Latest news with #PomonaCollege
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
An Appeal to My Alma Mater
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When Maggie Li Zhang enrolled in a college class where students were told to take notes and read on paper rather than on a screen, she felt anxious and alienated. Zhang and her peers had spent part of high school distance learning during the pandemic. During her first year at Pomona College, in Southern California, she had felt most engaged in a philosophy course where the professor treated a shared Google Doc as the focus of every class, transcribing discussions in real time on-screen and enabling students to post comments. So the 'tech-free' class that she took the following semester disoriented her. 'When someone writes something you think: Should I be taking notes too?' she told me in an email. But gradually, she realized that exercising her own judgments about what to write down, and annotating course readings with ink, helped her think more deeply and connect with the most difficult material. 'I like to get my finger oil on the pages,' she told me. Only then does a text 'become ripe enough for me to enter.' Now, she said, she feels 'far more alienated' in classes that allow screens. Zhang, who will be a senior in the fall, is among a growing cohort of students at Pomona College who are trying to alter how technology affects campus life. I attended Pomona from 1998 to 2002; I wanted to learn more about these efforts and the students' outlook on technology, so I recently emailed or spoke with 10 of them. One student wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for more classes where electronic devices are banned. Another co-founded a 'Luddite Club' that holds a weekly tech-free hangout. Another now carries a flip phone rather than a smartphone on campus. Some Pomona professors with similar concerns are limiting or banning electronic devices in their classes and trying to curtail student use of ChatGPT. It all adds up to more concern over technology than I have ever seen at the college. These Pomona students and professors are hardly unique in reacting to a new reality. A generation ago, the prevailing assumption among college-bound teenagers was that their undergraduate education would only benefit from cutting-edge technology. Campus tour guides touted high-speed internet in every dorm as a selling point. Now that cheap laptops, smartphones, Wi-Fi, and ChatGPT are all ubiquitous—and now that more people have come to see technology as detrimental to students' academic and social life—countermeasures are emerging on various campuses. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that sales of old-fashioned blue books for written exams had increased over the past year by more than 30 percent at Texas A&M University and nearly 50 percent at the University of Florida, while rising 80 percent at UC Berkeley over the past two years. And professors at schools such as the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland are banning laptops in class. The pervasiveness of technology on campuses poses a distinct threat to small residential liberal-arts colleges. Pomona, like its closest peer institutions, spends lots of time, money, and effort to house nearly 95 percent of 1,600 students on campus, feed them in dining halls, and teach them in tiny groups, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 8 to 1. That costly model is worth it, boosters insist, because young people are best educated in a closely knit community where everyone learns from one another in and outside the classroom. Such a model ceases to work if many of the people physically present in common spaces absent their minds to cyberspace (a topic that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explored in the high-school context). At the same time, Pomona is better suited than most institutions to scale back technology's place in campus life. With a $3 billion endowment, a small campus, and lots of administrators paid to shape campus culture, it has ample resources and a natural setting to formalize experiments as varied as, say, nudging students during orientation to get flip phones, forging a tech-free culture at one of its dining halls, creating tech-free dorms akin to its substance-free options––something that tiny St. John's College in Maryland is attempting––and publicizing and studying the tech-free classes of faculty members who choose that approach. Doing so would differentiate Pomona from competitors. Aside from outliers such as Deep Springs College and some small religious institutions—Wyoming Catholic College has banned phones since 2007, and Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio launched a scholarship for students who give up smartphones until they earn their degree—vanishingly few colleges have committed to thoughtful limits on technology. [Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now] My hope is that Pomona or another liberal-arts college recasts itself from a place that brags about how much tech its incoming students will be able to access––'there are over 160 technology enhanced learning spaces at Pomona,' the school website states––to a place that also brags about spaces that it has created as tech refuges. 'In a time of fierce competition for students, this might be something for a daring and visionary college president to propose,' Susan McWilliams Barndt, a Pomona politics professor, told me. McWilliams has never allowed laptops or other devices in her classes; she has also won Pomona's most prestigious teaching prize every time she's been eligible. 'There may not be a million college-bound teens across this country who want to attend such a school,' she said, 'but I bet there are enough to sustain a vibrant campus or two.' So far, Pomona's leadership has not aligned itself with the professors and students who see the status quo as worse than what came before it. 'I have done a little asking around today and I was not able to find any initiative around limiting technology,' the college's new chief communications officer, Katharine Laidlaw, wrote to me. 