Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday announced the framework of a roughly $254 billion state budget agreement, ending a monthlong stalemate over public safety issues that the governor had insisted on including in the fiscal plan. The budget deal, which will now go to the Legislature for a full vote, includes changes to make it easier to remove people in psychiatric crisis from public spaces to be evaluated for treatment, and eases so-called discovery requirements for how prosecutors hand over evidence to criminal defendants in the pretrial phase. Ms. Hochul also successfully pushed for an all-day ban on students having cellphones in schools. But another of the governor’s policy priorities relating to the restriction of the wearing of masks was whittled down by legislators over concerns that it would be selectively enforced and infringe on people’s civil liberties. “We worked through some really challenging issues,” Ms. Hochul said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “We refused to be drawn into the toxic, divisive politics of the moment.” Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the majority leader, and Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, were not present at the announcement. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The changes related to criminal justice and mental health were major priorities of Mayor Eric Adams and district attorneys from New York City, who appeared several times with Ms. Hochul to push for the proposals. She made them clear priorities, frustrating lawmakers who were forced to pass several so-called budget extenders to keep the government running after the April 1 deadline passed. Ms. Hochul did not provide many details on what exactly would be changed and to what degree, saying that her aides would iron out the final details with legislative leaders in the coming days. Other changes may yet be in store, depending on the severity of the rolling cuts to federally subsidized programs, the specter of which has heightened anxiety among lawmakers. Most concede that a special legislative session may be needed to reckon with the shortfalls once Congress passes its budget. Ms. Hochul and others have been saying for months now that it is essentially impossible to plan until they fully understand the cuts. “We can only devise a budget based on the information we have at this time,” Ms. Hochul said, adding the state had already been hit with about $1.2 billion in cuts.“There’s a possibility that we’ll have to come back later this year and update our budget in response to federal actions,” she added. Still, New York’s budget agreement, which will be fleshed out and voted on next week, dealt only glancingly with the transformed fiscal picture that could be on the horizon a few months from now — a bleak outlook made even more uncertain by President Trump’s tariff-driven global trade war. State Democratic leaders have stressed that congressional Republicans seem all too willing to cut entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Social Security. Yet the budget proposal called for New York to spend $17 billion more than last year, made possible in part after state officials disclosed earlier this month that tax revenues and the state’s general fund closed the fiscal year with billions more dollars than expected. Ms. Hochul, who is keenly aware of voters’ frustrations with rising costs for basic goods like food and housing, is up for re-election next year. Several Democrats are considering primary challenges, and several prominent Republicans, including Representative Elise Stefanik, are also weighing bids. In effort to boost her flagging political prospects, she stuffed her executive budget proposal in January with populist efforts to “put money back in people’s pockets.” It included a $3 billion tax refund that would have seen New Yorkers receive between $300 and $500 and a generous expansion of the state’s child tax credit program. The framework agreement with the Legislature included the governor’s proposed child tax credit of up to $1,000 for families with a child under 4, but the refund was scaled back in negotiations, amid pushback over whether that was the best use of so much cash. Now about $2 billion will be devoted to the program, with New Yorkers receiving between $200 and $400, depending on their income. Similarly Ms. Hochul had promised no increases to state income taxes, although she proposed an extension of an existing tax on residents making more than $1.1 million through tax year 2032, and relief for many middle-class New Yorkers earning up to $323,000 per year as joint filers. The budget agreement reached on Monday maintains the tax cut but includes an increased payroll levy on companies with more than $10 million in revenue. This largess would help fund the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s $68 billion five-year plan to make systemwide infrastructure upgrades. Smaller companies will see a cut in their payroll tax burden because of the deal. The M.T.A., the state and New York City will each kick in $3 billion to fund the plan. Ms. Hochul also said that $1.2 billion that had been previously allocated for renovating Penn Station will go toward safety improvements and stopping fare evasion. “It’s a fair plan that asks the most from large employers, but also calls on the city, state and M.T.A. to step up,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group. Mr. Heastie said the framework agreement included changes to the state’s campaign finance matching system. Donations larger than $250 are currently disqualified from the matching program; the agreement provides for the state to match the first $250 of any donation up to $1,000. The budget deal also includes a change to the law to allow candidates for governor and lieutenant governor to run together as a ticket, rather than in separate primaries as they do now. The current lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, recently announced he would not seek another term in the role and is considering challenging Ms. Hochul in next year’s primary.

