COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Administrators at the state university campus in Colorado Springs saw a solid opportunity to avoid the Trump administration’s attack on higher education.
Located in a picturesque Bluff with spectacular views of Pikes Peak, the school is far from the Ivy League colleges that attracted President Donald Trump’s wrath. Most of the students are commuters and earn their degrees while keeping their full-time jobs under control. Students and faculty alike will explain universities in the conservative part of the Blue Nation.
That optimism was misguided.
Thousand-page emails from school staff, Associated Press reviews, and interviews with students and professors, reveal that school leaders, teachers and students will soon be dressed in the crosshairs of a Republican administration, forcing them to describe them as an unprecedented, potential degree of change.
With Washington reducing its government sector, launching research into diversity programs and campus anti-Semitism, University of Colorado Colorado Springs face many of the same challenges as elite universities across the country.
The school has lost three major federal grants and is under investigation by Trump’s education department. Hoping to avoid that scrutiny, the university renamed all websites and job titles, but all dealt with pressure from students, faculty and staff who wanted to take a more fighting stance at the school.
According to the minutes of the session, the school’s prime minister told teachers at a meeting in February. “And I was a bit shocked at what orders came.”
The university refused to allow administrators to interview them. The spokesman asked the Associated Press to make it clear that the professors and students interviewed in this story are speaking for themselves and not for the institution. Several faculty members also sought anonymity. This is because they either had no tenure or didn’t want to bring unnecessary attention to themselves and their scholarships in the current political environment.
“Like our higher education colleagues, we spent quite a bit of time understanding the new directives from the federal government,” Prime Minister Jennifer Sovanette said in a statement provided to the Associated Press.
Students said they were able to feel the stress that school administrators and professors felt.
“There are administrators who are under pressure because they want to keep their funds here. It’s tense,” said Ava Knox, a rising junior who covers the school newspaper’s university administration.
The faculty said, “We’re very careful about how they are doing their research and how they deal with the student population. They are also seen in this new, expanding set of guidelines and regulations by the federal government.”
A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Misfit Optimism
Shortly after Trump won a second term in November, UCCS leaders were trying to gather information about the Republican plan. In December, Sovanet met a newly elected Republican lawmaker. Republican lawmakers represented the school district. In her meeting notes obtained by the Associated Press, the Prime Minister sketched out a scenario in which the university might avoid dramatic cuts and chaos under the upcoming administration.
“Research funds — it’s difficult to pull back the Grant Dollar, but Trump tried to pull back several times last time. The money passed through Congress,” Sovanet wrote in a memo preparing for the meeting. “Grant money could stay, but it just changes the way they are expressed and what it funds.”
Sobanet also observed that dismantling the federal education sector requires Congressional approval. Given the structure of the US Senate, she suggested that it was unlikely.
Like many others, she wasn’t entirely expecting how Trump would actively try to change the federal government.
The conservative desire to improve higher education began before Trump took office.
They have long complained that the university has become a fortress of liberal indoctrination and raucous protest. In 2023, Republicans in Congress held a controversial hearing Some leaders at Ivy League University. Shortly afterwards, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned. During the presidential election last fall, Trump criticized the campus for saying it was a protest about Gaza and liberal bias in the classroom.
His new administration has launched an investigation into alleged anti-Semitism at several universities. Over $400 million has been frozen in research grants and contracts in Columbia. Over $2.6 billion at Harvard University. Colombia has reached an agreement last month Paying $220 million to resolve the investigation.
When Harvard filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s actions, his administration tried to block international students from registering at the school. The Trump administration also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-free status.
Northwestern University, Penn, Princeton and Cornell have seen a huge chunk of fundraising on how they dealt with Israeli war in Gaza and protests over school support for trans athletes.
Trump’s decision to target the wealthiest and most honorable institutions provided some degree of comfort to administrators at around 4,000 other universities across the country.
Most higher education students in the United States are educated at local public universities and community colleges. Such schools usually do not draw attention from cultural warriors.
UCCS students and professors wanted Trump’s crackdown to bypass schools and others like that.
Jeffrey Scholes, professor in the Department of Philosophy, said: “We just don’t see the anxiety and polarization that we see on other campuses.”
