Loretta Ford, who co-founded the first academic program for nurse practitioners in 1965, then spent decades transforming the field of nursing into an area of serious clinical practice, education and research, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Wildwood, Fla. She was 104. Her daughter, Valerie Monrad, confirmed the death. Today there are more than 350,000 nurse practitioners in America; it is one of the fastest growing fields, and last year U.S. News and World Report ranked it the top job in the country, a reflection of salary potential, job satisfaction and career opportunities. That success is in large part the result of a single person, Dr. Ford, who in 1965 co-founded the first graduate program for nurse practitioners, at the University of Colorado, and subsequently mapped the outlines of what the field entailed. At the time, nurses were important figures in the medical field, providing not just administrative support but also vital services where and when doctors were unavailable. But the training and career framework for nurses was almost completely absent. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “In nurses’ training, the focus is too much on teaching and administration,” Dr. Ford said in a speech at Duke University in 1970. “We want to make the nurse into a clinician.” She went further in 1972, when she was hired as the first dean of the school of nursing at the University of Rochester. There she implemented the “unification” model of nursing, in which education, practice and research are fully integrated.“It gives the profession the ability to study itself with the research, and have nurse-practitioner researchers conducting that work while educating the future work force,” Stephen A. Ferrara, the president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, said in an interview. Dr. Ford’s work in the 1970s often faced resistance from doctors, who scoffed at the idea of nurses wielding influence within the medical field and, perhaps, threatening their dominance of it.“We actually got hate letters in the mail,” Eileen Sullivan-Marx, who studied under Dr. Ford at Rochester and is now the dean emerita of the school of nursing at New York University, said in an interview.But Dr. Ford and others pushed on, establishing state-level licensing protocols, standardizing curriculums and adjusting insurance programs to allow nurse practitioners to have a substantive, and often independent, role within the health care system. And she emphasized that nurse practitioners were not there to replace doctors but to complement them — to do the frontline work in hospitals, but also to be out in the community, focused on health and prevention at a grass-roots level. “It was obvious to me,” she told Healthy Women magazine in 2022, “that we needed advanced skills and an expanded knowledge base to make the decisions. Because it happens in a hospital. Who do they think makes decisions at 3 a.m.?” Loretta Cecelia Pfingstel was born on Dec. 28, 1920, in the Bronx and raised in Passaic, N.J. Her father, Joseph, was a lithographer, and her mother, Nellie (Williams) Pfingstel, oversaw the home. As a child, Loretta hoped to become a teacher, but the onset of the Great Depression hit her family’s finances hard, and she was forced to find work at 16. She became a nurse, and in 1941 earned a diploma in nursing from Middlesex General Hospital in New Jersey. Her fiancé was killed in combat in 1942, inspiring her to join the U.S. Army Air Forces, intending to be a flight nurse. But her poor eyesight disqualified her from flying, and by the end of the war she was based at a hospital in Denver. She received a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1949 from the University of Colorado, and a master’s in public health there in 1951.Early in her career she specialized in pediatric public health, while also teaching in the nursing program at the University of Colorado; by 1955 she was an assistant professor, and in 1961 she earned a doctorate in education from the school. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT She married William J. Ford in 1947. He died in 2014. Their daughter is her only survivor. Dr. Ford’s work took her into rural parts of Colorado, where doctors were few, poor families were many and the need for basic preventive medical care was acute. She found herself playing many roles under the title “nurse” — she was part public health official, part counselor, part all-around clinician. At the same time, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were bringing a new sense of urgency to the issues of rural public health and supporting innovation across all medical fields. Working alongside Henry Silver, a pediatrician at Colorado, Dr. Ford created a graduate program for nurses, though at first it was in the form of continuing education, without a degree. But the kernel of her vision was already there: that nurses should be sufficiently trained to make independent decisions, have their own practices and participate in health care as part of a team. “Complete independence for any health practitioner today is a myth,” she said at Duke. “It could be downright poor practice.” By the time she retired from Rochester, in 1986, there were thousands of licensed nurse practitioners, and many doctors had come to accept them as colleagues, not supporting players. Dr. Ford continued to write and lecture, and in 2011 she was inducted into the U.S. Women’s Hall of Fame. “I get a lot of credit for 140,000 nurses, and I don’t deserve it,” she said in her acceptance speech. “They’re the ones who fought the good fight. They took the heat, and they stood it, and they’ve done beautifully.”

Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature approved bills on Thursday aimed at reducing unauthorized immigration and allowing families to use public funds for private school tuition, mirroring the policy agenda of the new Trump administration. Legislative leaders left little room for debate, pushing through millions of dollars and sprawling policy changes in a special session that lasted just four days. One bill creates a new state immigration office that will work directly with the federal government to enforce immigration law. Another expands the state’s school voucher program, which currently operates only in Tennessee’s largest school districts. President Trump’s explicit support and a full-throated pressure campaign was enough to help overcome resistance within the Republican supermajority over the school bill. Expanding the voucher program has also been a top priority of Gov. Bill Lee’s, and it narrowly passed with 54 votes in the House and 20 in the Senate. “Now, we stand ready to assist the president in his further agenda for public safety for our state,” Mr. Lee, a Republican, said in a statement after the special session ended Thursday afternoon. “And finally, thanks to the General Assembly and thousands of Tennesseans who have worked so hard, universal school choice is now a reality for Tennessee families.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The only provision that won bipartisan support allotted millions of dollars in aid for communities in East Tennessee, which were devastated last year by flooding from Hurricane Helene. Some Democrats voted against part of it, though, because the funding was wrapped into the same spending bill that would pay for the voucher expansion.“In reality, it’s about control — certainly about control over taxpayer dollars,” said State Senator Heidi Campbell, a Democrat. Lawmakers had expected Mr. Lee to push for the multimillion-dollar voucher plan, which failed to receive enough support last year, along with the hurricane aid. But after Mr. Trump signed a series of executive orders toughening federal immigration law, Mr. Lee added a nearly $6 million immigration bill to be considered in the special session.At least one aspect of the bill caused consternation among both Democrats and Republicans: making it a felony for any local official to vote in support of a “sanctuary city” policy for unauthorized immigrants. Such policies are already illegal under state law, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee said it would file a legal challenge. “If we set a precedent for penalizing any elected official for voting their conscience, whether it’s good or bad, then we set a dangerous precedent for the issue,” said State Senator Todd Gardenhire, a Republican from Chattanooga. He cited as an example a conservative lawmaker being punished for supporting Democratic priorities such as abortion rights or gun control.The expanded vouchers remained the most divisive issue for Democrats and Republicans alike, especially those worried about siphoning money away from rural schools. The program is estimated to cost about $350 million over the next school year, and will cost millions more in the coming years as it is opened up to more students. Some school districts have adopted resolutions opposing the expansion. As part of the measure, about 20,000 students will be eligible for about $7,000 each to use at private or charter schools in the next school year, with the number of eligible students increasing each year after that. Half of the students must be from low-income families, or have disabilities. Republicans framed the voucher plan as a way to empower parents and allow them access to more schools. Democrats questioned whether private schools receiving the money would be held to the same educational standards as public schools. They also questioned whether private schools might rebuff certain students who wanted to use the voucher money to attend. “When we start to take from public schools, we’re hurting our kids, we’re hurting our lower-income kids,” said State Representative Ronnie Glynn, a Democrat from Clarksville. He added that “many of your kids in rural Tennessee will never see the inside of a private institution.” Some lawmakers also bristled at an amendment that would award one-time bonuses of $2,000 to public schoolteachers only if their school districts passed a resolution “affirming” participation in the voucher program.But Republicans were quick to highlight the support of Mr. Trump, who preemptively congratulated lawmakers on social media for their work on the bill. The Tennessee chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group, hailed that “as of today, parents, not government bureaucrats, are finally in control” on education. Tennessee lawmakers will return next month for the regular legislative session.

In the latest release of federal test scores, educators had hoped to see widespread recovery from the learning loss incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, the results, from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, tell a grim tale, especially in reading: The slide in achievement has only continued. The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent. There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic. Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class. And while students at the top end of the academic distribution are performing similarly to students prepandemic, the drops remain pronounced for struggling students, despite a robust, bipartisan movement in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills.“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”But the tumult of the new presidential administration may threaten that focus. The federal test scores began to circulate on the same day that many educators across the country fell into panic as they tried to discern how a White House freeze on some federal funding would affect local schools. On a Tuesday phone call with reporters, Dr. Carr did not directly address President Trump’s campaign promise to shut down or severely reduce the federal Department of Education, the agency for which she works. But she did mention that education data collection could change because of changes to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, including a change allowing greater flexibility in how racial and ethnic groups are categorized. (The agency later clarified that the change happened in 2024.) The NAEP exam is considered more challenging than many state-level standardized tests. Still, the poor scores indicate a lack of skills that are necessary for school and work. In fourth-grade reading, students who score below the basic level on NAEP cannot sequence events from a story or describe the effects of a character’s actions. In eighth grade, students who score below basic cannot determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Dr. Carr did point to Louisiana fourth graders as a rare bright spot. Though their overall reading achievement was in line with the national average, a broad swath of students had matched or exceeded prepandemic achievement levels. Louisiana has focused on adopting the science of reading, a set of strategies to align early literacy teaching with cognitive science research. The resulting instruction typically includes a strong focus on structured phonics and vocabulary building. That approach has become widespread over the past five years, but does not seem to have led to national learning gains — at least not yet. Experts have no clear explanation for the dismal reading results. While school closures and other stresses associated with the Covid-19 pandemic deepened learning loss, reading scores began declining several years before the virus emerged. In a new paper, Nat Malkus, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that declines in American children’s performance are echoed in tests of adults’ skills over the same time period. So while we often look to classrooms to understand why students are not learning more, some of the causes may be attributed to screen time, cellphones and social media, he argues. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Children and adults both watch more video on their phones, meaning “there is a displacement of reading text, which is probably increasing over time in degree and severity,” he said. “The phone’s ability to make our attention spans shorter and give kids less ability to stay focused is quite likely to come home to roost.” In math, higher-achieving fourth graders — those performing at the 75th percentile and above — are doing as well as similar fourth graders were in 2019. But fourth graders performing below average in math had not made up the lost ground. In eighth-grade math, only higher-achieving students showed improvements, but they remained below prepandemic levels. “It’s great that more kids are getting to basic, but that’s a midpoint. We need to be thinking hard about getting more kids to proficiency,” said Bob Hughes, director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation, a philanthropy that has recently focused on improving math education. “Higher-level math, beginning in middle school, is mission critical.” A student survey distributed alongside NAEP found that 30 percent of eighth graders were enrolled in algebra, down from 32 percent in 2019. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Student absenteeism has improved since 2022 in both fourth and eighth grade, with about 30 percent of students reporting missing three or more days of school in the previous month. But at both grade levels, absence rates remain significantly higher than they were prepandemic. Dr. Carr said she had an important message for parents: If they want their children to excel academically, they must attend school regularly.