The Trump administration’s swift initial rollout of orders seeking more control over universities left schools thunderstruck. Fearing retribution from a president known to retaliate against his enemies, most leaders in higher education responded in February with silence. But after weeks of witnessing the administration freeze billions in federal funding, demand changes to policies and begin investigations, a broad coalition of university leaders publicly opposing those moves is taking root. The most visible evidence yet was a statement last week signed by more than 400 campus leaders opposing what they saw as the administration’s assault on academia. Although organizations of colleges and administrators regularly conduct meetings on a wide range of issues, the statement by the American Association of Colleges and Universities was an unusual show of unity considering the wide cross-section of interests it included: Ivy League institutions and community colleges, public flagship schools and Jesuit universities, regional schools and historically Black colleges. “We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” the statement said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Although it contained no concrete action, and what’s next was unclear, the collective stance reflected a group more galvanized than ever to resist. “When we are teaming up with higher ed across the board, it’s more than just about what the elite think,” Richard K. Lyons, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview after the school signed on. “At some level, that really disparate, wide-angle, wonderful group of colleges and universities that signed the message, I find quite heartening.” Another signatory, Brian Sandoval, president of the University of Nevada, Reno and a former Republican governor of the state, said he was not viewing the statement through a political lens. “I’m concerned about what we’ve seen and what we’re experiencing,” he said. The joint statement from university leaders, many of them energized by Harvard’s confrontation with the Trump administration, emerged even after higher education associations and a handful of universities filed lawsuits fighting cuts to funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Energy Department. And heads of colleges had been talking and meeting with one another more frequently than they had since the Covid-19 pandemic, with some engaged in discussions in Washington. The Association of American Universities, an exclusive trade group that counts the nation’s most powerful schools among its 71 members, is meeting there this week, its first gathering since President Trump’s inauguration. The meeting is not open to the public, but it could end up as a strategy session about how to address the administration’s moves, including its investigations of campus antisemitism, diversity programs and admissions practices and its attempts to control what is taught in classrooms.Those actions stem from the administration’s desire to punish institutions it says have inadequately addressed antisemitism and indoctrinated students with liberal viewpoints. Boards of major education groups have been speaking more frequently. “A day doesn’t go by that there’s not an email that goes out,” said Mr. Sandoval, a member of the board of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. “There’s a lot of communication.” One president of a private university, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, said on Wednesday that he and other university leaders were on Capitol Hill a lot more than they used to be. When asked whether additional lawsuits will be filed against the Trump administration, which next week will pass its 100th day, several university presidents contacted by The New York Times declined to make predictions or referred to secret contingency plans. The group statement grew out of discussions among presidents and other academic leaders, and an urgent concern among many of them that leaders were not speaking out against the White House, said Lynn C. Pasquerella, who heads the group that wrote the statement. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We decided to see whether there was a will for collective action,” she said. Dr. Pasquerella, a former president of Mount Holyoke College, added that many leaders were getting pressure from their campuses to say something. The organization convened two virtual listening sessions, attended by 193 college and university leaders, to gauge the group’s interest. The statement that was agreed on is far from radical, focusing on opposition to “undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live and work on our campuses,” but it was significant in that it represented an unusually broad consensus among the disparate members. At first, the statement had only 100 signatures. Support grew as university leaders sensed strength in numbers, Dr. Pasquerella said, adding that one university president signed and then asked to be removed after receiving pushback. While most of the signers are from blue states, some represent red state colleges, such as Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and Talladega College in Alabama. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Many other red-state presidents have not joined the effort. “I saw absolutely no upside — none,” said the leader of a private university in a Republican-led state who also asked to remain anonymous about the private discussions and has, even previously as a faculty member, been skeptical of petition drives. The official, skeptical that one additional signature would prove decisive, added, “I don’t think a petition is going to change the mind of the president, his administration or anybody in Congress.” And the official sensed a potential downside: angering the White House. That fear is real for many schools, said Wesleyan University’s president, Michael S. Roth, who also signed the statement. He has been a vocal critic of the administration’s actions affecting universities and recently participated in a “Hands Off” protest near the school’s campus in Middletown, Conn. He said he was not surprised that some universities had turned down the opportunity to sign. “This administration is very ready to exact retribution on its foes,” Dr. Roth said. “I asked a lot of people to sign, and many people said: ‘I can’t sign. I’m afraid.’”

One of the nation’s most elite liberal arts schools, Amherst College has historically also been one of its most diverse. In 2023, federal data revealed that its overall Black enrollment, 11 percent of the student body, far outstripped many other similar institutions. So it was particularly jarring to the Amherst community last fall when data for the entering freshman class revealed that only 3 percent of its members were Black. Quincy Smith, an art major, joined one of the most diverse classes in Amherst history in 2022 and said gatherings of Black students feel different now: “There’s less engagement, fewer people coming to our meetings and going to events.