There’s a room in Washington, D.C., where the rules of American higher education are being rewritten right now. The sessions start on April 13th. They will be livestreamed and open to the public.
Almost no one is watching, which is by design.
The Trump administration has made no secret of its contempt for American universities. But the most sweeping changes it’s pursuing aren’t happening through dramatic executive orders or headline-grabbing funding freezes. They’re happening through a bureaucratic process called negotiated rulemaking — a wonky, technical-sounding mechanism that is almost perfectly engineered to avoid public scrutiny.