'But let's keep in touch. I could absolutely see how this could become a values-based experiment at Pomona.' Pomona would face a number of obstacles in trying to make itself less tech-dependent. The Americans With Disabilities Act requires allowing eligible students to use tools such as note-taking software, closed captioning, and other apps that live on devices. But Oona Eisenstadt, a religious-studies professor at Pomona who has taught tech-free classes for 21 years, told me that, although she is eager to follow the law (and even go beyond it) to accommodate her students, students who require devices in class are rare. If a student really needed a laptop to take notes, she added, she would consider banning the entire class from taking notes, rather than allowing the computer. 'That would feel tough at the beginning,' she said, but it 'might force us into even more presence.' Ensuring access to course materials is another concern. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a professor of politics and law, told me that she is thinking of returning to in-class exams because of 'a distinct change' in the essays her students submit. 'It depressed me to see how often students went first to AI just to see what it spit out, and how so much of its logic and claims still made their way into their essays,' she said. She wants to ban laptops in class too––but her students use digital course materials, which she provides to spare them from spending money on pricey physical texts. 'I don't know how to balance equity and access with the benefits of a tech-free classroom,' she lamented. Subsidies for professors struggling with that trade-off is the sort of experiment the college could fund. Students will, of course, need to be conversant in recent technological advances to excel in many fields, and some courses will always require tech in the classroom. But just as my generation has made good use of technology, including the iPhone and ChatGPT, without having been exposed to it in college, today's students, if taught to think critically for four years, can surely teach themselves how to use chatbots and more on their own time. In fact, I expect that in the very near future, if not this coming fall, most students will arrive at Pomona already adept at using AI; they will benefit even more from the college teaching them how to think deeply without it. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is that so many students who don't need tech in a given course want to use it. 'In any given class I can look around and see LinkedIn pages, emails, chess games,' Kaitlyn Ulalisa, a sophomore who grew up near Milwaukee, wrote to me. In high school, Ulalisa herself used to spend hours every day scrolling on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Without them, she felt that she 'had no idea what was going on' with her peers. At Pomona, a place small enough to walk around campus and see what's going on, she deleted the apps from her phone again. Inspired by a New York Times article about a Luddite Club started by a group of teens in Brooklyn, she and a friend created a campus chapter. They meet every Friday to socialize without technology. Still, she said, for many college students, going off TikTok and Instagram seems like social death, because their main source of social capital is online. [From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?] Accounts like hers suggest that students might benefit from being forced off of their devices, at least in particular campus spaces. But Michael Steinberger, a Pomona economics professor, told me he worries that an overly heavy-handed approach might deprive students of the chance to learn for themselves. 'What I hope that we can teach our students is why they should choose not to open their phone in the dining hall,' he said. 'Why they might choose to forgo technology and write notes by hand. Why they should practice cutting off technology and lean in to in-person networking to support their own mental health, and why they should practice the discipline of choosing this for themselves. If we limit the tech, but don't teach the why, then we don't prepare our students as robustly as we might.' Philosophically, I usually prefer the sort of hands-off approach that Steinberger is advocating. But I wonder if, having never experienced what it's like to, say, break bread in a dining hall where no one is looking at a device, students possess enough data to make informed decisions. Perhaps heavy-handed limits on tech, at least early in college, would leave them better informed about trade-offs and better equipped to make their own choices in the future. What else would it mean for a college-wide experiment in limited tech to succeed? Administrators would ideally measure academic outcomes, effects on social life, even the standing of the college and its ability to attract excellent students. Improvements along all metrics would be ideal. But failures needn't mean wasted effort if the college publicly shares what works and what doesn't. A successful college-wide initiative should also take care to avoid undermining the academic freedom of professors, who must retain all the flexibility they currently enjoy to make their own decisions about how to teach their classes. Some will no doubt continue with tech-heavy teaching methods. Others will keep trying alternatives. Elijah Quetin, a visiting instructor in physics and astronomy at Pomona, told me about a creative low-tech experiment that he already has planned. Over the summer, Quetin and six students (three of them from the Luddite Club) will spend a few weeks on a ranch near the American River; during the day, they will perform physical labor—repairing fencing, laying irrigation pipes, tending to sheep and goats—and in the evening, they'll undertake an advanced course in applied mathematics inside a barn. 'We're trying to see if we can do a whole-semester course in just two weeks with no infrastructure,' he said. He called the trip 'an answer to a growing demand I'm hearing directly from students' to spend more time in the real world. It is also, he said, part of a larger challenge to 'the mass-production model of higher ed,' managed by digital tools 'instead of human labor and care.' Even in a best-case scenario, where administrators and professors discover new ways to offer students a better education, Pomona is just one tiny college. It could easily succeed as academia writ large keeps struggling. 