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT At Amherst, a college of about 1,900 undergraduates in western Massachusetts, students and administrators alike are now uneasy as the idea of diversity, one of the school’s core values, is increasingly under attack by conservatives in Washington.Across the country, highly selective universities and their students were already trying to reckon with the demographic shifts caused by a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2023, when the court banned the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Some schools saw only minor changes in their enrollment makeup, according to an analysis by The New York Times. But at others, including Amherst, Black and Hispanic enrollment declined sharply last fall — the first class affected by the new ruling — with Amherst experiencing one of the steepest drops. Hispanic enrollment in Amherst’s freshman class dropped to 8 percent last fall, compared with 12 percent a year earlier.The Trump administration is trying to use that Supreme Court case to increase the pressure on universities to eliminate diversity efforts. It is promising to punish schools it believes might be circumventing the decision. The moves have added to the tension at schools like Amherst as they try to avoid legal challenges, but also face faculty, students and alumni urging their school to fight back.Conservatives argue diversity efforts meant to boost Black, Hispanic and other groups have resulted in discrimination against Asian and white students, the contention that formed the crux of the Supreme Court case. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” the Supreme Court said in its decision. Despite the decision, Michael A. Elliott, Amherst’s president, said the school’s 200-year-old mission, which emphasizes educating students from all backgrounds, has not changed.“My goal is to be able to execute our mission and to do so in a way that’s in compliance with the law,” Dr. Elliott said in a telephone interview.Amherst was one of the first highly selective colleges to eliminate legacy preferences, which tend to favor white students. It was also the lead author of a brief in the Supreme Court case arguing for the “educational benefits of a diverse student body and the societal benefits of educating diverse future leaders.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In the brief, Amherst argued that eliminating race-conscious admissions would “have a drastic resegregating impact” and predicted it could lose about half its enrollment of Native American, Black and Hispanic students. Since that prediction largely came true, many at Amherst are concerned that fewer Black and Hispanic students on campus will make it less attractive to those groups, prompting a cycle of further declines. Marllury Vizcaino, a freshman from Washington Heights, in Manhattan, said she was the only Black student in her required first-year seminar last fall, and one of only two Black students in her chemistry class. “I didn’t feel like I was welcome because I didn’t really see students who looked like me,” Ms. Vizcaino said, adding, “I can’t really talk about it without getting upset.”Bryce Dawkins, a senior from Oakland, Calif., majoring in English and Black studies, said that diversity attracted her to Amherst. “When I was applying to college, I was looking at Amherst particularly because the number of Black students was so high,” she said. During a book talk on campus in October, one of Amherst’s notable Black alumni, the professor and writer Anthony Abraham Jack, said he felt a deep sadness over the changes. “I just can’t tell you how hard of a walk it was when the numbers came out,” said Dr. Jack, a 2007 graduate who teaches today at Boston University and grew up in a low-income household in Miami. “The place that changed my life and the place that I love, probably more than any other, is hurting.” Concern about the numbers frequently comes up in faculty meetings and alumni gatherings; at the Charles Drew house, a dorm for Black students named for the pioneering Black physician; and at the Multicultural Resource Center, a gathering place for students of color. The campus newspaper, The Amherst Student, described diversity as the “ever-present backdrop” during a visit by 130 prospective students last fall.Since its freshman class demographics were disclosed, Amherst has been working to reverse the decline in Black and Hispanic students while still complying with the law. (When international students are included, this year’s freshman class was 9 percent Black, but that number declined from 19 percent last year.) Colleges are no longer allowed to consider applicants’ race after the Supreme Court decision. So highly selective schools are seeking students who are the first to attend college in their family, visiting communities in rural areas and expanding financial aid for low-income students. Amherst added four people to its recruitment team, who traveled a broad swath of the country to find students who might help the school yield a more diverse class. Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi were on the list. So was Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On March 21, Amherst announced that it had offered admission to 1,175 students. Ninety-six are from rural regions, an increase of 37 percent from last year. Amherst said it did not have a racial breakdown for the newly admitted students, but Matthew L. McGann, Amherst’s dean of admission and financial aid, said that a quarter of the students would be the first in their family to attend college, a school record. Dr. Elliott said he believed that more than one factor was at play in last year’s demographic shift, and pointed out that the school’s small size amplifies percentage changes. And he is optimistic about the incoming class. “We’re really encouraged by what we see so far,” he said.Applicants must accept by May 1, and it is hard to say how many will say yes. Many schools, including those in the Ivy League, are competing for the best and brightest students from racial minority groups. “The largest number of students who say ‘no’ to Amherst, end up in New Haven at Yale and other places like that,” Dr. McGann said in an interview. He acknowledged that there were also declines in the number of Black students offered admission last year, adding that one year is not enough to suggest a trend. Dr. Jack said he believed that Amherst may have been more careful than many other schools in using measures, such as high school grades, to select its class. “It felt like there was a conversation about trying not to get sued,” said Dr. Jack, a professor of higher education leadership. Conservatives have only intensified their scrutiny of schools in recent weeks. The Justice Department announced last month that it would investigate admissions policies at four California universities. And Edward Blum, an activist who is the driving force behind the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court case, has said he is examining school data for evidence of “cheating.”Mr. Blum has said that his effort to end affirmative action is inspired by the work of Martin Luther King Jr., arguing that “an individual’s race and ethnicity should not be used to help them or harm them in their life’s endeavors.” In an interview, Jeffrey Wright, the Amherst alum and actor who starred in the 2023 film “American Fiction,” a satire on how the publishing industry stereotypes race, characterized Mr. Blum’s reference to Dr. King as “the most egregiously cynical thing that I’ve heard in a long time.” Mr. Wright, who was recently on Amherst’s campus speaking at a literary event, sees Mr. Blum’s work as part of a movement to roll back civil rights, reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. In recent months, Amherst leaders have held a flurry of meetings with campus constituencies, trying to reassure them that they are working to prevent resegregation. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT After attending one such meeting with the Black Student Union, Zane Khiry, a senior from Avenel, N.J., and a former officer of the group, said he remained skeptical. “They had a choice between prizing diversity and playing it safe. They chose to play it safe,” he said.

