Colleges and Universities

Colleges and universities are both incubators of feminist awakening and contested ground in the struggle over equity, inclusion and the freedom to learn.

Stop Calling Hungary an Authoritarian Playbook

PUBLISHED 4/11/2026 by

A popular explanation for today’s attacks on academic freedom is that the Trump administration is following an authoritarian playbook, with Hungary under Viktor Orbán cast as the model.

As someone who lived in Hungary for five years, earned two degrees in gender studies at Central European University in Budapest, and later completed a doctorate in the United States, I have firsthand experience with Hungary’s attacks on higher education. The playbook metaphor oversimplifies and suggests that the future is inevitable. It’s not. But Hungary’s severe curtailing of academic freedom should serve as a grave warning.

I understand the impulse to name closures in the United States, such as the shuttering of the Texas A&M gender studies program, as another page in an authoritarian playbook crafted by a leader somewhere else. But we should be careful not to slip into anticipatory fatalism. Expecting the worst won’t save U.S. higher education.

Instead, let’s remember that disciplines such as gender studies were born out of collective defiance and sustained—in the case of my feminist colleagues in gender studies in Hungary—by bucking playbooks and persisting despite the conditions.

‘First They Came for My College’: The Takeover of a Florida College and the Students Who Refused to Disappear

PUBLISHED 4/9/2026 by

When I told coworkers and friends I was going to see a documentary about the right-wing takeover of a small public Florida college, the reaction was immediate and unanimous: Why would you do that to yourself? Too depressing. I’d be too angry.

They weren’t wrong. Premiering at SXSW last month and directed by Patrick Bresnan, First They Came for My College is, at times, almost unbearable to watch—a slow, procedural dismantling of a public institution, carried out in meeting rooms and press conferences and budget lines.

But what stayed with me wasn’t only the anger—it was the stubborn, surprising insistence on community, joy and showing up anyway.

Juliana Stratton’s Big Senate Win, Kristi Noem’s Next Steps and the Origins of Women’s History Month

PUBLISHED 3/21/2026 by

Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!

This week:
—Illinois primaries feature a big U.S. Senate win for Juliana Stratton.
—The IPU/U.N. Women Report on Women in Politics presents a sobering global snapshot.
—Mississippi will remain the only state that has never sent a woman to the U.S. House.
—Ranked-choice voting is being used for student elections at over 100 colleges and universities.

… and more.

The Filibuster Is No Virtue

PUBLISHED 3/19/2026 by

Republicans have put on the Senate floor (barely, with only 51 votes) their massive voter suppression bill, inaptly named the SAVE America Act.

What will likely trip up Republicans is not the substance of the bill, but fiddling with the filibuster, which will be necessary to pass this anti-democratic monstrosity. A critical segment of the Republican Senate caucus cares about maintaining the filibuster, a tool Republicans have used repeatedly to block bills with majority support, such as reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.

The Heritage Foundation’s New Policy Guidebook Wants to Push Women Out of Public Life

PUBLISHED 3/13/2026 by

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the right-wing Heritage Foundation—developers of Project 2025, the policy guidebook written to influence the Trump administration’s legislative priorities—has issued a 168-page position paper, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.”

The document is intended to “restore the family,” by elevating a male-led, heterosexual model of social relations. 

The report is both absurd and terrifying—which is why the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) is sounding an alarm about it. Emily Martin, the NWLC’s chief program officer and Amy Matsui, its vice president of childcare and income security, spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader about “Saving America by Saving the Family” in late February.

‘Lone Star Three’: How Three UT Austin Students Paved the Way for Birth Control Access in 1960s Texas

PUBLISHED 3/5/2026 by and | UPDATED 3/10/2026 at 5:31 P.M. PT

In 1969 Victoria Foe, Judy Smith and Barbara Hines were students at the University of Texas in Austin when Smith invited Foe and Hines to attend women’s liberation meetings at her house. Their discussions led them to start a campus Birth Control Information Center and eventually evolved into an underground network that helped women access safe abortion at a time when it was illegal in Texas. 

Their activism would eventually extend far beyond their university campus, planting the seeds for Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that would legalize abortion in the U.S. Not until 1965 did birth control in the U.S. become legal for married women. Not until 1972 did it become legal for anyone, married or unmarried, to access birth control.

