues that resonate with his conservative base. During his 2024 campaign, that meant adopting the concerns of the parents’ rights movement that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT That movement gained steam by organizing around opposition to progressive agendas that promoted mandating certain education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students. Activists contended that these policies undermined parental rights and values. In that way, Mr. Trump’s desire to eliminate the Education Department became intertwined with his focus on eradicating diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the federal government, a dynamic that has played out vividly through his purge of personnel and policies at the agency in the weeks since his return to office. In a draft of an executive order aimed at dismantling the department that circulated in Washington this week, Mr. Trump’s only specific instructions for Education Secretary Linda McMahon were to terminate any remaining diversity, equity and inclusion programs. On Mr. Trump’s campaign website, he criticizes gender or transgender issues eight times in his list of 10 principles for “great schools.” “One reason this issue has so much momentum was definitely the pandemic and the populist frustration that Washington was not on the side of parents,” said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Department of Education really became emblematic of a lot of what was going on that was wrong.” Project 2025 called for dismantling the department, too. A multitude of Mr. Trump’s actions during his first six weeks in office were hinted at in Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government. This includes an excoriation of the Education Department, which is pilloried in the foreword of the 992-page document for being staffed by workers who “inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” The document maintains that schools should be responsive to parents rather than “leftist advocates intent on indoctrination,” and that student test scores have not improved despite 45 years of federal spending. But it does not explain how that might change by giving more power to state and local school districts, which have spent exponentially more on education during that same time. “This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm,” the Project 2025 blueprint reads. “For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.”

The women’s basketball coach stood atop a ladder on Sunday night, carefully cutting down the last of the net after Haskell Indian Nations University won the league championship. The scene is a familiar one at this time of year in college basketball. But the celebration in Lawrence, Kan., where the man who invented the sport worked for decades, was nevertheless astonishing: Officially, Haskell’s coach, Adam Strom, was only a volunteer. He had been fired 16 days earlier, swept up in an executive order that led Haskell to oust about a quarter of its workers on a Friday in February. The only other federally run college for Native people, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, also laid off a similar share of workers that day. More than 140 years after the United States first used the grounds in Lawrence as a boarding school to assimilate Native children, Haskell students feel that the federal government, which controls the university, has once again become a malevolent force upending lives. The student government association president said three of her five instructors had been dismissed. Rumors had swirled over whether enough dining hall workers were left to serve meals. A senior had wondered whether the university, a sanctum for Native American students shaped by tradition and tragedy, would remain open long enough for him to receive his degree. As other potential policy changes loom, students, leaders and experts fear that the federal system for educating Native Americans — which serves tens of thousands of students at Haskell and beyond, and which already has some of the worst outcomes in the United States — is lurching into a new phase of crisis. In President Trump’s Washington, firings across the federal government have been billed as an “optimization” of the bureaucracy. But on Haskell’s campus, where at least 103 people are buried, the seemingly indiscriminate budget cuts represent another breach of the government’s vows to Native Americans. “We’re not necessarily repeating the history of the school; it’s just continuing in our own modern way,” said J’Den Nichols, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana who is majoring in American Indian studies. As she spoke, less than a week before the conference championship game, a tepee stood near the student union in response to the cuts. “We only bring that up in times of ceremony, or in times like now, where we are either mourning or attacked by others,” Tyler Moore, the senior and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said of the tepee. Haskell’s president, Francis Arpan, referred an interview request to the Bureau of Indian Education, which declined to make any federal officials available. A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which includes the bureau, said in a one-sentence statement that the department “reaffirms its unwavering commitment to the American public while practicing diligent fiscal responsibility.” Although the administration’s quest to reduce federal spending has led campus officials across the country to weigh layoffs, hiring freezes and other steps, schools like Haskell are particularly vulnerable to disruptions since they are directly run by the government. And perhaps no education system in the United States is as familiar with upheaval and shattered promises than the one that provides federal schools for Native students. Almost a century after a major federal report about conditions for Native Americans warned that “cheapness in education is expensive” because thriftiness in schools could deepen future societal problems, witnesses repeatedly told Congress in written testimony last week that the federal system for teaching Native people suffered from “chronic underfunding.”About 45,000 children are enrolled in bureau-funded schools in 23 states, their options