The Trump administration on Friday abruptly moved to restore thousands of international students’ ability to study in the United States legally, but immigration officials insisted they could still try to terminate that legal status despite a wave of legal challenges. The decision, revealed during a court hearing in Washington, was a dramatic shift by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as the administration characterized it as only a temporary reprieve. The back and forth only contributed to the anxiety and confusion facing international students as the administration has moved to cancel more than 1,500 student visas in recent weeks. On Friday morning, Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer, told a federal judge in Washington that immigration officials had begun work on a new system for reviewing and terminating the records of international students and academics studying in the United States. Until the process was complete, he said, student records that had been purged from a federal database in recent weeks would be restored, along with their legal status. A senior Department of Homeland Security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the students whose legal status was restored on Friday could still very well have it terminated in the future, along with their visas. The changes on Friday came amid a wave of individual lawsuits filed by students who have said they were notified that their legal right to study in the United States was rescinded, often with minimal explanation. In some cases, students had minor traffic violations or other infractions. But in other cases, there appeared to be no obvious cause for the revocations. Upon learning that their records had been deleted from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, scores of students have sued to preserve their status, producing a flurry of emergency orders by judges blocking the changes by ICE. “We have not reversed course on a single visa revocation,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security Department spokeswoman. “What we did is restore SEVIS access for people who had not had their visa revoked.” It was not clear how many student visa holders have left the country to date after their records were deleted; facing the prospect of arrest, at least a handful have left before risking deportation. But the Trump administration had stoked panic among students who found themselves under threat of detention and deportation. A handful of students, including a graduate student at Cornell, have voluntarily left the country after abandoning their legal fight. Editors’ Picks Hey ChatGPT, Which One of These Is the Real Sam Altman? 36 Hours in Rome Is There a Least Bad Alcohol? “It is good to see ICE recognize the illegality of its actions canceling SEVIS registrations for these students,” said Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer who led a separate lawsuit over the revocations. “Sad that it took losing 50 times. What we don’t yet know is what ICE will do to repair the damage it has done, especially for those students who lost jobs and offers and had visas revoked.” Judges reviewing the lawsuits so far have shown significant doubt that the abrupt changes to scores of students’ legal status are lawful, especially given the haphazard and often seemingly arbitrary way the administration has proceeded. In March, the Trump administration moved to cancel visas and begin deportation proceedings against a number of students who had participated in demonstrations against Israel during the wave of campus protests last year over the war in Gaza. Federal judges had halted some of those revocations and slammed the brakes on efforts to remove those students from the country. But in recent weeks, many students received word that their records had been deleted from the SEVIS database. That caused a wave of panic across the country among students and academics whose prospects of finishing a degree or completing graduate research were upended without warning. By Friday evening, the government had already started moving to dismiss lawsuits over the SEVIS deletions, arguing that the administration’s policy change had made them unnecessary, since deleted records would be restored. Other lawsuits, including a potential class action involving a number of states in New England, have moved forward, seeking to stop the administration from more broadly from carrying out further mass cancellations. Another case out of Massachusetts, focused on instances where students were targeted over their speech in support of Palestine, a group has sued to prevent the administration from seeking to remove international students on First Amendment grounds.

A coalition of 19 states sued the Trump administration on Friday over its threat to withhold federal funding from states and districts with certain diversity programs in their public schools. The lawsuit was filed in federal court by the attorneys general in California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota and other Democratic-leaning states, who argue that the Trump administration’s demand is illegal. The lawsuit centers on an April 3 memo the Trump administration sent to states, requiring them to certify that they do not use certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs that the administration has said are illegal. States that did not certify risked losing federal funding for low-income students. Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, said at a news conference on Friday that the Trump administration had distorted federal civil rights law to force states to abandon legal diversity programs. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “California hasn’t and won’t capitulate. Our sister states won’t capitulate,” Mr. Bonta said, adding that the Trump administration’s D.E.I. order was vague and impractical to enforce, and that D.E.I. programs are “entirely legal” under civil rights law. The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday evening. The administration has argued that certain diversity programs in schools violate federal civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs that receive federal funding. It has based its argument on the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling ending the use of race in college admissions, arguing that the decision applies to the use of race in education more broadly. The administration has not offered a specific list of D.E.I. initiatives it deems illegal. But it has suggested that efforts to provide targeted academic support or counseling to specific groups of students amount to illegal segregation. And it has argued that lessons on concepts such as white privilege or structural racism, which posits that racism is embedded in social institutions, are discriminatory. The lawsuit came a day after the Trump administration was ordered to pause any enforcement of its April 3 memo, in separate federal lawsuits brought by teachers’ unions and the N.A.A.C.P., among others.Mr. Bonta said that the lawsuit by the 19 states brought forward separate claims and represented the “strong and unique interest” of states to ensure that billions of federal dollars appropriated by Congress reach students. “We have different claims that we think are very strong claims,” he said. Loss of federal funding would be catastrophic for students, said Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, an adversary of President Trump who previously won a civil fraud case against him. She noted that school districts in Buffalo and Rochester rely on federal funds for nearly 20 percent of their revenue and said she was suing to “uphold our nation’s civil rights laws and protect our schools and the students who rely on them.”