I could feel the anger in Erin Kyle’s voice when I spoke to her last week. She was in the harried process of moving from a hotel to an apartment in the Marina del Rey section of Los Angeles because her family’s townhouse was destroyed in the Palisades fire. Her daughter, who will be 16 on Friday, was a sophomore at Palisades Charter High School, a beloved local institution of 2,900 students where “about 40 percent of the campus was damaged or destroyed,” the principal told The Los Angeles Times. Pali High is providing virtual instruction while school leaders try to find a temporary location for their students, who come from all over the city. Kyle was especially furious and bereft because her daughter — like other Los Angeles high schoolers affected by the fire — has already had so much disruption to her young life. During Covid, Los Angeles schools stayed closed to in-person instruction longer than those of many other cities across the country. She talked about how much online learning harmed her daughter, a social butterfly, in fifth and sixth grade. “These kids suffered so much during that time period,” she said. I have heard this complaint from many parents over the past few years: California opened up hair salons and restaurants but kept schools closed, and that said everything about how the state values children and families. “Just to have to do this again, it’s terrible,” Kyle said. “I mean, she’s traumatized from what we went through. We were stuck on the road for 45 minutes with fire on both sides of us trying to get out.” Even though her daughter was so happy at Pali — she was a cheerleader and had lots of friends — Kyle decided to enroll her at a public school in Manhattan Beach, where she will start next week. “She needs to be in school in person,” she told me. School disruption from natural disasters is becoming more common because of climate change, and America is not ready for it. In 2023, Jonathan T. Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, told The Times, “Pretty much anywhere in the United States you’re going to have to be more careful about this and perhaps change how we run our schools in order to accommodate climate change.” More than a year later, I don’t think we’ve changed much. I spent the past week talking to parents, teachers and teenagers who experienced major climate-related school disruptions — not just from the fires in California but also from Hurricane Helene, which caused billions of dollars of damage in the Southeast in September and kept some schools closed for weeks.These extreme weather events are fast-moving, and it would have been very difficult to anticipate the extent of their damage. “Having lived in California during drought and then wildfire, having lived in New York and seeing what happens with the hurricanes and things like that along the coast, I was like, maybe the mountains will be better,” said Jim Ray, who grew up in Asheville, N.C., and said he and his family moved back there in part because they thought it would be safer from climate-related disruption. They were not expecting a hundred-year flood triggered by a hurricane. Speaking to recently dislocated parents, it was clear that the disruptions brought on by Covid still loomed large in their minds — a symbol that they, their children and their schools remain an afterthought. In North Carolina, Buncombe County, where Asheville is situated, voted earlier this month to cut nearly $5 million — or 4 percent — from the school budget, despite protests. The local ABC station reported that the chair of the county board of commissioners said she would replenish the school budget once state and federal disaster funding came in. But considering the fact that President Trump proposed potentially eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency when he visited North Carolina last week, arguing that if disaster funding were left to the states, fixing problems would be “a lot less expensive,” it’s not looking good for those coffers to be refilled as much as they need to be. Stephanie Forshee, who lives in Asheville and has two children who are 9 and 6 and who were out of school for a month because of Helene, told me she feels like “the town is in limbo and the news cycle has obviously moved on.” She’s concerned about how the next few years are going to play out because of the school budget cuts and because her county is not a wealthy area to begin with. “Currently, kids don’t seem to be the priority,” she said. Beyond public K-12 budget cuts, preschool and child care programs are possibly more vulnerable in the aftermath of disasters because they’re so sensitive to enrollment changes. According to The Los Angeles Times, more than 300 child care facilities are still closed, and the damage is so extensive, there’s no telling when they might reopen. Furthermore, the child care industry already took a hit during the pandemic, when “California lost about 12 percent of its licensed child care capacity. The industry already struggles with such low profit margins — despite high prices for families — that any additional costs can destabilize providers and lead to closures.” I spoke to Estela Maldonado, who has worked in a variety of roles at Methodist Preschool of Pacific Palisades for 11 years, and whose son also attends the preschool. She told me that the school building burned in the fires and lost half of its student body because so many families were displaced from their homes. The preschool is currently operating out of a temporary location in Santa Monica. Without funding from the students to keep the school afloat, staff members have had their hours cut, and now Maldonado is worried about supporting her family while the school looks for a permanent home. Maldonado would like to see the government supporting early childhood educators financially in this moment of crisis with direct funding to make sure they can make it until they find a more permanent home and recoup their student body, but she is not optimistic. “To be honest, I don’t think any of us are really expecting it,” Maldonado said. But that does not mean she has lost hope. “You won’t find us giving up because it’s a job that we don’t see as a job. We see as the passion of our lives to serve the children and to serve their families,” she added. Despite the heartbreak and despair that came through in these conversations, I was touched by the fierce love that people — especially the kids — had for their school communities. Moksha Bruno and her son Lincoln, a freshman at Pali High, both told me that even though they’re unhappy with virtual learning, Lincoln has no desire to leave Pali. Bruno said she and Lincoln’s father gave him the option to find another school, but “there was no question in his mind he wants to help rebuild it.” She means that literally. Lincoln described the makerspace classes (a modern version of shop class, with woodworking, metalwork and arts and crafts) at Pali. He reached out to his makerspace teacher after the fire and asked if he and his fellow students could help with the rebuilding efforts. Lincoln is also a member of the school’s marching band, and he talked about how they’re working to source instruments and get together this week to practice at a park. “I’m a very social guy, and I need to see my friends and talk and hang out to be happy,” he told me. What heartens Bruno is the number of people who want to help. “People want to help and are willing to give and do whatever it takes,” she said. I agree it is a blessing. I just wish that these individual efforts were better supported by our government. Most critically, we can no longer greet national disasters of this scale as surprises. We can’t GoFundMe our way out of future climate disasters for our children. We need careful planning, and we need to recognize that kids only get one shot at an education — and that there is real mourning when they miss their first homecoming dance or their fifth grade graduation, when they don’t get to experience the normal and imperfect passage of each season. When people lose everything, the communities that parents, teachers and children form around schools are even more vital. Rebuilding these bonds needs to be a national effort, and it should start now.