'My fear,' Gary Smith, an economics professor, wrote to me, 'is that education will become even more skewed with some students at elite schools with small classes learning critical thinking and communication skills, while most students at schools with large classes will cheat themselves by using LLMs'—large language models—'to cheat their way through school.' But successful experiments at prominent liberal-arts colleges are better, for everyone, than nothing. While I, too, would lament a growing gap among college graduates, I fear a worse outcome: that all colleges will fail to teach critical thinking and communication as well as they once did, and that a decline in those skills will degrade society as a whole. If any school provides proof of concept for a better way, it might scale. Peer institutions might follow; the rest of academia might slowly adopt better practices. Some early beneficiaries of the better approach would meanwhile fulfill the charge long etched in Pomona's concrete gates: to bear their added riches in trust for mankind. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
An Ideal Campus to Tame Technology
When Maggie Li Zhang enrolled in a college class where students were told to take notes and read on paper rather than on a screen, she felt anxious and alienated. Zhang and her peers had spent part of high school distance learning during the pandemic. During her first year at Pomona College, in Southern California, she had felt most engaged in a philosophy course where the professor treated a shared Google Doc as the focus of every class, transcribing discussions in real time on-screen and enabling students to post comments. So the 'tech-free' class that she took the following semester disoriented her. 'When someone writes something you think: Should I be taking notes too? ' she told me in an email. But gradually, she realized that exercising her own judgments about what to write down, and annotating course readings with ink, helped her think more deeply and connect with the most difficult material. 'I like to get my finger oil on the pages,' she told me. Only then does a text 'become ripe enough for me to enter.' Now, she said, she feels 'far more alienated' in classes that allow screens. Zhang, who will be a senior in the fall, is among a growing cohort of students at Pomona College who are trying to alter how technology affects campus life. I attended Pomona from 1998 to 2002; I wanted to learn more about these efforts and the students' outlook on technology, so I recently emailed or spoke with 10 of them. One student wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for more classes where electronic devices are banned. Another co-founded a 'Luddite Club' that holds a weekly tech-free hangout. Another now carries a flip phone rather than a smartphone on campus. Some Pomona professors with similar concerns are limiting or banning electronic devices in their classes and trying to curtail student use of ChatGPT. It all adds up to more concern over technology than I have ever seen at the college. These Pomona students and professors are hardly unique in reacting to a new reality. A generation ago, the prevailing assumption among college-bound teenagers was that their undergraduate education would only benefit from cutting-edge technology. Campus tour guides touted high-speed internet in every dorm as a selling point. Now that cheap laptops, smartphones, Wi-Fi, and ChatGPT are all ubiquitous—and now that more people have come to see technology as detrimental to students' academic and social life—countermeasures are emerging on various campuses. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that sales of old-fashioned blue books for written exams had increased over the past year by more than 30 percent at Texas A&M University and nearly 50 percent at the University of Florida, while rising 80 percent at UC Berkeley over the past two years. And professors at schools such as the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland are banning laptops in class. The pervasiveness of technology on campuses poses a distinct threat to small residential liberal-arts colleges. Pomona, like its closest peer institutions, spends lots of time, money, and effort to house nearly 95 percent of 1,600 students on campus, feed them in dining halls, and teach them in tiny groups, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 8 to 1. That costly model is worth it, boosters insist, because young people are best educated in a closely knit community where everyone learns from one another in and outside the classroom. Such a model ceases to work if many of the people physically present in common spaces absent their minds to cyberspace (a topic that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explored in the high-school context). At the same time, Pomona is better suited than most institutions to scale back technology's place in campus life. With a $3 billion endowment, a small campus, and lots of administrators paid to shape campus culture, it has ample resources and a natural setting to formalize experiments as varied as, say, nudging students during orientation to get flip phones, forging a tech-free culture at one of its dining halls, creating tech-free dorms akin to its substance-free options––something that tiny St. John's College in Maryland is attempting ––and publicizing and studying the tech-free classes of faculty members who choose that approach. Doing so would differentiate Pomona from competitors. Aside from outliers such as Deep Springs College and some small religious institutions—Wyoming Catholic College has banned phones since 2007, and Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio launched a scholarship for students who give up smartphones until they earn their degree—vanishingly few colleges have committed to thoughtful limits on technology. Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now My hope is that Pomona or another liberal-arts college recasts itself from a place that brags about how much tech its incoming students will be able to access––'there are over 160 technology enhanced learning spaces at Pomona,' the school website states––to a place that also brags about spaces that it has created as tech refuges. 