President Trump was dealt a setback in his plans for American public education, as three federal judges issued separate rulings on Thursday pausing his ability to withhold funds from schools with diversity and equity initiatives. The rulings block the administration, at least for now, from carrying out efforts to cut off billions of dollars that pay for teachers, counselors and academic programs in schools that serve low-income children. Two of the judges who issued the decisions were appointed by Mr. Trump. A third was appointed by President Barack Obama. The cases were brought by teachers’ unions and the N.A.A.C.P., among others. In one of the cases, Judge Landya B. McCafferty of the Federal District Court in New Hampshire said that the administration had not provided an adequately detailed definition of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” She also said the policy threatened to restrict free speech in the classroom, while overstepping the executive branch’s legal authority over local schools. The loss of federal funding “would cripple the operations of many educational institutions,” wrote Judge McCafferty, who was appointed by Mr. Obama. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The three rulings followed a demand earlier this month by the Trump administration that all 50 state education agencies attest in writing that their schools do not use certain D.E.I. practices. Otherwise, they would risk losing billions in Title I money, which supports low-income students. The deadline for returning that document was Thursday, and about a dozen states, most of which lean Democratic, refused to sign. In a separate ruling on Thursday, Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher of the Federal District Court in Maryland postponed enforcement nationwide of a memo the administration sent to schools in February, which said that federal civil rights laws ban certain D.E.I. efforts. Judge Gallagher, a Trump appointee, said the administration had not followed proper procedure in adopting a new legal framework. A third judge, Dabney L. Friedrich of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., also paused enforcement of the D.E.I. policy, saying from the bench that it provided “no clear boundaries” for what did and did not constitute D.E.I. Judge Friedrich is also a Trump appointee. These postponements will hold while the cases proceed. The Trump administration is expected to appeal any rulings against it.The Department of Education did not immediately respond on Thursday to a request for comment on the rulings. In issuing its ban on D.E.I., the administration had employed a novel legal strategy, arguing that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action in college admissions also applied to K-12 education. The government has said that the ruling means public schools should end programs meant to serve specific racial groups. The Trump administration has not offered a detailed definition of what it calls “illegal D.E.I. practices.” But it has suggested that efforts to provide targeted academic support or counseling to specific groups of students, such as Black boys, amount to illegal segregation. The administration has also argued that lessons on concepts such as white privilege or structural racism, which posits that racism is embedded in social institutions, are discriminatory toward white children. Several Republican-leaning states have signed the administration’s letter attesting that they do not use certain D.E.I. practices. But many already had regulations in place restricting how race and gender could be discussed in schools. North Carolina took a different approach. It signed the letter, but said it disagreed with Mr. Trump’s interpretation of civil rights law, and argued that the attempted ban on D.E.I. had overstepped the department’s authority. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We will continue working to ensure fairness, remove barriers to opportunity, and make decisions based on merit and need,” wrote Maurice “Mo” Green, the Democratic state superintendent, in a letter to Linda McMahon, the education secretary. In a hearing in the New Hampshire case last week, Judge McCafferty noted that the administration had sought to ban lessons that caused white students to feel “shame.” She asked an administration lawyer whether students could still engage with history lessons that traced the concept of structural racism through events like slavery, Jim Crow and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, in which a thriving Black neighborhood was destroyed by a white mob. Would teaching such a class be illegal, she asked, if it caused a student to feel ashamed of that history? A lawyer for the Justice Department, Abhishek Kambli, responded, “It goes toward how they treat the current students, not what they teach.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the lead plaintiff in that case, said, “Today’s ruling allows educators and schools to continue to be guided by what’s best for students, not by the threat of illegal restrictions and punishment.” There were some bright spots for the government on Thursday. Judge Gallagher of the Maryland court declined a request from plaintiffs for the Trump administration to take down a website it created to collect reports from the public of D.E.I. practices in schools. “The government is entitled to express its viewpoint on its website and to maintain a reporting portal,” Judge Gallagher wrote. The future of Mr. Trump’s education agenda may be decided at the Supreme Court. Last year, the justices declined to hear a case on diversity efforts in the admissions system of a selective public high school in Virginia. That choice seemed to suggest that the court was not yet ready to make a statement on how its ruling against affirmative action in college admissions applied to K-12 education. But Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the conservative legal group that brought the case challenging affirmative action, said he continued to believe the Supreme Court decision had set a precedent for the entire education system, including K-12 public schools. His group has filed an amicus brief in the New Hampshire suit, backing the Trump administration’s reading of civil rights law. “As some of the justices have signaled, it is my belief that the court is waiting for a case with the right procedural posture and factual record to address K-12 racial policies and programs,” Mr. Blum said.

