What do the US midterm election results mean for HE?

Following the Democrats’ crushing victory in the United States midterm elections on 3 November, changes to higher education policy are likely to come more quickly at the state than at the federal level.

The reason for this is that the incoming Democratic governors in states like Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin – who were at the forefront of the ‘culture wars’ against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and attacks on tenure and academic freedom, including restrictions on what can be taught at university – have more political levers at their disposal than does the incoming Democratic Congress.

Despite winning 54 seats – and, at the time of writing, narrowly leading in two others – in the 100-member US Senate and winning between 253 and 263 in the 435-member House of Representatives, the Democrats lack the ability to turn bills into law because President Donald J Trump retains the veto power, and overriding a veto requires a two-thirds majority in each chamber.

Still, “the dramatic change in congressional control creates an opportunity to move beyond the largely defensive posture that higher education has occupied during the past two years,” says Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

“Higher education is now a critical, decisive voting bloc,” said American Association of University Professors President Todd Wolfson. “Students, faculty, staff, and families refuse to stand on the sidelines while our classrooms are weaponised and our institutions are systematically defunded.

“Voters have sent an unmistakable directive to Washington: protecting the right to learn, teach, and research without political interference is a top-tier national priority.”

“We’re ecstatic about the results in Texas,” Wolfson said, referring to the Democrats’ victory in the race for governor and overturning of the Republican majority in the State House of Representatives.

“We have a real mandate here to reverse years of damage to the Texas higher education system, ensure and enshrine students’ right to learn and faculty’s right to teach, and rebuild a system that serves the public good.”

Pasquerella said Democratic House and Senate majorities in Washington can use their appropriations and oversight authority to challenge several aspects of the administration’s higher education agenda. These could include:

• Investigating grant cancellations, restoring or protecting funding, and establishing safeguards against politically motivated interference in federal research support.

• Examining restrictions affecting visas, student status, and the ability of international researchers to work and study in the United States.

• Interrogating federal efforts to pressure universities into changing academic programmes, personnel decisions, and institutional policies.

• Scrutinising efforts to dismantle the Department of Education.

• Further examining whether federal funding conditions and enforcement are being used to impose particular ideological preferences on universities like Brown and Columbia.

Election focus narrowed

Jon Fansmith, the American Council on Education’s (ACE) senior vice-president, government relations and national engagement, told a podcast last Wednesday: “This election was not about the culture wars that so predominated in 2024. I think there was a very intentional effort by the Democrats to keep very narrowly focused on things that are really resonating with Americans.”

These include the unpopular war in Iran, affordability issues, the price of gasoline, corruption and the Epstein files.

Still, he added: “For somebody on the campus, you might see a much more dramatic impact from the switch in governors than you would from the changes at the federal level. Certainly, in the short term.”

In Ohio, Democrat Dr Amy Acton won the gubernatorial race and her party won a majority in both houses of the state legislature. Accordingly, she will be able to pass legislation stopping or amending the controversial Bill 1, which calls for the consolidation of Ohio’s public universities and colleges as well as the elimination of smaller programmes.

Speaking for then gubernatorial candidate Acton, Addie Bullock told the Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio): “Eliminating such programs undermines the broader mission of higher education and curtails the advancement of fields that are strategic for Ohio while cutting off opportunities for young Ohioans to pursue promising career and job paths.”

Acton’s opponent, the billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, took a page from Texas governor Greg Abbott’s successful campaigns four and eight years ago which campaigned on keeping Senate Bill (SB) 1’s ban on DEI.

Speaking for Ramaswamy in an interview with Ohio State University’ online independent newspaper The Lantern, Hunter Willmitch, chair of the Ohio State Republican Party, said that SB 1’s ban on DEI improved Ohio’s higher education classrooms.

“I think that DEI tends to be bad for higher education. It should be higher education letting you form your own opinions, not letting someone basically tell you how you should think,” he said, before adding that “the removal of DEI protects free speech and allows students to be more open in expressing their beliefs.”

As Fansmith noted, Democrat Acton did not rise to the bait.

Control of the state Senate means that Acton will have a relatively free hand in appointing trustees to the state’s public universities, as such appointments are made with “the advice and consent of the Senate”.