'In a time of fierce competition for students, this might be something for a daring and visionary college president to propose,' Susan McWilliams Barndt, a Pomona politics professor, told me. McWilliams has never allowed laptops or other devices in her classes; she has also won Pomona's most prestigious teaching prize every time she's been eligible. 'There may not be a million college-bound teens across this country who want to attend such a school,' she said, 'but I bet there are enough to sustain a vibrant campus or two.' So far, Pomona's leadership has not aligned itself with the professors and students who see the status quo as worse than what came before it. 'I have done a little asking around today and I was not able to find any initiative around limiting technology,' the college's new chief communications officer, Katharine Laidlaw, wrote to me. 'But let's keep in touch. I could absolutely see how this could become a values-based experiment at Pomona.' Pomona would face a number of obstacles in trying to make itself less tech-dependent. The Americans With Disabilities Act requires allowing eligible students to use tools such as note-taking software, closed captioning, and other apps that live on devices. But Oona Eisenstadt, a religious-studies professor at Pomona who has taught tech-free classes for 21 years, told me that, although she is eager to follow the law (and even go beyond it) to accommodate her students, students who require devices in class are rare. If a student really needed a laptop to take notes, she added, she would consider banning the entire class from taking notes, rather than allowing the computer. 'That would feel tough at the beginning,' she said, but it 'might force us into even more presence.' Ensuring access to course materials is another concern. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a professor of politics and law, told me that she is thinking of returning to in-class exams because of 'a distinct change' in the essays her students submit. 'It depressed me to see how often students went first to AI just to see what it spit out, and how so much of its logic and claims still made their way into their essays,' she said. She wants to ban laptops in class too––but her students use digital course materials, which she provides to spare them from spending money on pricey physical texts. 'I don't know how to balance equity and access with the benefits of a tech-free classroom,' she lamented. Subsidies for professors struggling with that trade-off is the sort of experiment the college could fund. Students will, of course, need to be conversant in recent technological advances to excel in many fields, and some courses will always require tech in the classroom. But just as my generation has made good use of technology, including the iPhone and ChatGPT, without having been exposed to it in college, today's students, if taught to think critically for four years, can surely teach themselves how to use chatbots and more on their own time. In fact, I expect that in the very near future, if not this coming fall, most students will arrive at Pomona already adept at using AI; they will benefit even more from the college teaching them how to think deeply without it. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is that so many students who don't need tech in a given course want to use it. 'In any given class I can look around and see LinkedIn pages, emails, chess games,' Kaitlyn Ulalisa, a sophomore who grew up near Milwaukee, wrote to me. In high school, Ulalisa herself used to spend hours every day scrolling on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Without them, she felt that she 'had no idea what was going on' with her peers. At Pomona, a place small enough to walk around campus and see what's going on, she deleted the apps from her phone again. Inspired by a New York Times article about a Luddite Club started by a group of teens in Brooklyn, she and a friend created a campus chapter. They meet every Friday to socialize without technology. Still, she said, for many college students, going off TikTok and Instagram seems like social death, because their main source of social capital is online. From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation? Accounts like hers suggest that students might benefit from being forced off of their devices, at least in particular campus spaces. But Michael Steinberger, a Pomona economics professor, told me he worries that an overly heavy-handed approach might deprive students of the chance to learn for themselves. 'What I hope that we can teach our students is why they should choose not to open their phone in the dining hall,' he said. 'Why they might choose to forgo technology and write notes by hand. Why they should practice cutting off technology and lean in to in-person networking to support their own mental health, and why they should practice the discipline of choosing this for themselves. If we limit the tech, but don't teach the why, then we don't prepare our students as robustly as we might.' Philosophically, I usually prefer the sort of hands-off approach that Steinberger is advocating. But I wonder if, having never experienced what it's like to, say, break bread in a dining hall where no one is looking at a device, students possess enough data to make informed decisions. Perhaps heavy-handed limits on tech, at least early in college, would leave them better informed about trade-offs and better equipped to make their own choices in the future. What else would it mean for a college-wide experiment in limited tech to succeed? Administrators would ideally measure academic outcomes, effects on social life, even the standing of the college and its ability to attract excellent students. Improvements along all metrics would be ideal. But failures needn't mean wasted effort if the college publicly shares what works and what doesn't. A successful college-wide initiative should also take care to avoid undermining the academic freedom of professors, who must retain all the flexibility they currently enjoy to make their own decisions about how to teach their classes. Some will no doubt continue with tech-heavy teaching methods. Others will keep trying alternatives. Elijah Quetin, a visiting instructor in physics and astronomy at Pomona, told me about a creative low-tech experiment that he already has planned. Over the summer, Quetin and six students (three of them from the Luddite Club) will spend a few weeks on a ranch near the American River; during the day, they will perform physical labor—repairing fencing, laying irrigation pipes, tending to sheep and goats—and in the evening, they'll undertake an advanced course in applied mathematics inside a barn. 