For 65 years, the U.S. Naval Academy’s annual foreign affairs conference has been a marquee event on campus, bringing in students from around the world for a week of lectures and discussions with high-ranking diplomats and officials. But this year, the event was abruptly canceled, just weeks before it was set to start. The conference had two strikes against it — its theme and timing. Organized around the idea of “The Constellation of Humanitarian Assistance: Persevering Through Conflict,” it was set for April 7 through 11, just as the Trump administration finished dismantling almost all of the federal government’s foreign aid programs. According to the academy, each foreign affairs conference takes a year to plan. But killing it off was much faster, and the decision to do so is among the many ways the school’s leadership has tried to anticipate the desires of an unpredictable and vengeful president. The moves have included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order last month that led to the banning of hundreds of books at the academy’s library, and the school’s cancellation of even more events that might attract the ire of President Trump or his supporters. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most colleges and universities decide what courses to teach and what events to hold on their campuses. But military service academies like the Navy’s in Annapolis, Md., are part of the Pentagon’s chain of command, which starts with the commander in chief. The Naval Academy said in a statement that it was reviewing all previously scheduled events to ensure that they aligned with executive orders and military directives. Representatives for the academy and for the Navy declined to comment for this article, but school officials have said privately that their institution’s academic freedom is under full-scale assault by the White House and the Pentagon. A Discussion of Coups and CorruptionEven before the presidential election, the academy began preparing for Mr. Trump’s potential return to power. In January 2024, the academy’s history department had invited Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University, to give a lecture as part of a prestigious annual series that has brought eminent historians to the campus since 1980. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT She was scheduled to speak on Oct. 10 about how the military in Italy and Chile had adapted to autocratic takeovers of those countries. The title of her lecture was “Militaries and Authoritarian Regimes: Coups, Corruption and the Costs of Losing Democracy.”Ms. Ben-Ghiat, who had written and spoken critically about Mr. Trump, said she had not intended to discuss what she considers his authoritarian tendencies in front of the students as part of the George Bancroft Memorial Lecture series at the academy. Even so, just a week before her lecture, an off-campus group formed in opposition to her invitation. After reports about the upcoming lecture by right-wing outlets, Representative Keith Self, Republican of Texas, wrote to Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids, the academy’s superintendent, on Oct. 3 urging her to disinvite Ms. Ben-Ghiat from speaking to the midshipmen, as the students are called. The next day the Naval Academy’s dean of academics, Samara L. Firebaugh, called to say the lecture had been postponed, Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled. It was one month before the election. Although victorious, the critics still were not satisfied. The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist criticized Ms. Ben-Ghiat’s invitation, even after it was revoked. A group of 17 House Republicans said in a letter to Admiral Davids that the situation had raised concerns about “the academy’s process for choosing guest speakers.” Editors’ Picks Hey ChatGPT, Which One of These Is the Real Sam Altman? 36 Hours in Rome Is There a Least Bad Alcohol? Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled that she was told that the lecture was a potential violation of the Hatch Act, a law that limits certain political activities of federal employees. “That would have only been true if I had been talking about current U.S. politics and Trump’s attitude to the U.S. military, and that was never part of the plan,” she said. Ms. Ben-Ghiat now assumes that the lecture will never be rescheduled. “A small purge was orchestrated,” she wrote in February about the cancellation of her lecture, “to make sure the Naval Academy fell into line when Trump got back into office and the real purges could take place.” “It was a loyalty test for the Naval Academy, and they passed it, but Trump and Hegseth will surely be back for more,” she added.

For the foreseeable future, a school that burned during the fires in Los Angeles this year will call a retrofitted Sears home. Students and teachers at Palisades Charter High School have met online since a wildfire swept through Pacific Palisades in January and decimated their school building and many of their homes. On Tuesday, they gathered in person at their school’s temporary new home in nearby Santa Monica, where they hugged, cried and navigated classrooms set up inside the former department store. “After everything we’ve been through — now we have a place to be all of a sudden,” Charlie Speiser, a junior, said. He had commuted over an hour from Hermosa Beach, where his family is living after having lost their home in the fire. The new facility, located on the busy southern edge of Downtown Santa Monica, is called “Pali South.” It will serve students for the remainder of the school year, and potentially well into the next, depending on the speed of recovery at their Palisades campus. About 40 percent of the campus was destroyed in the fire. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The building is a local landmark — a 1947 design by the architect Rowland Crawford, with grooved ivory and green walls. A large blue Pali High sign now replaces what was a neon green Sears sign above the entrance. Inside, 90 classrooms, a few offices and some communal areas have been constructed using a $10 million insurance payment, as well as donations and school funds. Teachers tried to find ways to make the new building feel more like their old school.Robert King, who teaches U.S. history, lost many of the educational props that filled his former classroom, including flags, posters and busts of presidents, after the items were exposed to smoke and chemicals. Students and some alumni gave replacement posters. One student wrote “F104,” the number of Mr. King’s classroom at Pali, on a concrete wall in chalk. By late morning, some students seemed to be settling in, and approved of the new setup. “They nailed it,” said Ocean Silkman, a junior. Still, moving into an enclosed space from what was essentially an outdoor school was an adjustment, several students said. At the Pali High campus, most hallways were outdoors. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We took the sunlight for granted,” Zoya Kassam, a senior, said. As students made their way through the new building, bottlenecks formed and Tiffany Jensen, a junior, said she felt “dazed and confused.” Staff members made adjustments in real time, rerouting the flow. The structure has sat empty since the Sears store closed in 2017, and an attempt to repurpose it as an office was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. “It was completely unclaimed,” said Kelly Farrell, a managing director at the architecture firm Gensler. “We just had to give it purpose and place.”That purpose came just weeks after the wildfire, when Pali High administrators called Ms. Farrell and asked if she could help turn the 100,000-square-foot space into a functioning high school. “Yes,” she recalled telling them. “We don’t know what help means, but we’re going to help you figure it out.” She was at the site that Sunday morning. By mid-March, the design team had put together some sketches. A few days later, the school negotiated a lease of $200,000 from the real estate firms that had been trying to rent it as offices. “No one ever stopped from that point on,” said Pam Magee, Pali High’s principal. Working from dawn to dusk, the crew finished construction in a month. Gensler laid out acoustical panels for walls, and quilted insulation above, to soften the din of high schoolers. It also designed colorful graphics for many surfaces. Tables, desks, chairs, couches and thousands of square feet of carpet were donated. Things that weren’t free came at a discount, or were expedited.The City of Santa Monica helped expedite approvals and encouraged collaboration between its agencies to help the school construction. Since Sears, like most department stores, had few windows, many classrooms are windowless, and there were other sacrifices made for the sake of speed, budget and space. There are no doors on the classrooms, for instance, and no whiteboards on the walls. Students have to use temporary bathroom facilities in the parking lot. And premade lunches are served from what used to be an old Sears delivery window. The school will use other schools’ athletic and theater facilities and public parks. But for students, many of whom remember learning remotely during the pandemic, the thrill of being together seemed to outweigh the hardships. “So many people are so happy to get back to in person,” Tiffany Jensen said. Many Pali High students may not go to school at the new facility. Some have opted to continue partial online learning, and about 500 have moved to other schools.How long the school will remain in Santa Monica is unclear. Nick Melvoin, a board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns Pali’s Palisades campus, said that treatment of smoke and other damage at the school’s surviving buildings, and the placement of portable classrooms on the baseball field, should be completed by July or August.But the surrounding neighborhood is still decimated, and nearby Temescal Canyon Road is filled with both fire-related debris and trucks hauling it away. Many families and educators in the school have voiced concerns about students’ physical and mental well-being if they return too soon. Ms. Magee, the principal, said that even if the new building were temporary, she hoped it would provide hope. “It’s not just about reopening a school,” she said. “It’s about restoring a community.”