A month after Kimberly Diei enrolled as a doctor of pharmacy student at the University of Tennessee, the college’s professional conduct committee received an anonymous complaint about her posts on social media. The college reviewed her posts, which included racy rap lyrics and tight dresses, and concluded that they were vulgar and unprofessional. It threatened to expel her. For the last four years, Ms. Diei has been fighting her school in court, arguing that her posts were fun and sex-positive, and unconnected to her status as a student. Now she has won a settlement: On either Wednesday or Thursday, she expects to receive a check for $250,000 — both vindication and relief, she said. She has also graduated from pharmacy school at the university and is now a practicing pharmacist at a Walgreens in Memphis, a job where she says her comfort with her own sexuality has been an asset. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Viagra, that’s a very, very big seller,” she said, chuckling. “Sexual lubricants, condoms, all of that. I can’t say every day somebody’s asking me about sexual products, but it’s fairly frequent across the age range.” Her lawsuit against the university, filed in February 2021, tested the boundaries of free expression for students in the age of social media. With the pro bono help of a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech group, Ms. Diei challenged the university’s authority to punish her for messages posted on her own account, on her own time, and not representing her as a student. The suit argued that the public university had violated her constitutional right of free expression “for no legitimate pedagogical reason.” About a month before she sued, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case of a high school cheerleader in Pennsylvania who was removed from her school’s junior varsity squad after she posted vulgar complaints about not making the varsity team. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor, indicating that courts should be skeptical of schools’ efforts to punish students’ off-campus speech. Ms. Diei’s complaint was initially dismissed by the district court where she filed it. She appealed, and the appellate court found last September that her speech “was clearly protected by the First Amendment,” and permitted the case to go forward. Melissa Tindell, a spokeswoman for the university, said that in line with its general practice, it would not comment on a legal matter. Ms. Diei acknowledges that she is an unlikely poster child for freedom of expression. “I never had a strong interest in politics,” she said in an interview. Even so, she said, she never doubted that she was doing the right thing by refusing to back down. “I knew what was happening was unfair,” she said. “Personally, I never felt shame. But I did not appreciate the fact they were wanting me to feel shame.” She said she is too busy these days to post on social media, and her followers on Instagram have stagnated at around 18,000, about where they were when she got into trouble. She is not sure what she will do with her settlement money: Pay off her student loans, perhaps, or invest in the stock market. But she knows she would like to take a vacation. “Somewhere tropical, with a piña colada in my hand,” she said. “That’s where I see myself in the near future.”

With a now-rescinded White House directive that threw millions of federal dollars for education and research into uncertainty, President Trump and his allies tried to prove they were not bluffing with their campaign threats to target universities. But before President Trump even returned to office, many of the nation’s well-known universities were already preparing to fight back. While few college presidents are especially eager to spar with Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance in public, schools have been marshaling behind-the-scenes counteroffensives against promises of an onslaught of taxes, funding cuts and regulations. Some universities have hired powerhouse Republican lobbying firms. Others are strengthening, or rebuilding, their presences in Washington. Many are quietly tweaking their messaging and policies, hoping to deter policymakers who know it can be good politics to attack higher education — even when they themselves are products of the schools they castigate on cable television. Rutgers University, for example, announced last week that it would cancel a conference on diversity, equity and inclusion, a focus of the new administration. A spokeswoman for the university said the decision, which prompted criticism, was made after many speakers from a federally funded program withdrew from the conference, citing an executive order that targets the topic. “There’s a concern among a lot of campuses,” said Kenneth K. Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown. Some efforts to rehabilitate higher education’s reputation were already in the works, a response to attacks leaders in Congress made after campus protests over the war in Gaza. But now university officials are confronting an administration whose leaders have made clear their contempt for some wings of higher education. Mr. Trump has said schools are dominated by “Marxists, maniacs and lunatics,” and Mr. Vance has called them “insane.” The ominous saber rattling from Mr. Trump and his allies includes threats to endowments, federal research funding, student financial aid, diversity initiatives and the potential deportation of roughly 400,000 undocumented students enrolled in U.S. schools. Several major universities have responded by hiring lobbyists whom Republican leaders might view favorably. Harvard University has turned to a Capitol Hill heavyweight, Ballard Partners, the former firm of both Mr. Trump’s attorney general-designate, Pam Bondi, and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Columbia University signed up with BGR Government Affairs, which counts Haley Barbour, a former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee chairman, among its co-founders. Duke University, which has an in-house government relations effort, brought in DLA Piper as an adviser. One of the firm’s executives is Richard Burr, a Republican who represented North Carolina (where Duke is located) in the Senate for 18 years. The University of Notre Dame recently registered its own lobbyists for the first time since Mr. Trump’s previous term. And Yale University is beginning its own theater of operations in Washington. “The university decided to open an office in Washington, D.C. after conducting benchmarking among peer institutions,” Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman, wrote in an email, citing upcoming higher education “issues” on Capitol Hill. The latest activity in Washington came after some other schools ramped up lobbying efforts. As recently as 2022, Washington University in St. Louis paid $50,000 for its lobbying in the capital. The next year, it raised that spending to $250,000. That exploded to $720,000 in 2024, federal records show. A university spokeswoman did not comment.Across the country, university officials and their allies said that they were somewhat more prepared for what to expect under Mr. Trump than they were when he first ascended to power in 2017. Eight years later, they said, they had a better sense of Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency and have also looked for insights into his administration’s ambitions in the “Project 2025” plan, which is closely linked to many of his appointees. The administration wasted no time in launching those plans with a flurry of executive orders in its first week. One seeks to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including those run by contractors that receive federal student aid funding — a category that includes virtually every campus. Mr. Trump also ordered federal agencies to compile lists of “nine potential civil compliance investigations” of organizations, including higher-education institutions with endowments over $1 billion. In a public conference call on Monday sponsored by DLA Piper, Mr. Burr said that while the rest of the Trump administration’s higher education policy was not yet entirely clear, “we believe that endowments are a target of revenue, potentially, in a tax bill.” Few topics are as alarming to the leaders of the country’s wealthiest universities. Endowments were largely exempt from taxation for years. 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.As a senator, Mr. Vance was a leading proponent of increasing the endowment tax, proposing an increase to 35 percent for endowments of $10 billion or more. Despite his Yale law degree, funded partly by the university, Mr. Vance has previously called for an “attack” on universities. “Why is it that we allow these massive hedge funds pretending to be universities to enjoy lower tax rates than most of our citizens, people who are struggling to put food on the table?” he said when he was a senator, adding: “It’s insane. It’s unfair.” At least 56 schools were forced to pay the 1.4 percent tax in 2023, totaling more than $380 million, according to an analysis by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Records show that representatives of major universities were busy presenting their anti-endowment positions on Capitol Hill last year. In the fourth quarter, about 10 top schools, including Stanford and Cornell, lobbied on the tax. They have often built their case around what they contend would be lost if universities had to pay more of the government’s bills: money that they use for research and tuition support, particularly for low-income students. At Wesleyan University, for example, that amounted to $85 million last year that served 1,500 students, according to Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president. “So it’s real money,” Dr. Roth said, adding that a tax increase would make it harder for the university to support students. He added, “It means we will be serving fewer worthy applicants.” Dr. Roth said that Wesleyan would not be hiring outside lobbyists but, instead, would use that money to assist students. Mr. Burr also said universities would be affected if the Trump administration targeted funds for research. He noted that the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had both recently issued directives to suspend public communications, research-grant reviews, travel and training for scientists. On Monday evening, the administration also issued a sweeping pause on trillions in federal grant funding, which a federal judge blocked about 24 hours later — but only after a day of chaos and tumult for campus leaders. Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 campuses nationwide, called it the “most irresponsible public policy” he had ever witnessed. The organization called for the order’s reversal; the White House backed away from the order on Wednesday. The pause had been designed to give the administration time to determine whether grants align with Mr. Trump’s priorities. In the 2023 fiscal year, universities received close to $60 billion in federal funding for research. Barbara Snyder, the president of the Association of American Universities, which includes dozens of the most prominent schools in the country, noted that the explosion of anger in Washington toward universities was not necessarily new. “It’s more challenging than it was 20 years ago,” she said, but added: “I don’t think this has all been an overnight change.” Even as universities muster defenses, no consensus has emerged among them about how best to approach the second iteration of Mr. Trump’s Washington. “Our institutions,” Ms. Snyder said, “have their own ways of doing these things.”

Stephan Thernstrom, a Harvard history professor and author who, with his wife, the political scientist Abigail Thernstrom, vaulted to national prominence during the 1990s as a leading critic of affirmative action, died on Thursday in Arlington, Va. He was 90. His daughter, the author Melanie Thernstrom, said his death, at a care facility, was from complications of dementia. Professor Thernstrom and his wife were among the earliest, most vociferous and most prolific critics of affirmative action in the 1980s and ’90s, when the policy came under sustained attack from the right. In a stream of opinion essays, magazine articles and books, they argued that the left had embraced a form of racial pessimism that sought to right imbalances through quotas and preferences, rather than do the harder work of education reform. “If you need double standards in admission, should we also have double standards in grades, graduation requirements, even professional accreditation tests such as the bar exam?” Professor Thernstrom asked in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1998. “Our point is that racial preferences are a Band-Aid over a cancer.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT He was already a highly regarded historian of social mobility in 1988 when he found himself at the center of one of the first battles of the so-called political correctness wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s. An article in The Harvard Crimson reported that a group of students from one of his courses said he had made “racially insensitive” comments in class, including reading from white plantation owners’ journals. Scandal swirled as outside commentators picked up the story, using it as an example of political correctness run amok. Professor Thernstrom stopped teaching the course and criticized the university for not doing enough to support him. He repeated those allegations to the conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza for his book “Illiberal Education” (1991). The affair made him a darling of the anti-P.C. right. He and his wife began writing for conservative publications like Commentary and The Public Interest, as well as skeptically liberal outlets like The New Republic. The Thernstroms’ 1997 book, “America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible,” was a touchstone of the conservative critique of race relations and higher education in the late 1990s. