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Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Impact of drastic federal funding cuts on tribal colleges, universities would be ‘extremely dire'
Adam Strom, head coach for the Haskell Indian Nations University women's basketball team, coaches the team to a March 1, 2025, win against Washington Adventist University (Maryland) during the 2025 Continental Athletic Conference women's basketball championship. After he was laid off Feb. 14, 2025, as a result of mass federal layoffs by the Trump administration, Strom continued to coach without pay until he was rehired on March 6, 2025. (Lauren Richey / Special to ICT) Credit: Adam Strom, head coach for the Haskell Indian Nations University women's basketball team, coaches the team to a March 1, 2025, win against Washington Adventist University (Maryland) during the 2025 Continental Athletic Conference women's basketball championship. Haskell went on to win the tournament after defeating Northern New Mexico. After he was laid off Feb. 14, 2025, as a result of mass federal layoffs by the Trump administration, Strom continue to coach without pay until he was rehired on March 6, 2025. (Photo by Lauren Richey/Special to ICT) LAWRENCE, Kan. – The Trump administration's proposed funding cuts by 90% for tribal colleges and universities surprised many last week, especially for a tribal university already impacted by federal layoffs since February. Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, has faced numerous challenges since President Donald J. Trump took office in January, including losing nearly a quarter of its staff on Valentine's Day, when the administration laid off all probationary federal employees. The layoffs cost the university 37 employees, who included kitchen workers, custodians, teachers, administrators and academic advisers. The university is one of two tribal colleges and universities that is federally controlled by the U.S. Department of Interior. However, two federal judges later ordered those employees, as well as all federal probationary employees from six federal agencies who had been laid off, to be reinstated. According to an Interior Department budget overview, the Trump administration has requested $22 million for all 37 tribal colleges and universities for 2026, compared to the $196 million appropriated for those programs in 2025. 'This is incredibly concerning,' said Moriah O'Brien, who serves as the vice president of Congressional and Federal Relations for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the 35 accredited tribal colleges and universities and two developing institutions and based in Alexandria, Virginia. TCUs receive core operational funds from three separate government agencies: Interior, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Education. Think of the situation as a three-legged stool, O'Brien said. If even one leg is removed, the stool falls. 'I think someone may have misunderstood that because TCUs receive funding from a number of different federal agencies that they could somehow make up the difference or use other resources, but it really takes those three core funding streams in order for them to keep the lights on,' O'Brien said. 'This is absolutely critical core operational funding.' Tribal colleges and universities receive 74% of their total revenue from federal funding, the consortium told ICT during tribal college week in February. More than 30,000 jobs are created across the local and regional economies near the tribal colleges and universities in 16 states where all these institutions are located – Montana, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Alaska, California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. The majority of these jobs are tied to federal funding and would affect faculty and staff positions. This federal funding cut would impact 80% of Indian Country, the approximately 160,000 Native students and community residents that these institutions serve, plus the more than 245 federally recognized tribes that have students studying in these postsecondary institutions. RELATED: 'Losing our voice, losing our space' Unlike Harvard University or other major schools, TCUs don't have massive endowments, O'Brien said. Rather, they heavily rely on this funding from the federal government. 'It would be difficult to quantify the exact impact on each TCU, but it would be extremely dire and they don't have any other options to turn to,' O'Brien said. A Bureau of Indian Education spokeswoman and the Bureau of Indian Affairs public affairs office declined to comment on the president's proposed cuts. The Department of Agriculture's public affairs office also declined to comment. For Oglala Lakota College in western South Dakota, this funding loss could mean less financial aid for students, said college president Dawn Frank, Oglala Lakota. Frank said cuts to funding will directly impact these students, cutting student aid and forcing them to choose between continuing their education and supporting their livelihoods. 'We are part of one of the poorest counties in the United States,' Frank said. 'These policies widen existing gaps and threaten educational attainment and workforce development. They also threaten tribal sovereignty by reducing access to higher education, particularly among low-income, non-traditional, first-generation students.' Oglala Lakota College has campuses in Rapid City, South Dakota, and on the Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River reservations, and has an enrollment of 1,188. A significant percentage of the students are non-traditional, meaning they're working full-time or part-time jobs and caring for families of their own. '(Tribal colleges) are change agents,' Frank said. 'They change individual lives. They provide stability to families and also work in the form of employment on the reservation. … They provide hope.' Haskell students who learned about the president's proposed budget cuts expressed shock and dismay at the news. 