In Wisconsin too the Democrats scored a trifecta, with David Crowley, presently the County Executive for Milwaukee, becoming the first Democrat to be elected governor in the state in 16 years, and his party winning the State Assembly and State Senate.

The Democratic majority in the Senate means that Crowley should also have an easy time appointing new members to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin, as in that state too appointees require the “advice and consent of the Senate.”

While Crowley’s Republican opponent, Congressman Tom Tiffany, was vocal in his support for the state constitutional amendment banning DEI (which passed), Crowley’s campaign statements about higher education ignored this issue and, instead, provided an alternative to policies dating back to the election of Republican Scott Walker in 2011.

In an interview in October, Crowley told PROFS, an online newsletter published by the faculty of University of Wisconsin-Madison, that his goals were to “keep tuition costs in line while investing in our higher education institutions”, and “remove unnecessary barriers for Wisconsin students from all walks of life”, which would include restoring in-state tuition opportunities for non-documented students.

A more difficult path in Texas

Texas State Senator Gina Hinojosa, the governor-elect in Texas and first Mexican American to be elected governor in the US, faces a more difficult path getting appointments to the state’s many universities’ boards of trustees and regents because the Republicans maintained control of the State Senate, whose “advice and consent” is required for a trustee to take office.

The Democrats flipped at least 21 seats in the Texas House of Representatives to achieve a slim majority of at least 76, but the Texas State Senate, despite gains by the Democrats, remains in Republican hands.

The split legislature means first that the Democrats will not be able to repeal legislation that facilitated restrictions on what is taught.

While, as Leonard Bright, professor of public service and administration at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, argues the legislation (SB 37) did not mandate the ending of DEI in Texas’ universities or the closure of gender studies and African-American studies or the recasting of the universities’ “Core” requirement to a Great Books Course with a conservative ideological bent, it did allow the regents and, through those bodies, university trustees to make these decisions and also to, in the case of the University of Texas at Austin, dissolve the faculty senate.

Professor Karma Chávez, chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, told University World News that she hopes the “Republicans are going to be sufficiently chastened by the results of the election that they’re at least going to be willing to work with her [Hinojosa] to get the nominees on the different boards of regents that she wants to.”

Drawing on his expertise in public policy, Bright also pointed out that when the Regents and boards of trustees were putting anti-DEI and other such policies in place, they said “they were following the will of the governor and the will of the people”.

“The question now is what are they going to say given the outcome of the election. Are they going to say ‘Oh guess what, we don’t have to listen to the voters?’ when just a few weeks ago they were saying we were listening to the voters?”

If they do so, says Bright, the governor can pressure the members of the Senate.

Neither Bright nor Chávez is under any illusion that the Republicans were voted out solely because of their higher education policy. Yet, both believe that while it may not have been issue one, two or even three, there was a general sense among voters that the Republicans’ handling of higher education was sadly lacking.

Chávez, whose academic training is in communications, says that “there’s no doubt that questions about the direction of higher education were in the media on a very regular basis” and that those stories highlighted the fact that administrators and boards of regents and other power brokers “weren’t willing to offer a defence of what they were doing.”

With some exceptions, the picture was of “disgruntled faculty and students”. The articles “didn’t tell people what to think, but they did help people about what to think about” in regard to the states’ universities.

Bright noted that people he spoke with outside the university community “were hearing that something’s going on about censorship [on campus] and what they were hearing, they didn’t like”.

Further, he pointed to general disgruntlement with public education in Texas, especially the voucher system under which funds are withdrawn from public education, assigned to an individual student and who can then use them for private schools.

In recognition of the concerns about K-12 education, as one of her first acts as governor-elect, Hinojosa announced that one of her priorities in her first year would be to end the voucher system for K-12 education and work to fund the public system properly.

Texas off the front line of culture wars?

Hinojosa’s defeat of her three-term predecessor, Greg Abbott, means that the governor of the second most populous state in the nation will not be on the front lines of the culture wars.

As University World News has reported, last January Texas A&M banned the teaching of Plato from one course and shortly thereafter abruptly cancelled Bright’s course “Ethics and Public Policy”, Bright’s course ran afoul of new regulations administrators put in place following a new policy promulgated by the Regents.