A new documentary, Lone Star Three, directed by Karen Stirgwolt, tells the story of the women who formed the underground networks that allowed young women to access reproductive care in Texas in the days leading up to Roe v. Wade. Ms. recently spoke with Foe and Hines (Smith passed away in 2013), and archivist Alice Embree, about their activism from the 1960s to the present moment.

What Trump’s Rollback of DEI Means for First-Generation Students Like Me

PUBLISHED 3/4/2026 by

“People can take anything from you, but they can never take away your education.” My roots are in Guyana, a Caribbean nation, and this mantra of resilience echoed through generations and followed me from Guyana to Queens, N.Y.

But when President Trump recently bragged he “ended DEI in America,” he was openly celebrating the very shift I’ve already felt in my own education.

When I entered college in Fairfield, Conn., I carried more than my own ambition. I carried the unrealized dreams of my grandmother and the women in our village who were told their place was in the home, not a lecture hall. My education isn’t just for me—it’s for my family, my community and every girl back in our motherland who never got the chance and never will.

But higher education in the United States has increasingly transformed from a public good into a private marketplace. The very pathways that made my presence in these institutions possible are now being publicly dismantled through legislation and policy.

Immigrant and first-generation students do not weaken universities. We strengthen them. If we believe education cannot be taken from us, then we must be willing to fight for the conditions that make it accessible in the first place. In a political moment where leaders celebrate the end of DEI as progress, defending its need has never felt more urgent.

Texas A&M’s Women’s and Gender Studies Closure Signals a Wider Crackdown on Academic Freedom

PUBLISHED 2/24/2026 by

Texas A&M University’s decision to eliminate its women’s and gender studies program is not happening in a vacuum. For years, the university has steadily rolled back programs, courses and resources tied to gender and LGBTQ+ studies, leaving students and faculty with fewer spaces to learn, teach and engage with these subjects.

Now, with the program gone and new classroom restrictions in place, the impact is being felt directly by the people who rely on these courses to study, teach and understand the world around them.

For many students and educators, this moment feels like part of a much larger shift unfolding across the country. As universities scale back programs and limit discussions around race, gender and sexuality, what can be taught—and who feels supported in the classroom—is rapidly changing. The closure at Texas A&M reflects a growing national pattern: one that raises urgent questions about the future of academic freedom in public higher education.

The Heritage Foundation’s Plan to Keep Women Uneducated, Pregnant and Subservient

PUBLISHED 2/20/2026 by

Since Trump’s re-ascendance to the White House, the reactionary conservative movement has become the most aggressive and unfettered it has been in my lifetime. And they are getting very, very clear on what they think an acceptable life looks like for women:

—Settle for any man who decides he wants you.
—Don’t go to college.
—Marry early.
—Have as many babies as possible.
—Quit your job (or don’t pursue one in the first place) to stay home full time and depend financially on your husband.
—Shoulder the blame if you wind up married to a jerk.
—Wind up impoverished if you divorce.
—Face social condemnation if you fail to follow the tradwife script.
—Contraception should be illegal or at least hard to get; same for IVF and other fertility treatments.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s a plan they wrote down and published: Last month, the Heritage Foundation published “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” Think of it as Project 2275, a detailed plan that is mostly about how America can spend the next two and a half centuries undoing the feminist progress we’ve made.

Raped, Recorded, Shared—Then Abandoned by the System: ‘Once It’s on the Internet, It’s Out There’

PUBLISHED 2/3/2026 by and

Survivors of online sexual exploitation and abuse are not just confronting individual perpetrators—they are up against systems that were never designed to protect them.

A new report by Equality Now and the Sexual Violence Prevention Association documents how survivors who report tech-facilitated sexual abuse routinely encounter jurisdictional dead ends, outdated laws and opaque platform policies that leave harmful material circulating indefinitely. For many, the abuse does not end with the assault itself, but continues through repeated viewing, sharing and threats—often with devastating financial, professional and psychological consequences.

The report also makes clear that this harm is not inevitable. Survivors point to concrete policy solutions that could meaningfully change outcomes: consent-based laws governing the online distribution of sexual material, clear and enforceable takedown obligations for tech companies, survivor-centered reporting systems and access to free legal and mental health support.

Accountability is possible, but only if lawmakers and platforms choose to act.