'It's an amazing school and I think cutting the funding is way out of line, especially for Native Americans,' said Creighton Youngbird, Cheyenne Arapahoe and a sophomore paraprofessional education major. Stopping before the Haskell dining hall, Youngbird said the university provides an affordable education to Indigenous students who might otherwise not be able to afford college. It also serves as a powerful cultural education center for Native students seeking to reconnect to their cultures. Ryan Kingfisher, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation and a junior social work and Indigenous studies major, said he worried the cuts could force Haskell to close. 'The students and the employees have been walking on egg shells knowing that we're hanging by a thread,' he said. 'I really don't know what to think about it.' Pe-quas Hernandez, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and a junior environmental sciences major, also expressed concern about Haskell losing its accreditation. 'I put a lot of work into my grades, into my studies here,' she said. Hernandez has worked to manage a garden and greenhouse at Haskell, and she said she worries what might happen to those places should she lose her job. 'We've been restoring a lot of this land here that is historic,' she said. 'Who's going to be there to continue taking care of that?' She said it's taken nearly three months for the university to start to heal from the March 14 layoffs. She said the layoffs generated significant support for Haskell as tribes and other donors stepped forward to help provide funds to keep the university operating. 'I think that we carried on just fine. We had our tribes pulling together for us,' she said. 'I have a lot of hope that we're going to be able to continue what we've been doing here.' Haskell President Frank Arpan, who recently announced his decision to leave the university, declined to comment recently regarding the proposed cuts, referring an ICT reporter to the Bureau of Indian Education, which also declined to comment. One of the schools specifically targeted is the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, O'Brien said. IAIA is a living institute of Native art, a public tribal land-grant college that serves anyone interested in the study, creative application, preservation and contemporary expression of Indigenous arts. Along with Haskell, IAIA is the second tribal college that is federally controlled. Within the thousand-page appendices in the fiscal year 2026 budget released by the Trump administration, a line specifically requested to completely zero out funding for IAIA, O'Brien said. 'This is shocking,' she said. IAIA's board of trustees and administration released a statement on social media on Wednesday, June 4. 'The IAIA Board of Trustees and administration reject this ill-conceived and harmful proposal,' the statement read on Instagram. 'Trump would erase nearly 63 years of progress in American Indian and Alaska Native higher education, artistic expression, and Congressional support for IAIA, the only institution of its kind. As the birthplace of contemporary Native arts, we cannot let this happen.' The statement continued: 'We have reached out to the New Mexico Congressional Delegation to convince the Chairs and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Interior Appropriations subcommittees and committees to fund IAIA at a minimum of $13.482 million in FY 2026. Our New Mexico Delegation is solidly supportive. We could not ask for a stronger delegation and are confident they will do everything possible to restore IAIA funding.' IAIA President Robert Martin, Cherokee, said in a statement that IAIA is resilient and determined to remain operating. 'Every day at IAIA, we witness students discovering their power – artistically, academically and personally. These proposed cuts would cut off that momentum. IAIA is where students learn to lead, innovate and uplift Indigenous knowledge. We cannot let that be erased,' Martin said. He added the school has a longstanding impact and responsibility for its former, current and future students. 'IAIA exists because our ancestors signed treaties in exchange for education. To defund IAIA is to undermine a sacred promise. More than 4,000 graduates have carried forward our cultures, stories and leadership – this is what's at stake.' O'Brien said the AIHEC is currently working to push out letters to congressional delegates educating them on the dangers of the proposed cuts. 'It would be devastating if these cuts were enacted,' she said. 'TCUs specifically enjoy incredibly strong bipartisan support in Congress. We have many champions on each side of the aisle for which we are incredibly grateful. I think the administration may have misunderstood the depth of the negative impacts of cutting the Department of Interior funding for TCUs.' More information about the potential impacts of funding disruption at tribal colleges and universities can be found here. ICT's Jourdan Bennett-Begaye contributed to this report. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Washington Post
08-03-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Across Indian Country, mass firings at colleges open up age-old wounds
LAWRENCE, Kan. — When the oldest federally funded university for Native Americans lost nearly a quarter of its staff to the Trump administration's sweeping budget cuts, supporters organized protests, began fundraising and launched a letter-writing campaign pleading with officials to spare the school. Late this week, the supporters of Haskell Indian Nations University won a partial victory. Fourteen of 37 staff members are to be reinstated by Monday, including instructors, the dean of students and Adam Strom, the women's basketball coach who stayed on without pay to lead his team to a conference championship.