Wallet strings
The federal government has more leverage than higher education. It offers Approximately $60 billion A year to university for research. Additionally, the majority of US students require grants and loans from various federal programs to pay tuition and living expenses.
In this budget year, UCCS won around $19 A million research funding From a combination of federal, state and private sources. It’s a relatively small portion of the school’s overall $369 million budget, but universities have recently pushed to strengthen campus research programs by utilizing grants from government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. Wide range of federal subsidies cuts could derail these efforts.
School officials were disappointed when the Trump administration ended research grants from the Humanities, the Department of Defense and the National Fund for the National Science Foundation, the emails show. The grant funded women’s boost programs in the civic, cultural conservation and technology sectors.
School administrators scrambled to contact federal officials to find out if other grants were on the chopping block, but they had trouble finding the answer, records show.
School officials have repeatedly sought federal officials’ assistance just to know that these officials don’t know what’s going on when the Trump administration stopped paying grants and shut down thousands of employees and shut down shut agencies.
The report was reported in a memo on the NIH, a university official, about “The Sky is falling” and the call from school lobbyists to provide reports on what is happening in Washington.
Interviews with faculty and education policy experts also show concerns about other changes in Washington that will affect the way students pay colleges.
While only Congress could abolish the U.S. Department of Education altogether, the Trump administration has sought to dramatically cut staff and divide many of its functions into other institutions. Administrators fired nearly 1,400 employeesand issues have been reported in the system that handles student loans. Student loan management is expected to completely transition to another institution.
Additionally, the initial version of the main funding bill in Congress included massive cuts in tuition fees. That provision was not caught up in the law, but Congress made cap loans for students seeking graduate degrees. This policy could have ripple effects on institutions such as UCC, which rely on tuition dollars for operating expenses in the coming years.
Dei and Transgender issues hit campus
To force change on campus, the Trump administration has launched a survey targeting diversity programs and efforts to combat anti-Semitism.
For example, the education department The investigation has begun I’m targeting my PhD in March. Scholarship programs, affiliated with 45 universities, including UCCS, expanded opportunities for women and non-whites in graduate education. The administration argued that the program was open to certain non-white students and was equivalent to racism.
Annie Larson, assistant vice president of federal relations and outreach for the University of Colorado system-wide, wrote: “We are sorry to be the bad news bearer” at the schools being investigated.
“Wow, this is amazing,” writes Hilary Fout, UCCS graduate dean.
The UCCS also struggled with how it handled executive orders, particularly on transgender issues.
In response to an order aimed at revoking funds for schools that allowed transwomen to play women’s sports, UCCS has launched a review of the athletic program. Records indicate that there are no trans athletes. University officials also found that only one school in the athletic conference was affected by the order, and were relieved that UCCS would rarely find a match or game with that school.
“We don’t have students affected by this and we don’t compete with teams that we know will be affected by this,” the vice-prime minister of student affairs wrote to a colleague.
Avoid the spotlight
The attack led the UCC to take preemptive action and self-censorship, hoping to preserve the program and avoid the Trump administration’s spotlight.
The email shows that the school’s legal advisor has begun to look at all the university’s websites and assess whether it is necessary to paraphrase the scholarship. The university has changed its diversity initiative web address from www.diversity.uccs.edu to www.belonging.uccs.edu.
And the administrator responsible for the university’s Inclusive Culture and Ab and Attribution Division won a new role in January: Director of Strategic Initiatives. The university professor discussed whether the school would change the name of the women’s and ethnic studies department to avoid attracting attention from Trump, but so far the department has not been renamed.
In line with the same line, UCCS administrators tried to avoid being dragged into the controversy that frequently arises in the first Trump administration. UCCS staff attended a presentation from education consulting firm EAB. This encouraged schools not to respond to any news cycle. That could be a challenge as some students and faculty seek voice resistance to issues from climate change to immigration.
For example, shortly after Trump was sworn in, staff at UCCS’ Sustainability Program began to tackle climate change by pushing forward the entire University of Colorado system and denounce Trump’s withdrawal from international agreements. It was the type of statement the university issued in its past administrations without thinking twice.
In an email, the UCCS top public relations executive warned his boss:
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Colin Binkley, the Associated Press Educational Author in Washington, contributed to this report.
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