'We're trying to see if we can do a whole-semester course in just two weeks with no infrastructure,' he said. He called the trip 'an answer to a growing demand I'm hearing directly from students' to spend more time in the real world. It is also, he said, part of a larger challenge to 'the mass-production model of higher ed,' managed by digital tools 'instead of human labor and care.' Even in a best-case scenario, where administrators and professors discover new ways to offer students a better education, Pomona is just one tiny college. It could easily succeed as academia writ large keeps struggling. 'My fear,' Gary Smith, an economics professor, wrote to me, 'is that education will become even more skewed with some students at elite schools with small classes learning critical thinking and communication skills, while most students at schools with large classes will cheat themselves by using LLMs'—large language models—'to cheat their way through school.' But successful experiments at prominent liberal-arts colleges are better, for everyone, than nothing. While I, too, would lament a growing gap among college graduates, I fear a worse outcome: that all colleges will fail to teach critical thinking and communication as well as they once did, and that a decline in those skills will degrade society as a whole. If any school provides proof of concept for a better way, it might scale. Peer institutions might follow; the rest of academia might slowly adopt better practices. Some early beneficiaries of the better approach would meanwhile fulfill the charge long etched in Pomona's concrete gates: to bear their added riches in trust for mankind.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What's driving small colleges to hire lobbyists for the first time
Some of the nation's small liberal arts colleges arehiring Washington lobbyists for the first time — seeking to distinguish themselves from the Ivy League universities at the center of President Donald Trump's attacks on higher education. While managing government relations has always been a main responsibility for college presidents, at least five of U.S. News & World Report's top 20 liberal arts colleges have recently hired lobbyists for the first time in their histories, according to lobbying disclosures: Williams College, Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College and Washington and Lee University. All five schools declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests. 'There are some institutions that have decided that because of the risk, they feel like they need to hire some outside expertise to bolster what they've already been doing,' said Steven Bloom, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. Firms hired to lobby on education-related issues for those five schools include Lewis-Burke Associates for Williams College, theGroup DC for Pomona College and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for Davidson College. Holland & Knight has received the largest payday of the firms hired by those five schools, netting $80,000 in the first quarter from Washington and Lee University and Claremont McKenna College, according to disclosure reports. The lobbying firms declined or did not respond to requests for comment. A key factor driving the K Street hires, according to disclosure reports and people familiar with the matter, is worry about an expanded endowment tax — the 1.4 percent tax on university investment income that was first adopted in 2017 to help offset Trump's broader package of tax cuts. The number of schools paying the tax fluctuates from year to year based on student enrollment and endowment size. Only 56 schools paid the tax in 2023, generating $381 million, according to IRS data. Due to the way the tax is applied — only to schools with more than 500 paying students and an endowment valued at more than $500,000 per student — universities with large enrollments can be exempt, while smaller schools with relatively modest endowments but much smaller student populations are required to pay. House Republicans are considering a major expansion of taxes on college and university endowments, with some paying exponentially larger tax rates based on a sliding scale of wealth, according to four people granted anonymity to share details of the GOP tax package. Under the tiered proposal, schools with endowments valued at $750,000 or less per student would be taxed at the current 1.4 percent rate, according to two of those people. Schools with endowments valued between $750,000 to $1 million per student would be taxed at a 10 percent rate and schools with endowments greater than $1 million per student would be taxed at a 20 percent rate. The committee's tax bill is not yet finalized and details could still change, the people cautioned. A spokesperson for the committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The existence of a tiered proposal, but not the exact brackets, was first reported by Bloomberg. Approximately 30 schools concerned about changes to the tax, including some of the small schools that recently hired their own lobbyists, have banded together in a consortium to coordinate strategy, according to two people with knowledge of the group granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for it. Schools subject to the tax range in size and don't fall neatly into preexisting higher education trade associations, prompting formation of a group focused on this issue, the people said. The consortium declined to comment. In recent years, Republican lawmakers have proposed various methods to increase revenue generated by the tax. In 2023, then-Sen. JD Vance proposed raising the tax rate to 35 percent. Another proposal called for foreign students to be excluded from enrollment counts for tax purposes, which would increase the number of schools that qualify. For some of the small liberal arts schools hiring their first lobbying firms, one goal is clear: to differentiate themselves from Columbia. Columbia University, which has faced criticism from Republicans for its response to last year's pro-Palestine student protests, doesn't currently pay the tax. A desire to adjust the tax criteria to fit Columbia is partially driving the current changes, according to two people granted anonymity to share details of the ongoing discussions. 