Surrounded by a group of 10th graders, Alex Asal, a museum educator at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, read aloud from three school lunch menus. She asked the students to raise their hands for which sounded best. One menu had options such as pizza, Caribbean rice salad and fresh apples. Another had grilled cheese, tomato soup and green beans. The third featured creamed beef on toast and creamed salmon with a roll. That menu — which did prompt a few raised hands — was from 1914, Asal revealed. A century ago, butter and cream were considered as vital as fruits and vegetables are today because the concern was less about what children ate than whether they ate enough at all. The exhibition that had drawn students from the Octorara Area School District of Atglen, Pa., was “Lunchtime: The History of Science on the School Food Tray.” It examines how this cornerstone of childhood became deeply intertwined with American politics, culture and scientific progress. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT From the earliest school food programs until now, “what’s been interesting for us about this topic is how discourses of nutrition and science have always been present,” said Jesse Smith, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs and digital content.Smith didn’t anticipate just how timely the exhibition would be when it opened about a month before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed secretary of health and human services by President Trump, promotes the removal of processed foods from school lunches. History shows that his isn’t the first attempt to change what people eat.“Lunchtime” was developed from the Science History Institute’s collection of books and scientific instruments related to food science. Located just down the street from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed, the small museum and research library teaches the history of how science has shaped our everyday lives. In 1946, President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act authorizing the creation of the National School Lunch Program. According to the Food Research & Action Center, just over 28.1 million children participated in the school lunch program in the 2022-23 school year on an average day, with 19.7 million receiving a free or reduced-price lunch. In the 2023-24 school year, some 23.6 million students were enrolled in high-poverty districts that qualify for free lunch for all.“It’s a service to students, and something we provide on a daily basis to help the students learn,” said Lisa Norton, executive director of the division of food services for the Philadelphia school district. “And we know that there are students that this is the only meal they are going to see.”The exhibition opens with the 1800s, as industrialization brings people to cities, far from the source of their food. Producers would cut corners, mixing wood shavings with cinnamon and chalk into flour. “Probably the most notorious example was the dairy industry, which routinely added formaldehyde to milk to keep it from spoiling,” Asal said. And school medical inspections found that children were severely undernourished. Scurvy and rickets were widespread. The Institute of Child Nutrition, at the University of Mississippi, maintains an archive of photographs, oral histories, books and manuscripts, and Jeffrey Boyce, the institute’s coordinator of archival services, provided several photographs for the exhibit. One shows a baby being fed cod liver oil, an old-fashioned remedy for vitamin A and D deficiency, in the age before vitamin-fortified cereal. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Philadelphia became one of the first cities to have a school lunch program and, over the next few decades, local programs spread across the country in a movement led largely by women. A federal response to school lunches would come from the National School Lunch Act. “The National School Lunch Program is the longest running children’s health program in U.S. history, and it has an outsized impact on nutritional health,” said Andrew R. Ruis, author of the book “Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States,” which Smith used as a resource for the exhibit. “Research in the ’20s and ’30s showed overwhelmingly that school lunch programs had a huge impact on student health, on educational attainment, on behavior and attitude.”As farmers faced ruin in the wake of the Great Depression, the Department of Agriculture purchased surplus crops to distribute to U.S. schools and as foreign aid. This decades-old partnership made headlines in March when the U.S.D.A. announced plans to cut $1 billion in funding to schools and food banks. School lunch programs have wide public support, but that has never stopped them from being a political football. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement drew attention to the fact that many poor children were still going hungry. The Black Panthers’ free breakfast program helped fill the gap and put pressure on politicians. A table in the exhibition piled with Spam, TV dinners, bagged salad and Cheetos explained how military research into preservation created iconic American foods. These advancements, however, also helped put nutrition back under the microscope and led to the concern that young people were getting too much of the wrong kinds of foods. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The 1973 board game “Super Sandwich” tried to make nutrition fun, with players competing to collect foods that met recommended dietary allowances. Remember the controversy in the 1980s over whether ketchup qualified as a vegetable? It erupted in a larger battle over school lunch program cuts under the Reagan administration and further inflamed the national debate over school lunch quality. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, and the public health campaign for children by the first lady, Michelle Obama, resulted in more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains and less sodium and sugar on lunch trays. But balancing those regulations with what young people will eat is a challenge, said Elizabeth Keegan, the coordinator of dietetic services for the Philadelphia school district who advised on the exhibition. Especially when median lunch prices, according to the School Nutrition Association, hover around $3.“We always say, for less than what you pay for a latte, schools have to serve a full meal,” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, the association’s director of media relations. Following their tour, the Octorara students reflected on the tales of wood shavings in food. They debated the quality of their own school lunches and what they would prefer: more variety, more vegetarian and vegan options, less junk food. “It made me feel like we should get better food,” said Malia Maxie, 16. “When she was talking about 1914, like how they got salmon — we don’t get that anymore.”Those from generations raised on rectangular pizza may see it differently. “From the days when I was in school, the meal program has totally transformed,” said Aleshia Hall-Campbell, executive director of the Institute of Child Nutrition. “You have some districts out here that are actually growing produce and incorporating it in the menus. You have edamame at salad bars. They are trying to recreate what kids are eating out in restaurants and fast-food places, incorporating it from a healthier level.” Everyone has memories of school lunch. Boyce remembers “the best macaroni and cheese on the planet” and the names of the cafeteria ladies. Smith remembers the Salisbury steak and that distinct cafeteria smell. For Ruis, the best day of the year was when his Bay Area school had IT’S-IT, a local ice-cream sandwich with oatmeal cookies. “So much has changed, standards have changed, and what is considered healthy has changed,” Keegan said. “But something that has never changed is that feeding kids a nutritious meal is important.”