New York Times
05-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Native University Is Losing a Quarter of Its Staff to Federal Cuts
The women's basketball coach stood atop a ladder on Sunday night, carefully cutting down the last of the net after Haskell Indian Nations University won the league championship. The scene is a familiar one at this time of year in college basketball. But the celebration in Lawrence, Kan., where the man who invented the sport worked for decades, was nevertheless astonishing: Officially, Haskell's coach, Adam Strom, was only a volunteer. He had been fired 16 days earlier, swept up in an executive order that led Haskell to oust about a quarter of its workers on a Friday in February. The only other federally run college for Native people, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, also laid off a similar share of workers that day. More than 140 years after the United States first used the grounds in Lawrence as a boarding school to assimilate Native children, Haskell students feel that the federal government, which controls the university, has once again become a malevolent force upending lives. The student government association president said three of her five instructors had been dismissed. Rumors had swirled over whether enough dining hall workers were left to serve meals. A senior had wondered whether the university, a sanctum for Native American students shaped by tradition and tragedy, would remain open long enough for him to receive his degree. As other potential policy changes loom, students, leaders and experts fear that the federal system for educating Native Americans — which serves tens of thousands of students at Haskell and beyond, and which already has some of the worst outcomes in the United States — is lurching into a new phase of crisis. In President Trump's Washington, firings across the federal government have been billed as an 'optimization' of the bureaucracy. But on Haskell's campus, where at least 103 people are buried, the seemingly indiscriminate budget cuts represent another breach of the government's vows to Native Americans. 'We're not necessarily repeating the history of the school; it's just continuing in our own modern way,' said J'Den Nichols, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana who is majoring in American Indian studies. As she spoke, less than a week before the conference championship game, a tepee stood near the student union in response to the cuts. 'We only bring that up in times of ceremony, or in times like now, where we are either mourning or attacked by others,' Tyler Moore, the senior and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said of the tepee. Haskell's president, Francis Arpan, referred an interview request to the Bureau of Indian Education, which declined to make any federal officials available. A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which includes the bureau, said in a one-sentence statement that the department 'reaffirms its unwavering commitment to the American public while practicing diligent fiscal responsibility.' Although the administration's quest to reduce federal spending has led campus officials across the country to weigh layoffs, hiring freezes and other steps, schools like Haskell are particularly vulnerable to disruptions since they are directly run by the government. And perhaps no education system in the United States is as familiar with upheaval and shattered promises than the one that provides federal schools for Native students. Almost a century after a major federal report about conditions for Native Americans warned that 'cheapness in education is expensive' because thriftiness in schools could deepen future societal problems, witnesses repeatedly told Congress in written testimony last week that the federal system for teaching Native people suffered from 'chronic underfunding.' About 45,000 children are enrolled in bureau-funded schools in 23 states, their options fashioned by court cases, laws and treaties. In addition to operating Haskell and SIPI — as the small college of about 200 in Albuquerque is known — the government financially supports tribal colleges and universities that are run independently. Although some measures of student success are improving, the high school graduation rate for Bureau of Indian Education schools regularly lags the nation's. In the 2020-21 school year, standardized tests showed that roughly one in 10 assessed students were proficient in math, and about 17 percent were proficient in language arts, according to the bureau. The system's colleges are also troubled. The most recently reported six-year graduation rate at Haskell was 43 percent; the national rate is usually around 62 percent. Dr. Arpan, congressional aides noted before a hearing last summer, was Haskell's eighth president in six years. And a 2023 Interior Department report, which emerged last year after the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility sued to obtain a redacted copy, depicted Haskell as 'severely dysfunctional.' The report concluded, in part, that the university had been insufficiently attentive to accusations of sexual assault, housed an athletic department 'in disarray' and used adjunct instructors 'inappropriately" while federal employees worked beyond their job descriptions. Last December, some congressional Republicans floated a new governance structure for Haskell that