fashioned by court cases, laws and treaties. In addition to operating Haskell and SIPI — as the small college of about 200 in Albuquerque is known — the government financially supports tribal colleges and universities that are run independently. Although some measures of student success are improving, the high school graduation rate for Bureau of Indian Education schools regularly lags the nation’s. In the 2020-21 school year, standardized tests showed that roughly one in 10 assessed students were proficient in math, and about 17 percent were proficient in language arts, according to the bureau. The system’s colleges are also troubled. The most recently reported six-year graduation rate at Haskell was 43 percent; the national rate is usually around 62 percent. Dr. Arpan, congressional aides noted before a hearing last summer, was Haskell’s eighth president in six years. And a 2023 Interior Department report, which emerged last year after the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility sued to obtain a redacted copy, depicted Haskell as “severely dysfunctional.” The report concluded, in part, that the university had been insufficiently attentive to accusations of sexual assault, housed an athletic department “in disarray” and used adjunct instructors “inappropriately" while federal employees worked beyond their job descriptions. Last December, some congressional Republicans floated a new governance structure for Haskell that has drawn mixed reviews on campus and not yet cleared Capitol Hill. Despite their university’s problems, one student after another said that Haskell was one of the few places in academia where they felt their culture was honored. Shrinking the university, they argued, was more than a violation of the government’s promises; it was an assault on their heritages and futures. Angel Ahtone Elizarraras, the student government president, talked of how the library offered spiritual medicine and every dorm had a smudge room. (“If you ask anyone on campus, English isn’t the coolest language we know,” Marina DeCora, a student who is a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, said wryly.) Students frequently used the word “family” to describe the community at Haskell, where they pay some fees but no tuition. This semester, the university reported an enrollment of 918 students representing 153 tribal nations. Shiannah Horned Eagle, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota who is a social work student, said she started out at another college, but found it “isolating.” She found solace at Haskell — and then learned of the cuts when an instructor told the class. “Basically, they just told us they got fired and that they don’t know what’s going to happen to the classes,” she said. Ms. Ahtone Elizarraras was preparing for a Valentine’s Day dance when she heard. “As a Native, as you’re at this school, you kind of read through the books, and it prepares you for moments like this,” said Ms. Ahtone Elizarraras, a citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma, adding, “It makes it to where you realize, ‘Hey, my ancestors stepped so that I could walk.’” But there is also fury. “How much more can you take?” Ms. DeCora fumed.Haskell’s board of regents has appealed to Washington. In letters to federal officials, the advisory board’s interim president, Dalton Henry, argued that the ousted employees should be reinstated because they were fulfilling duties that were mandatory under treaties. Last week, students protested outside the Kansas Capitol. Later in the week, Dr. Arpan told student government leaders about a reprieve that would allow ousted instructors to finish this semester as adjuncts. But that fix is, for now, only temporary. Among the university workers who have lost jobs are a photography instructor and custodians. On the morning of Feb. 14, there were rumors among some employees about coming cuts. Then Mr. Strom, who was in his fourth season as the women’s basketball coach, was summoned to the athletic director’s office. He figured he was in for a talking-to about sharing gym time with other teams. Instead, the athletic director told him he was out of a job. Mr. Strom, a member of the Yakama Nation, said he had been a contractor for his first three seasons. He was only recently hired full time as a federal employee, which meant he was still in his probationary period.“I felt safe. I really did,” he said, adding, “I thought being an educator was important in America.” Ahniwake Rose, a Cherokee Nation citizen who is the president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, said that the Trump administration should reverse the firings soon. Otherwise, she warned, there could be “a trickle-down effect on long-term harm to these institutions” if students decided not to enroll because they feared for the universities’ health. Tribe-controlled colleges, she said, were offering to send volunteer faculty and staff members in the meantime. Mr. Strom decided to stick around for the rest of the season and coach as a volunteer, only miles from where James Naismith, basketball’s inventor, founded the University of Kansas’ fabled men’s team. The current Kansas coach, Bill Self, is the highest-paid college basketball coach in the United States. “I really could paint that very ugly picture in that that coach is a white male, and I’m a minority, I’m a Native American,” Mr. Strom said in the gym complex, where four Native star quilts flank the American flag. He paused. “At the same time, I’d rather be better than bitter.” On Sunday, the now-volunteer coach and his team won the conference title, securing a spot in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics national championship tournament. But instead of recruiting for next season or spending as many hours preparing for games, Mr. Strom has been searching for jobs, hoping he will find a coaching gig someplace else. Students are also worrying about the way forward for their lives and their campus, even though events like graduation remain on track. “I know there’s going to be a day where this is talked about in history books,” said Mr. Moore, who was chosen as this year’s Haskell Brave, one of the university’s highest honors, adding, “I’m just sad that I’m living through it today.”