The world’s wealthiest university is under attack by one of the world’s richest, most powerful men. The reasons have to do with disagreements about antisemitism, racial politics and raw power. But the fight, which the government accelerated with a mistimed letter, is also about taking Harvard and its billions down several notches. The Trump administration has frozen more than $2.2 billion in grants and contracts that were intended for Harvard, which is also America’s oldest institution of higher education. As Harvard and President Trump face off over the government’s intrusive demands, the university’s riches have emerged as a flashpoint. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he may want to take every last penny the government sends to the institution — and, if the Internal Revenue Service strips Harvard of its tax-exempt status, maybe collect more from the university, too. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On Monday, the university sued the administration, arguing the government had overstepped. The question is whether Harvard can handle the blow if its legal effort is unsuccessful. A Balance Sheet of Billions Harvard was sitting on $64 billion at the end of its most recent fiscal year, after factoring in its various debts. By comparison, this year’s Massachusetts state budget is worth about $58 billion. Money flows into the university each year from a variety of sources, including research grants, donations and, of course, tuition. (The sticker price is soon to be $59,320; room and board and other fees tack on nearly $30,000 more.) But most of Harvard’s wealth — more than $53 billion — is kept in its endowment, which resembles an enormous retirement account that is built to last. It might seem simple for Harvard to dip into those funds in an emergency like the one it is facing now. Many people, including former President Barack Obama and Harvard’s own former president, Lawrence H. Summers, have urged it to do just that — and it can, to some extent. But tapping an endowment is hardly automatic. At Harvard, the endowment is not just a single account from which the university can make withdrawals. Rather, it is broken up into more than 14,000 funds, many of them connected to donations from individuals or family foundations. Endowments, it is fair to say, can be more about egos than emergencies. Many donors, whether they are giving to a university or a house of worship or an aquarium, attach specific rules to their contributions. At Harvard, roughly 80 percent of the endowment is restricted, a higher share than at some other top institutions, including Yale and Princeton. Universities often have limited leeway to change these terms on their own. Harvard leaders, like their counterparts across the country, also carefully guard the endowment as a marker of prestige. But more fundamentally, endowments are designed to provide a permanent flow of money, so removing enormous sums could threaten the university’s long-term viability. Instead, Harvard is among the institutions that make regular, modest withdrawals. Those withdrawals help the university to pay its bills, which run to more than $6 billion a year. In recent years, Harvard has pulled out somewhere between 4.2 percent and 6.1 percent of its endowment’s market value. For 2024, that added up to $2.4 billion. The university has other resources, too. Its general operating account, for example, has billions in unrestricted investments that the university could deploy at will. It also has vast real estate holdings. By Harvard’s estimate, its land alone is worth more than $1 billion. And more than 20 percent of revenue comes from tuition, room, board and the like. But an essential category accounts for about 11 percent of Harvard’s revenue: federally sponsored research. In its most recent fiscal year, Harvard received about $687 million in research funding from Washington.What Trump’s Cuts Could Unleash Harvard, like many other research universities around the country, has become dependent on the federal government to underwrite some of the most important work its doctors, engineers and scientists do. Most federal research money that flows to Harvard comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. In 2023, almost $150 million a year came from other federal agencies, including the intelligence community, NASA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The full scale of the government’s newly announced cuts to Harvard is still coming into view, in part because the university is learning details as researchers receive so-called stop-work orders from the government. Among the projects targeted so far: work on a diagnostic tool for Lou Gehrig’s disease, or A.L.S.; research on space travel and radiation sickness; and a $60 million effort to combat tuberculosis. Harvard, which says it funded $489 million in research itself in 2023, has warned that many projects “will come to a halt midstream” if federal funding evaporates. The university imposed a hiring freeze last month and could ultimately turn to layoffs, lab closures and other steps.