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT They followed that book with “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning” (2003), which pointed the finger at teachers’ unions, education bureaucracies and, again, racial preferences. They advocated ideas like using vouchers and raising teaching standards to improve educational performance among racial minorities.Many of their arguments became intellectual fuel for the social and education reforms pushed by the George W. Bush administration, including the No Child Left Behind Act. “The structure of American urban education is a fortress against fundamental reform,” the Thernstroms wrote in The Boston Globe in 2003. “The alternative to a radical overhaul is too many Black and Hispanic youngsters continuing to leave high school without the skills and knowledge to do well in life.” Professor Thernstrom’s early work took issue with the notion of the American dream as a rags-to-riches story. His meticulous research showed that moving up the economic ladder was much harder than most people believed — but that it did in fact happen, incrementally and unevenly, with some ethnic groups climbing faster than others. Indeed, he saw himself as an avatar of that American dream. Stephan Albert Thernstrom was born on Nov. 5, 1934, in Port Huron, Mich., and raised in Battle Creek, where his father, Albert, worked for a railroad. His mother, Bernadine (Robbins) Thernstrom, managed the home. He excelled at school, especially in debate, winning a scholarship to study speech at Northwestern University. He graduated with top honors in 1956. He then studied history at Harvard under Oscar Handlin, whose groundbreaking work on the impact of immigration on American history and emphasis on scholarship “from the ground up” greatly shaped Professor Thernstrom’s own work. He received his doctorate in 1964. As a student, Professor Thernstrom identified firmly with the left; he met Abigail Mann at a talk by the progressive journalist I.F. Stone in 1959. They married two months later. Abigail Thernstrom died in 2020 at 83. Along with their daughter, Professor Thernstrom is survived by their son, Samuel, and four grandchildren. Professor Thernstrom’s dissertation, on social mobility in Newburyport, Mass., became his first book, “Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City” (1964). It won the Bancroft Prize, a top honor in history writing.That book and his next, “The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970” (1973), drew on mountains of raw census data to chart changes among everyday Americans over time. That approach to history, which involved formatting stacks of IBM punch cards to run through a mainframe computer, was pioneering at the time. “I wanted to test the Horatio Alger myth,” Professor Thernstrom told The Boston Globe in 1981, “but not on the basis of Andrew Carnegie.” He taught at Harvard and then at Brandeis and the University of California, Los Angeles, before returning to Harvard in 1974. He remained there until taking emeritus status in 2008. He also served as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Though he began his career on the left, by the 1980s Professor Thernstrom was describing himself as a neoconservative and, like his intellectual compatriots, criticizing many liberals for abandoning the principle of colorblind equality that he said underwrote the civil rights achievements of the 1950s and ’60s. “That seemed to me then absolutely the ideal — you admit people without any reference to their race,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “And it still seems to be the ideal to me. What’s different is that it was a radical idea in 1963, and now it’s a so-called conservative idea.” A correction was made on Jan. 29, 2025: An earlier version of this obituary misstated Professor Thernstrom’s middle name. It was Albert, not August.

President Trump signed several executive orders on Wednesday aimed at reshaping American schools, including restricting how racism is taught in classrooms, curbing antisemitism and allowing taxpayer dollars to fund private schools. The orders are designed to advance the Trump administration’s goal of shaking up the nation’s education system, which Mr. Trump has long derided as fostering left-leaning ideologies. One of the orders, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” sought to withhold funding from any schools that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” It directed agencies to produce an “ending indoctrination strategy” that would focus on uprooting instruction about transgender issues, “white privilege” or “unconscious bias” in schools, and to “prioritize federal resources, consistent with applicable law, to promote patriotic education.” Another laid the foundations to deport international students accused of “antisemitic harassment and violence” in connection to protests over the war in Gaza, part of a wider crackdown on what the administration has deemed antisemitic speech. And a third directed agencies to search for grants and discretionary programs that could be repurposed for use by states to fund voucher programs. Such programs allocate public funds to families to pay for children's education at home or at private and religious schools. The orders on Wednesday unleashed the Education Department to enforce penalties against schools that stray from the themes of “patriotic education” that Mr. Trump has said should be the underpinning of American history classes. And they appeared designed to send schools scrambling to check course catalogs for any content that could invite the government to rescind federal funds. The order related to antisemitism was broad and enlisted many federal agencies in an effort to identify and punish demonstrators who caused disruptions amid nationwide protests against Israel and the war in Gaza — a group that could include students involved in campus protests. It directed the State Department, Education Department and Homeland Security Department to guide colleges to “report activities by alien students and staff” that could be considered antisemitic, so that they could be investigated or deported. Conservative lawmakers have urged universities to crack down on demonstrations against Israel. A report released by House Republicans in December floated the idea of deporting international students who it said expressed support for Hamas, whose attack on Israelis in October 2023 ignited more than a year of war. The order cited existing law, under which the government is authorized to deport a person on a visa who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization,” which the report said should include expressing sympathy for Hamas.Under the Biden administration, the Education Department investigated