'I'd be shocked if they come out of this and aren't paying the tax,' one of the people said. Columbia declined to comment. Washington and Lee University, one of the schools that has hired an outside lobbyist for the first time, had no student encampments of the kind seen at Columbia during the protests last year and is emphasizing that contrast to lawmakers, the person said. Washington and Lee has an endowment of nearly $2 billion and is currently subject to the tax. Wabash College, a small men's college located an hour away from Indianapolis, doesn't currently pay the tax but is on the cusp of qualifying due to its student body of around 850 and its roughly $400 million endowment. The firm Barnes & Thornburg, which has previously handled legal matters for the school, recently registered to lobby for the school for the first time on education and tax policy issues. Barnes & Thornburg did not respond to a request for comment. 'No one that I've talked to says the endowment tax is really meant to hit Wabash College,' said school President Scott Feller. 'We're an unfortunate side effect, I think, of where our lawmakers want to take this tax bill.' The endowment tax fight comes amid the Trump administration's broader assault on higher education. Trump has cut billions of dollars of grant funding to universities, citing antisemitism on campuses, and required major changes to the way schools operate as a prerequisite for releasing the funds. Harvard University sued over the funding cuts, prompting Trump to declare he would strip the school of its tax exempt status. On Monday, the Education Department banned Harvard from receiving new federal research grants. 'Some of this is a political attack on higher education,' Bloom said. In this environment, some schools are eager to highlight political differences between themselves and the Ivies in Trump's sights. 'I think the best-case scenario is that the difference between our status and those of the top 1 percent will be acknowledged as the law is updated,' Feller said, noting Wabash would pay the same tax rate as Harvard under current law despite Harvard's endowment being significantly larger. That's where the lobbyists come in. 'The work of colleges and universities needs to be explained in plain language,' he said. 'I'm a lifelong academic, so I can say academics aren't always great at that. I think that it's our responsibility, even as a small college, to work with our government relations partners to make sure that the story of Wabash College and other colleges is being told in the language that people can understand.' Benjamin Guggenheim contributed to this report
Politico
09-05-2025
- Business
- Politico
What's driving small colleges to hire lobbyists for the first time
Some of the nation's small liberal arts colleges are hiring Washington lobbyists for the first time — seeking to distinguish themselves from the Ivy League universities at the center of President Donald Trump's attacks on higher education. While managing government relations has always been a main responsibility for college presidents, at least five of U.S. News & World Report's top 20 liberal arts colleges have recently hired lobbyists for the first time in their histories, according to lobbying disclosures: Williams College, Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College and Washington and Lee University. All five schools declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests. 'There are some institutions that have decided that because of the risk, they feel like they need to hire some outside expertise to bolster what they've already been doing,' said Steven Bloom, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. Firms hired to lobby on education-related issues for those five schools include Lewis-Burke Associates for Williams College, theGroup DC for Pomona College and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for Davidson College. Holland & Knight has received the largest payday of the firms hired by those five schools, netting $80,000 in the first quarter from Washington and Lee University and Claremont McKenna College, according to disclosure reports. The lobbying firms declined or did not respond to requests for comment. A key factor driving the K Street hires, according to disclosure reports and people familiar with the matter, is worry about an expanded endowment tax — the 1.4 percent tax on university investment income that was first adopted in 2017 to help offset Trump's broader package of tax cuts. The number of schools paying the tax fluctuates from year to year based on student enrollment and endowment size. Only 56 schools paid the tax in 2023, generating $381 million, according to IRS data. Due to the way the tax is applied — only to schools with more than 500 paying students and an endowment valued at more than $500,000 per student — universities with large enrollments can be exempt, while smaller schools with relatively modest endowments but much smaller student populations are required to pay. House Republicans are considering a major expansion of taxes on college and university endowments, with some paying exponentially larger tax rates based on a sliding scale of wealth, according to four people granted anonymity to share details of the GOP tax package. Under the tiered proposal, schools with endowments valued at $750,000 or less per student would be taxed at the current 1.4 percent rate, according to two of those people. Schools with endowments valued between $750,000 to $1 million per student would be taxed at a 10 percent rate and schools with endowments greater than $1 million per student would be taxed at a 20 percent rate. The committee's tax bill is not yet finalized and details could still change, the people cautioned. A spokesperson for the committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The existence of a tiered