The Trump administration said Wednesday it would use a law typically meant to investigate racist practices within police departments to examine whether the University of California system had engaged in a pattern or practice of antisemitic discrimination. The move by the Justice Department comes two days after other federal agencies announced a review of Columbia University’s federal contracts to determine if such funding should be taken away over an alleged failure to protect Jewish students and faculty on campus. President Trump has long railed against American colleges and universities for their policies toward on-campus protests against Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip. Some Jewish faculty and staff have complained that such protests, some of which featured antisemitic rhetoric, have made them feel harassed, and that the encampments impeded their ability to freely go to and from classes. “This Department of Justice will always defend Jewish Americans, protect civil rights, and leverage our resources to eradicate institutional antisemitism in our nation’s universities,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. The University of California system said in a statement that it was “unwavering in its commitment to combating antisemitism and protecting everyone’s civil rights. We continue to take specific steps to foster an environment free of harassment and discrimination for everyone in the university community.” Pattern or practice inquiries by the Justice Department are not criminal investigations but rather study broad conduct by institutions to see if they allow or encourage mistreatment of certain groups. For decades, the pattern or practice law has been used primarily to investigate local and state police departments for unfair treatment of people of color. Settlements in such cases typically involve a department agreeing to make specific changes to training and policies in order to root out problematic behavior or practices. Republican administrations generally take a less aggressive approach to such investigations than Democrats, and the Trump administration paused such work in late January. By using the law to investigate a university system rather than a police department, the Trump administration is pressing arguments Mr. Trump first made during the campaign, that Democrats have fostered racist treatment of white people. The Department of Education announced investigations last month into “widespread antisemitism” at five universities: Columbia; Northwestern; Portland State; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Minnesota. At a confirmation hearing last month for Linda McMahon as education secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the Senate education committee, pressed her to focus on what he said was a backlog of antisemitism cases in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. “I’d look forward to doing that,” Ms McMahon said. She was confirmed to the post on Monday. Writing on his social media site on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump underscored what he considered appropriate penalties regarding pro-Palestinian demonstrations. “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote, adding that the protesters would be “imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” and that American students would be permanently expelled or even arrested. The Justice Department investigation will seek to determine whether the U.C. system violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, and religion. That law authorizes the Justice Department to launch investigations of state and local government employers where it has reason to believe that a “pattern or practice” of discrimination exists. The Trump administration created a multiagency task force to combat antisemitism, and both actions this week were billed as the first major moves of that work. Last month, Trump administration officials announced that members of the task force would visit 10 schools around the country to discuss concerns about antisemitism on campus toward staff and students. On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education identified some $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government that could be cut off as a result of what the Trump administration said was the school’s “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.” Columbia said in a statement on Monday evening that it was reviewing the announcement and that it looked forward “to ongoing work with the new federal administration to fight antisemitism.” More than a quarter of Columbia’s $6.6 billion in annual operating revenue comes from federal sources, according to its 2024 financial statements. Much of that comes from federal research grants.

The police in Baton Rouge, La., are investigating whether a hazing episode at a fraternity may have played a role in the recent death of a 20-year-old Southern University student, university officials said Wednesday. The student, Caleb Wilson, of New Orleans, died at 12:27 a.m. on Feb. 27, the East Baton Rouge Coroner’s Office said. A university investigation into his death started after rumors of “unsanctioned off-campus activities” began to swell, the university, whose full name is Southern University and Agricultural & Mechanical College, announced on social media. The activities are believed to have been organized by the Beta Sigma chapter of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, the university said. “We have been informed that the local authorities have launched an investigation into this tragic incident,” the fraternity said in a statement on its website on Feb. 28. “We have extended ourselves to them and are ready to assist in any way possible during this difficult time.” The coroner’s office said that “the cause and manner” of Mr. Wilson’s death were still under investigation. The Baton Rouge Police Department, which is investigating Mr. Wilson’s death, did not immediately respond on Wednesday to an email or phone call seeking additional information. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “An off-campus incident is believed to have contributed to Caleb’s death,” John K. Pierre, the chancellor for the school, said on Feb. 27 in a Facebook message. “Southern University is cooperating fully with the Baton Rouge Police Department.” It is unclear whether Mr. Wilson was a fraternity member. Mr. Wilson was a junior at Southern University, a historically Black institution, majoring in mechanical engineering. He was also a member of the “Human Jukebox” Marching Band, the school’s prestigious collegiate musical group that incorporates dance and music and has performed at Super Bowls and presidential inaugurations. “This tragic loss leaves a void in our Jaguar family,” the school said, referring to the university’s mascot. “Our thoughts and prayers are with Caleb’s family, friends, classmates, and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time.” Southern University also said that it had begun a “student judiciary process” in the aftermath of Mr. Wilson’s death. “Caleb was a bright and talented young man with a promising future ahead of him,” his family said in a statement provided to WAFB, a local television station. “We are committed to seeking the truth about the circumstances surrounding Caleb’s passing and ensuring that no other family has to endure such a tragedy.” A candlelight vigil honoring his life was held on campus on Friday evening. In recent years, there has been a crackdown on fraternity hazing at schools across the country, and several states have passed legislation to address the problem. Earlier this year, four fraternity members at San Diego State University were charged with felony counts after a pledge was set on fire during a skit at a party last year. In October, two men who were charged in the 2017 hazing death of a Pennsylvania State University sophomore were sentenced to two to four months in prison.