has drawn mixed reviews on campus and not yet cleared Capitol Hill. Despite their university's problems, one student after another said that Haskell was one of the few places in academia where they felt their culture was honored. Shrinking the university, they argued, was more than a violation of the government's promises; it was an assault on their heritages and futures. Angel Ahtone Elizarraras, the student government president, talked of how the library offered spiritual medicine and every dorm had a smudge room. ('If you ask anyone on campus, English isn't the coolest language we know,' Marina DeCora, a student who is a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, said wryly.) Students frequently used the word 'family' to describe the community at Haskell, where they pay some fees but no tuition. This semester, the university reported an enrollment of 918 students representing 153 tribal nations. Shiannah Horned Eagle, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota who is a social work student, said she started out at another college, but found it 'isolating.' She found solace at Haskell — and then learned of the cuts when an instructor told the class. 'Basically, they just told us they got fired and that they don't know what's going to happen to the classes,' she said. Ms. Ahtone Elizarraras was preparing for a Valentine's Day dance when she heard. 'As a Native, as you're at this school, you kind of read through the books, and it prepares you for moments like this,' said Ms. Ahtone Elizarraras, a citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma, adding, 'It makes it to where you realize, 'Hey, my ancestors stepped so that I could walk.'' But there is also fury. 'How much more can you take?' Ms. DeCora fumed. Haskell's board of regents has appealed to Washington. In letters to federal officials, the advisory board's interim president, Dalton Henry, argued that the ousted employees should be reinstated because they were fulfilling duties that were mandatory under treaties. Last week, students protested outside the Kansas Capitol. Later in the week, Dr. Arpan told student government leaders about a reprieve that would allow ousted instructors to finish this semester as adjuncts. But that fix is, for now, only temporary. Among the university workers who have lost jobs are a photography instructor and custodians. On the morning of Feb. 14, there were rumors among some employees about coming cuts. Then Mr. Strom, who was in his fourth season as the women's basketball coach, was summoned to the athletic director's office. He figured he was in for a talking-to about sharing gym time with other teams. Instead, the athletic director told him he was out of a job. Mr. Strom, a member of the Yakama Nation, said he had been a contractor for his first three seasons. He was only recently hired full time as a federal employee, which meant he was still in his probationary period. 'I felt safe. I really did,' he said, adding, 'I thought being an educator was important in America.' Ahniwake Rose, a Cherokee Nation citizen who is the president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, said that the Trump administration should reverse the firings soon. Otherwise, she warned, there could be 'a trickle-down effect on long-term harm to these institutions' if students decided not to enroll because they feared for the universities' health. Tribe-controlled colleges, she said, were offering to send volunteer faculty and staff members in the meantime. Mr. Strom decided to stick around for the rest of the season and coach as a volunteer, only miles from where James Naismith, basketball's inventor, founded the University of Kansas' fabled men's team. The current Kansas coach, Bill Self, is the highest-paid college basketball coach in the United States. 'I really could paint that very ugly picture in that that coach is a white male, and I'm a minority, I'm a Native American,' Mr. Strom said in the gym complex, where four Native star quilts flank the American flag. He paused. 'At the same time, I'd rather be better than bitter.' On Sunday, the now-volunteer coach and his team won the conference title, securing a spot in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics national championship tournament. But instead of recruiting for next season or spending as many hours preparing for games, Mr. Strom has been searching for jobs, hoping he will find a coaching gig someplace else. Students are also worrying about the way forward for their lives and their campus, even though events like graduation remain on track. 'I know there's going to be a day where this is talked about in history books,' said Mr. Moore, who was chosen as this year's Haskell Brave, one of the university's highest honors, adding, 'I'm just sad that I'm living through it today.'
Washington Post
23-02-2025
- Sport
- Washington Post
This women's college hoops coach lost his job in government's mass firings
On the weekend before Donald Trump was inaugurated as president again, the Haskell Indian Nations University women's basketball team opened Continental Athletic Conference play with back-to-back victories in a tournament at Washington Adventist University in Takoma Park, Maryland. But just three weeks later, after leading the team to four more consecutive wins before getting tripped up at Northern New Mexico, Haskell Coach Adam Strom was fired. Cut. Summarily laid off.