proposal, but not the exact brackets, was first reported by Bloomberg. Approximately 30 schools concerned about changes to the tax, including some of the small schools that recently hired their own lobbyists, have banded together in a consortium to coordinate strategy, according to two people with knowledge of the group granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for it. Schools subject to the tax range in size and don't fall neatly into preexisting higher education trade associations, prompting formation of a group focused on this issue, the people said. The consortium declined to comment. In recent years, Republican lawmakers have proposed various methods to increase revenue generated by the tax. In 2023, then-Sen. JD Vance proposed raising the tax rate to 35 percent. Another proposal called for foreign students to be excluded from enrollment counts for tax purposes, which would increase the number of schools that qualify. For some of the small liberal arts schools hiring their first lobbying firms, one goal is clear: to differentiate themselves from Columbia. Columbia University, which has faced criticism from Republicans for its response to last year's pro-Palestine student protests, doesn't currently pay the tax. A desire to adjust the tax criteria to fit Columbia is partially driving the current changes, according to two people granted anonymity to share details of the ongoing discussions. 'I'd be shocked if they come out of this and aren't paying the tax,' one of the people said. Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Washington and Lee University, one of the schools that has hired an outside lobbyist for the first time, had no student encampments of the kind seen at Columbia during the protests last year and is emphasizing that contrast to lawmakers, the person said. Washington and Lee has an endowment of nearly $2 billion and is currently subject to the tax. Wabash College, a small men's college located an hour away from Indianapolis, doesn't currently pay the tax but is on the cusp of qualifying due to its student body of around 850 and its roughly $400 million endowment. The firm Barnes & Thornburg, which has previously handled legal matters for the school, recently registered to lobby for the school for the first time on education and tax policy issues. Barnes & Thornburg did not respond to a request for comment. 'No one that I've talked to says the endowment tax is really meant to hit Wabash College,' said school President Scott Feller. 'We're an unfortunate side effect, I think, of where our lawmakers want to take this tax bill.' The endowment tax fight comes amid the Trump administration's broader assault on higher education. Trump has cut billions of dollars of grant funding to universities, citing antisemitism on campuses, and required major changes to the way schools operate as a prerequisite for releasing the funds. Harvard University sued over the funding cuts, prompting Trump to declare he would strip the school of its tax exempt status. On Monday, the Education Department banned Harvard from receiving new federal research grants. 'Some of this is a political attack on higher education,' Bloom said. In this environment, some schools are eager to highlight political differences between themselves and the Ivies in Trump's sights. 'I think the best-case scenario is that the difference between our status and those of the top 1 percent will be acknowledged as the law is updated,' Feller said, noting Wabash would pay the same tax rate as Harvard under current law despite Harvard's endowment being significantly larger. That's where the lobbyists come in. 'The work of colleges and universities needs to be explained in plain language,' he said. 'I'm a lifelong academic, so I can say academics aren't always great at that. I think that it's our responsibility, even as a small college, to work with our government relations partners to make sure that the story of Wabash College and other colleges is being told in the language that people can understand.' Benjamin Guggenheim contributed to this report
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Sport
- Forbes
LA 2028 Olympics: The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
In 2028 the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (the Coliseum) will become the first stadium in the world to have hosted the Track & Field competitions and Opening Ceremony for the Summer Olympics three times. LOS ANGELES - MAY 10: The LA Memorial Coliseum served as the start of the Revlon Run/Walk For Women ... More May 10, 2003 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by) The Coliseum was commissioned in 1921 as a memorial to fallen veterans of World War I (1914-1918). Approximately 116,708 Americans died in that war. Groundbreaking was December 21, 1921 and was completed by May 1, 2023. Original construction costs were $954,873. On October 6, 1923 the University of Southern California (USC) and Pomona College would play in the inaugural game at the Coliseum, with USC prevailing in that game 23-7. From that point onward USC would play all its home games at the Coliseum. Chevrolet at Coliseum & 'All Star' football team, Los Angeles, California, 1926. (Photo by Dick ... More Whittington Studio/Corbis via Getty Images) Seating capacity was originally 75,144. But when Los Angeles was awarded the 2032 Olympic Games a decision was made to expand the seating to 101,574. The now-familiar Olympic cauldron torch was added above the peristyle at the east end of the stadium. The opening ceremony of the 1932 Summer Olympics at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, ... More California, 30th July 1932. (Photo by FPG/) For the 1932 Olympics the Coliseum was chosen for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies as well as the following athletic events: Field Hockey, Gymnastics, Show Jumping (only of the Equestrian events) and Track & Field. Incidentally these Games would mark the introduction of both the Olympic Village as well as the victory podium for the top three finishers in any event. Mildred "Babe" Didrikson, shortly after setting a world record in the javelin competition (threw a ... More distance of 143' 4") at the 1932 Olympic Games. At the 1932 Games there was Babe Didrikson, and there was everybody else. Mildred 'Babe' Didrikson (June 26, 1911-September 27, 1956) was the first female athlete anywhere to prove that a woman could be a 'stud athlete' (pardon my slang). This 5-5 phenom mastered many sports in her lifetime. Growing up as a teenager she already knew her calling. 