Looking at Hinojosa’s victory and the defeat also of Lt Governor Dan Patrick, who shepherded both SB 17 and SB 37 through the legislature, Bright told University World News: “The absence of culture war rhetoric will allow us to realign higher education in Texas with its core purpose and end policies designed to enforce ideological conformity.

“Our duty is to teach our disciplines, advance research, and follow the evidence wherever it leads. Texas higher education deserves an environment that respects expertise, protects academic freedom, and teaches students how to think – not what to think.”

Recognising the legislative limits facing Hinojosa, Chávez pointed to the governor’s power to issue executive orders, something Fansmith also noted in the ACE podcast.

To restore shared governance to UT Austin, Chávez says: “I think Gina [Hinojosa] could on day one issue an executive order that requires every Texas public university to reinstate faculty councils with at least 50% of that body being democratically elected.

“Just by doing that, which is perfectly within the realm of the law, would be a great benefit because it would restore some of the power into the hands of the faculty.”

Additionally, she says: “this would make a big difference because it wouldn’t allow administrators to make decisions by fiat”.

Second, Chávez explained, Hinojosa “can issue an executive order that says that any censorship policies that the different systems, including Texas Tech, University of North Texas and Texas A&M, have implemented are no longer allowed”.

This would prevent, she continued, Texas Tech from simply banning the teaching on race and gender, and teaching on race, gender and sexuality. Such an executive order would make clear that bans “are a violation of academic freedom”.

Third, Chávez calls on Hinojosa to issue an executive order that reconsiders “some of the mandates of SB 17, the anti-DEI law from 2023”.

Disproportionate impact of Texas changes

Pasquerella drew special attention to the outsized political impact of the change of party in Texas on the rest of the country.

“The impact of the midterms on higher education in Texas will be especially interesting to watch given the forthcoming changes to the political and administrative environment in which their public universities operate. The new Democratic attorney general will have considerable influence over Texas’ participation in the national legal battles surrounding higher education.

“There are three particularly important dimensions. The AG can review lawsuits initiated by the previous administration, including cases involving universities, federal education policy, and institutional practices. This may lead to a discontinuation of litigation, a reconsideration of appeals, or the pursuit of settlements.

“Texas can also join other states in contesting governmental overreach by challenging federal actions that exceed statutory authority or violate constitutional and administrative law requirements.”

She said potential subjects include unlawful termination of research funding; federal interference with state university governance; coercive funding conditions; actions affecting international students and scholars; and federal policies that interfere with the statutory responsibilities of public institutions.

“The state must establish standing and a viable legal basis for each challenge,” she said. “But Texas’s participation could bring substantial institutional and financial interests into these coalitions.

“Third, the AG could reconsider legal interpretations, enforcement initiatives, and the state’s approach to disputes involving public universities. In this way, the office can help establish a more constructive relationship between the state and its public universities,” she wrote.

Congress can use powers to investigate

Nationally, while Congress will not be able to pass laws over Trump’s vetoes, the new Democratic majorities will possess important powers. The first is its investigatory powers. Committees in both houses will be able to subpoena documents and call for sworn testimony about, for example, the decision to dismantle the Department of Education (DoE) without congressional authorisation.

In the ACE podcast, Sarah Spreitzer, vice-president and chief of staff, Government Relations drew attention to interagency agreements, like the one that saw the Office of Civil Rights be moved from the DoE to the Department of Justice (DoJ) as being a prime candidate for investigation.

“We’ve never seen anything like the interagency agreements or executive order to dismantle the US Department of Education. They could start by asking whether or not you are able to do it without congressional authority,” she said.

Other areas that committees can investigate were the billions of dollars in cuts made by the National Science Foundations and National Institute of Health, as well as whether the investigations undertaken by the departments of Education and Justice into antisemitism on campuses were conducted properly.

Fansmith also noted that Congress is likely to scrutinise the DoE’s and DoJ’s civil rights enforcement under Title IX of the US Higher Education Act.