dozens of colleges and public school districts over complaints of antisemitism or anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination. The department consistently sided with complainants, directing colleges to take a firmer stance against antisemitism and other forms of harassment or intimidation on campus. Legal scholars and civil rights groups have regularly warned that federal investigations into schools over antisemitism can have a chilling effect on protected speech. But a growing number of universities, including N.Y.U. and Harvard, have changed their policies to try to respond to criticism and curb protests. Among other policies, some have adopted a definition of antisemitism that considers some criticisms of Israel — such as calling its formation a “racist endeavor” — to be antisemitic. “It’s just crystal clear that they’re targeting people based on their viewpoint and their speech supporting Palestinian rights,” Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney with the group Palestine Legal, said Wednesday after the order was released. “And they’re trying to drag all federal departments into it.” The second order on Wednesday directed the Education Department to end what it said were efforts in American schools to compel children “to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.” It also condemned classroom instruction that it said had led children to “question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.” The order further warned that K-12 schools that defy the order could face investigation by the Education Department and ultimately a loss of federal funding. The order also revived an effort to rewrite history syllabuses that Mr. Trump pursued during his first term. The effort, known as the 1776 Commission, is a road map created by a group of right-wing Trump allies meant to challenge how slavery is taught and portray left-wing social and political movements as subversive. The order reinstated the commission and directed the Education Department to fund it to the extent that was legal. The bulk of federal funding to public school districts comes through the Title I program, which provides grants that help prop up high-poverty and rural schools in areas with weaker tax bases. That funding is set by Congress, and using it to enforce the president’s orders could present an uphill and possibly unwinnable battle. But the Department also provides a slew of discretionary grants aimed at helping low-income students and minority groups, as well as students with disabilities. Many of those programs are currently under review by the agency to determine whether they defy Mr. Trump’s executive order to rid the government of “diversity, equity and inclusion” and other efforts. Mr. Trump’s orders showed how he plans to leverage the education agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which has wide-ranging power to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws, as he seeks to empower his conservative base. The office is charged with enforcing some of the nation’s bedrock civil rights laws, and can withhold federal money from schools that don’t comply with the administration’s interpretation of them. In the first week of Mr. Trump’s new term, the Education Department has been among the most vocal among federal agencies about its support of his plans to eradicate programs seen as “radical” and “wasteful.” The department has sent a series of releases touting actions it had taken to comply with an earlier order to purge efforts to increase diversity, racial equity in hiring and accessibility across the government. Among other moves to, as it said, “end discrimination based on race and the use of harmful race stereotypes,” it took steps toward firing staff and identified 200 websites that it would take down. And in an extraordinary step, the Education Department announced that the Office for Civil Rights had dismissed pending complaints people had filed to the office over efforts to ban books about race and gender. The office — which under Mr. Trump’s previous administration bolstered its stated mission to be an apolitical “a neutral fact-finder”— announced last week that it had ended what it called “Biden book ban hoax.” The moves have been applauded by right-leaning groups. Nicole Neily, founder and president of Parents Defending Education, called the executive order a “vindication” of parents concerned about the way racism is taught about in schools, and a “tremendous first step in rooting out this poison from the American education system.” The group had filed several complaints to the office under the previous administration alleging that schools’ diversity programs violated federal civil rights laws. An array of organizations slammed the president’s order on classroom instruction on Wednesday, saying that it promotes distorted views of history and condemns practices that do not reflect the reality facing public students. James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said the executive order misrepresented how American history and civics are being taught. The group’s recent survey of educators “found little evidence that teachers are doing any of the things that are being banned in this executive order,” he said. In a statement on Wednesday, Lambda Legal, an L.G.B.T.Q. legal advocacy organization, described the promotion of patriotic education as “whitewashing the chapters of our nation’s documented history related to race, gender, sexism, homophobia and related injustices.” Mr. Trump’s third order on Wednesday directed agencies, in their review of discretionary spending, to find ways to allocate more federal funds to “expand education freedom” through voucher programs. The order cited a National Assessment of Educational Progress report, also released on Wednesday, as evidence that public schools are failing students and that the government should fund alternative options. The report found that students’ proficiency in reading had floundered. “Too many children do not thrive in their assigned, government-run K-12 school,” the order stated. Expanding school choice programs has been a key conservative education policy for years, and was a main priority of Mr. Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Many states already have policies in place allowing families to home-school their children or enroll them in private or religious institutions using public funds. Proponents say the programs allow parents to find the education options that are best for their children and to opt out of public schools that haven’t served them well. Critics blame the programs for hurting the public school system and diverting badly needed funding to schools that are rarely required to meet state performance standards and often produce poor student achievement. “Instead of stealing taxpayer money to fund private schools, we should focus on public schools,” said Rebecca Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, a teachers’ union.