'My goal was to be the greatest athlete who ever lived' she would say. She claimed that she was nicknamed Babe early by boys who were awed by her long-distance homers. Athlete Babe Dickerson jumps a hurdle in an event she won at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. Didrikson was accomplished in just about every sport: Basketball, track, golf, baseball, tennis, swimming, diving, boxing, billiards, skating and cycling. When asked if there was anything she didn't play, she said. 'Yeah, dolls.' Babe competed in an era when female athletes were viewed as freakish. She was perceived as the antithesis of femininity, but she was not a feminist. Viewed through the patriarchal lense of the culture 90 years ago one New York sports writer would write: 'It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.' (Original Caption) Mildred "Babe" Didrickson of Dallas, Texas, the 18 year old sports star is shown ... More in this photograph. She won the Texas A.A.U. Meet singlehanded, winning eight out of ten events, by working out at the Dyche Stadium in Evanston, Illinois, where she will again compete on July 16th in the Women's National A.A.U. Meet and Final Olympic tryouts. But Babe simply knew that she was an athlete and her body was her most valuable possession. She would qualify for five events in the 1932 Games. As the great American sports writer Grantland Rice said of Babe: 'She is beyond all belief until you see her perform. Then you finally understand that you are looking at the most flawless section of muscle harmony, of complete mental and physical coordination, the world of sport has ever seen.' (Original Caption) Winners in the 80-meter women's hurdle event are seen after their victory in the ... More Los Angeles Olympic Stadium. Left to right: Evelyn Hall of the U.S. second; Babe Didrikson of U.S. winner, who set a new world record in the event; and Marjorie Clark of South Africa, third. Babe would go on to win a gold medal in the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin throw and a silver medal in the high jump. She is the only Olympian to medal in three events running, jumping and throwing. The Associated Press would go on to name her as the Greatest Female Athlete of the first half of the 20th Century. The AP would choose her Female Athlete of the year six times: Once for the Olympics, and five times as a golfer. (Original Caption) Mildred Babe Didrikson, sensational one-girl track team from Texas, and member of ... More the US Olympic team, is seen here after a workout in preparation for the coming international events. In 1984 the Coliseum would again be used for Track and Field events. Competition would be noticeably affected by a Soviet Union-led boycott, especially in the throwing events, and most notably among the men, in the hammer throw, in which most of the world's top 10 did not compete. In addition Track and Field would for the first time include two new events for women athletes: The 3,000 meter run and the marathon. The 3,000 meter race would be won by Maricica Puica of Romania, but it became notorious for the epic collision between American champion Mary Decker and South African champion Zola Budd which would knock both women out of the race. The marathon would be won by Joan Benoit whose winning time of 2:22:23 was a world record. Her time made her faster than 13 of the previous twenty male Olympic marathon winners. US Olympic marathon runner Joan Benoit after winning Olympic marathon. Frederick Carlton Lewis (born July 1, 1961) would emerge as the huge track star of the 1984 Olympics. He entered four events at the 1984 Games with a realistic chance to win all of them–the first such American track athlete since Jesse Owens had done so in 1936, 48 years prior. American athlete Carl Lewis, wearing a red Kappa singlet, competes at the 1984 Summer Olympics, at ... More the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in the Exposition Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California, August 1984. Lewis won gold in the men's 100m, men's 200m, men's 4x100m relay, and men's long jump events at the Games. (Photo) Lewis would start his quest to match Owens with a convincing win in the 100 meter dash, running 9.99 seconds to defeat his nearest competitor, fellow American Sam Graddy by 0.2 s. In his next event, the long jump, Lewis won with relative ease. Since Lewis still had heats and finals in the 200 meter race and the 4x100 men's relay to compete in, he chose to take as few jumps as necessary to win the event. He risked injury in the cool conditions of that day if he over-extended himself, (which could put his ultimate goal to win four gold medals at risk. He knew that his first jump at 28 feet even was sufficient to win the event. He fouled on his next jump and then passed on his remaining four allotted jumps. Lewis easily won gold, and Gary Honey of Australia settled for the silver medal with a jump of 27 feet ¼ inch. LOS ANGELES, CA - AUG 6 1984: Carl Lewis of the USA in action in the Long Jump final during the 1984 ... More Olympic Games. Lewis won the gold medal with a jump of 8. 54 metres at the Colliseum Stadium on August 6, 1984 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Tony Duffy / Getty Images ) Lewis would go on to win a total of nine gold medals, one silver medal as well as 10 world championship medals. His career would span from 1979 to 1996 when he last won the Olympic long jump. He is one of only six athletes to win gold in the same individual event in four consecutive Olympic Games, and only the second American athlete along with discus thrower Al Oerter. American athlete Carl Lewis, wearing a blue-and-white Kappa tracksuit as he gives the peace symbol ... More trackside at the 1984 Summer Olympics, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in the Exposition Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California, August 1984. Lewis won gold in the men's 100m, men's 200m, men's 4x100m relay, and men's long jump events at the Games. (Photo)