“Beyond even the how are you spending money and how are you spending time,” says Fansmith, “there’s a lot of concern that their approach to civil rights enforcement is actually in violation of the law, that they are not sufficiently investigating cases of racial discrimination, they're not sufficiently addressing cases of sexual assault or sexual harassment” on campuses.

Congressional investigators could look at policies and how caseloads are being determined, how resolutions are being reached or not reached, how decisions are being made with internal documents.

“That's going to be the kind of thing that I think is going to catch fire pretty quickly, especially on the Hill,” he said.

A moment later, the podcast’s host, Mushtaq Gunja, ACE’s executive director of the Carnegie Classification Systems of American universities and a lawyer, added that he’s heard reports that they are not investigating “claims of racial discrimination and barely anything on sexual assault.”

Congress holds the power of the purse, although under Republican leadership to date in this term Congress has refused to use the power to hold the administration to account. From January, the incoming Democratic-led Congress, by contrast, is likely not to be chary about putting riders on any appropriation bills that the monies must be spent for the appropriated purpose and to use them as ways of pressuring the administration to fulfil legislative requirements.

Accordingly, Spreitzer told the podcast: “I think that there are real efforts and conversations going on about if you could expand the current blocking language, because remember the current blocking language was negotiated before the election, so it had to be something that would bring along enough Republicans and would not kind of draw the ire of the White House.

“I think right now the big concern is you lack uniform guidance, but many of the agencies, including the US Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, others, are implementing major changes to the grant processes to make big changes, like allow for the politicalisation of the merit review process” as well as on “forward funding grants, the ability for the secretary or the administrator, somebody political, to terminate grants.”

Spreitzer noted: “I think that there’s going to be some discussion among the Democrats, not just on uniform guidance, but how do you constrain the president's executive authority, without limiting the ability of future administrations to actually do things under executive authority? That’s going to be really interesting because for the past two years, Congress has not really sought to do that.

“They’re going to have hard conversations about what legislative authority looks like. If we give you money, are you allowed to like compete [that is, run competitions for] those grants in a way that never were competed before, or to do a pocket rescission after you've done a grant contest, or to not spend out money and repurpose those funds within the agency.”

Potential changes on international talent

Partway through the ACE webinar, Spreitzer drew attention to a subject that definitely was not a ballot question: international students. After noting that the Democrats in Congress are likely to put “institutions of higher education on the hot seat” to explain why their costs are so high and “our return on investment” in higher education as well as the cost of administration, she pivoted to the importance of international students.

One way, she said, is that you “bring back the US economy and you really supercharge it to start granting work authorisations again to legal immigrants. Start supersizing the H-1B program [the most common sort of international visa]. Withdraw the proposed rule on optional practical training” that requires companies to put up tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars if they employ a recent graduate (mainly in STEM).

The US should “encourage international students to come here and spend their dollars”, she said.

“I think that there are things that this Congress can do to say: ‘We want to encourage international students, people that come here legally that get work authorisations. They are paying taxes. They are paying into social security. This is not the population we should be targeting as part of our immigration policy’.”

Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, said in an email to University World News that she hopes the election results will be the harbinger of a new realisation on the importance of international students by the Trump administration and the opportunity to turn the page on two rancorous years.

“Tuesday’s historic midterm elections remind us that our values are not determined by election cycles but are the compass that guides us through them. We at NAFSA: Association of International Educators reaffirm our mission to champion international education, advocate for students and scholars, defend the value of global engagement, and stand firmly for the dignity, opportunity, and belonging of all.”

She said with a new Congress arriving, there is an opportunity to strengthen the US role in research, workforce development, knowledge diplomacy, and national security.

“As ever, NAFSA will work with legislators of both parties to show how international education advances each of these goals. Together with our advocates, we will brief new and returning members on key issues affecting our field, including threats to practical training for international students, visa processing, and funding for international education and exchange programmes.

Aw said international education is a bridge that connects us to each other and the world. With our more than 9,000 members, NAFSA will speak on behalf of students, scholars, and the institutions they enrich, and make clear how regulations and public policy affect them.”

“Those policies shape not only our educational landscape but also US economic strength, civil society, and global standing. We look forward to working with the 120th Congress in the new year,” she said.