Daily Lumina News 072423

Texas colleges stand to lose millions of dollars in funding for their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs starting this fall after a sweeping law goes into effect. College officials are now scrambling to figure out which programs to dismantle.
Meanwhile, diversity advocates fear that the law will have an outsize impact on the retention of students of color and funding for federal grants.

For more than 50 years, the University of Pittsburgh has received state funding to reduce the cost of tuition for thousands of Pennsylvania students. But partisan division has so far blocked attempts to approve the funding for the upcoming school year.
The tension over Pitt’s funding has become a repeated issue, and it could distract officials from developing broader strategies to reduce the cost of college in one of the least affordable states for higher education.

Last month, after Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey wrote in a letter that colleges there had to adopt race-blind criteria for scholarships following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling striking down affirmative action, the University of Missouri announced it would not offer scholarships like the Diversity Award to future applicants.
Legal experts and diversity champions worry that other institutions could soon follow that lead.

Affirmative action is a loaded term with a weighty history. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated race-conscious admissions decisions for higher education, what will diversity look like going forward?
On this episode of In Conversation, equity experts, professors, and policy leaders explore the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling, what can be done to make college campuses equitable and diverse, and whether eliminating affirmative action in higher education could foreshadow similar changes in the workplace.

In some parts of the world, academics who also work in the fields that they teach are being rebranded "pracademics" for "practical academics."
U.S. universities tend not to boast about the people in their classrooms who also work outside of them. But as students increasingly call for educations that lead more directly to jobs, the pracademic trend in other countries suggests this could change, with the word itself a symbol of newfound respect.

This week, the Biden administration will host the National Summit on Equal Opportunity in Higher Education as it tries to find ways to support colleges that want to promote diversity after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling gutted affirmative action.
The convening will bring together college presidents, researchers, and equity advocates to discuss the fallout of the ruling and how to move forward.