The California Historical Society, facing longstanding financial challenges exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, has decided to dissolve and transfer its collections to Stanford University. The society, a private nonprofit organization established in 1871 and designated the state’s official historical society in 1979, is one of California’s oldest historical organizations. But unusually among state historical societies, its leadership said, it received no regular state funding, which left it vulnerable to the vagaries of private donations.Tony Gonzalez, the organization’s board chair, said the decision to dissolve the organization, which is headquartered in San Francisco, was “bittersweet.” But he emphasized that the arrangement with Stanford ensured that the society’s collections, which include more than 600,000 items stretching back a century before the Gold Rush, would remain intact and accessible to the public. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We think of it as a rebirth,” Gonzalez said. “Stanford will not be a state historical society, but the collection will be in better hands with them than it could be with us.”The society’s treasures include the Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing, which features books, pamphlets, product labels, trade catalogs and other items produced in the American West between 1802 and 2001. The society also holds the archives of many organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the California Flower Market, Inc., founded by Japanese American flower merchants in 1912. It is also the official repository for records relating to the People’s Temple, whose members, led by Jim Jones, drank poison in Guyana in 1978, leading to the death of more than 900 people, a third of them children.Anh Ly, Stanford’s assistant university librarian for external relations, called the historical society’s collection a “huge addition” to its own holdings of more than 15 million items, which would help fill in some gaps, particularly relating to California’s early history. The board’s decision to dissolve the society and transfer its collection follows a decade of failed attempts at a turnaround.In 2016, it was tapped by the city of San Francisco as its lead partner for a potential restoration of the Old United States Mint in downtown San Francisco, one of the few structures to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire. But restoration of the building, which had been largely unused for decades, was deemed prohibitively expensive. In early 2020, the group announced a new strategic plan that involved selling its 20,000-square-foot building near Union Square and using the proceeds to support traveling shows and partnerships with smaller organizations around the state. But that effort was thwarted by the pandemic and downturn in San Francisco’s real estate market, as well as the unexpected death in 2022 of Alicia L. Goehring, the executive director and chief executive who helped formulate the plan.Gonzalez, a Sacramento lawyer who joined the board in 2012, said that private philanthropic support had become unreliable over the past two decades, as many foundations and donors pivoted away from the humanities toward efforts more directly aimed at solving social problems. And unlike in other states with robust historical societies, he said, California’s legislature had never provided any regular appropriation for operational support. In 2022, Gonzalez said, the group requested a one-time grant of $12 million to support a partnership with the University of California, Riverside, which would have involved collaborating with Native American tribes to bring historical projects to underserved parts of the state.The request was rejected. “The legislature gave us the same answer we heard from philanthropic organizations: This sounds like something a university should be doing,” Gonzalez said. The group took out a $5 million loan against its building, to help cover its budget, which Jen Whitley, the group’s interim executive director, said was about $3.5 million. But finances remained unworkable, and last summer the board voted to begin the process of dissolution. Four years after it was first listed, its building — a former hardware store painted the same shade of red as the Golden Gate Bridge — was sold for nearly $6.7 million, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.Under terms of dissolution, which had to be approved by the state attorney general, Stanford will also receive the society’s endowment of roughly $3.2 million. While most of the staff of roughly two dozen have been let go over the past several years, Whitley said, three people will move to Stanford with the collection. Gonzalez said it was “painful” to see history lose a footprint in San Francisco, at a moment when many of the city’s history and preservation groups are struggling to stay afloat. But Stanford’s stewardship of the collection, he said, would allow the continual discovery of new stories about the past.He cited the example of Juana Briones, a businesswoman and healer born in 1802 in Santa Cruz who lived in California “under three flags”: Spanish, Mexican and American. In 2011, local preservationists helped save a portion of adobe wall from her home in Palo Alto, which became the centerpiece of a bilingual exhibition at the historical society. “We all know about the Gold Rush,” Gonzalez said. “But there are also all these unsung heroes.”

Oklahoma education leaders approved a plan on Tuesday to request proof of citizenship or immigration status from families when they enroll their children in public schools. The new rule would not prevent students who are not citizens or legal immigrants from enrolling, a practice that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1982. But it would require districts to track and report the number of students whose families have not provided proof of citizenship or legal status. The rule was a remarkable departure from the noncooperative approach that many large school districts across the nation have taken in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, which are expected to cause waves of deportations and could lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to visit schools. It could also prompt swift legal challenges across the state. Ryan Walters, the state superintendent of schools and a firebrand Republican who supported the new rule, said it aimed to provide the White House with the information needed to enforce its immigration policies in Oklahoma. Mr. Walters, who clashed with the Biden administration over immigration, has claimed that schools across the state have been “crippled by the flood of illegal immigrants,” and said that “we will do everything possible to help put Oklahoma students first.” He has announced his intention to support immigration raids in schools “to ensure that deported parents are reconnected with their children and keep families together.” “We’re going to work with the Trump administration in any way they see fit,” Mr. Walters said in a recent television interview. “We will not allow schools to be sanctuary schools anymore.” The move in Oklahoma comes as some educators and principals in American school districts are feeling anxious over immigration enforcement. In Fort Worth, for example, the school system began an investigation into social media posts apparently made by a substitute teacher who called for ICE agents to come to the high school where he worked. In Chicago, reports of immigration agents appearing at the entrance of a public school set off widespread fear last week, but they were later proved false. The plan in Oklahoma — approved unanimously by the six-member Oklahoma State Board of Education — will now move to the state legislature and the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, for review. The text of the rule change asserts that the policy would help “assess statewide and local educational needs,” including English as a second language teachers and tutoring programs. That rationale has not sat well with many teachers, civil liberties organizations and immigration groups across Oklahoma, who convened protests over the proposed rule outside the state education headquarters in the lead-up to the vote on Tuesday. Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement that the requirement would violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. “All children have a constitutional right to equal access to education, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status,” Mr. Espíritu said. “Requiring school districts to collect information about immigration status illegally chills access to this opportunity, interfering with their ability to focus on their core mission.” He pointed to a similar move in 2011 that made Alabama the first state in the nation to require its public schools to check the immigration status of students. The rule was later overturned after a federal lawsuit, but it still led to “markedly higher rates of absenteeism for Latino school children,” according to the American Immigration Council. It was unclear whether all of Oklahoma’s more than 500 school districts would comply with the rule. Many districts have refused to follow a mandate from Mr. Walters last year that they teach the Bible across grade levels and subjects. Unlike the Bible directive, though, the enrollment rule would carry the weight of the law. Still, Jamie C. Polk, the superintendent of schools in Oklahoma City, said in a letter last month, after the proposal was announced, that her district “does not, nor do we have plans to, collect the immigration status of our students or their families.”