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.

Keeping Score: Supreme Court Blow to Voting Rights Will ‘Silence Our Voices’; Conservative Judges Try to Restrict Mifepristone; Moms Worry About Putting Food on the Table

PUBLISHED 5/14/2026 by | UPDATED 6/30/2026 at 11:13 A.M. PT

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, slashing protections against racially discriminatory voting laws.
—A record high amount of books were censored from libraries in 2025, often due to LGBTQ characters or plotlines addressing racism.
—A third of moms living on low incomes have gone into debt or skipped meals so their kids could eat.
—Just 22 percent of American voters have significant confidence in the Supreme Court.
—In 2025 the number of abortions in the U.S. remained stable, but more patients in states with bans turned to telehealth services instead of traveling out of state.
—The Department of Justice announced plans to expand the use of the federal death penalty.
—An Epstein-Maxwell survivor, who asked to remain anonymous, laments, “I kept my identity protected as Jane Doe. I woke up one day with my name mentioned over 500 times. While the rich and powerful remain protected by redaction, my name was exposed to the world.”
—The Trump administration launched a Moms.gov site on Mother’s Day that refers pregnant people to unregulated crisis pregnancy centers.
—A Ms. piece on solitary confinement by Kwaneta Harris and her daughter Summer Knight won Kwaneta second place in the Collaboration category of the Stillwater Awards for prison journalism.
—Liberation, a play about 1970s feminism by Bess Wohl, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. Wohl was inspired by her own life: Her mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, was an early Ms. contributor.

… and more.

Trump Administration Launches a Legally Bogus Investigation into Smith College

PUBLISHED 5/8/2026 by and

The Trump administration claims its investigation into Smith College is about defending women. In reality, it is an attack on the rights of women at Smith to define their own community, values and mission without political interference from Washington.

The Department of Education argues that by admitting transgender women and allowing them access to campus housing and facilities, Smith may have violated Title IX. But that argument collapses under even a basic reading of the law. Title IX simply does not apply to admissions at private undergraduate colleges like Smith.

The administration’s complaint is also striking because it is not based on evidence that Smith students have been harmed or excluded from campus life. There is no public record of students filing complaints about the college’s housing, bathrooms or locker rooms policies. Instead, this investigation grew out of pressure from a conservative advocacy group determined to use federal power to impose its ideological agenda on colleges and universities.

Smith’s campus policies were shaped over years by students, faculty and administrators themselves—including cisgender women students who pushed the college to open admissions to transgender women more than a decade ago.

At its core, this investigation is about far more than one women’s college. It reflects the Trump administration’s broader campaign against trans rights, higher education and liberal arts institutions that encourage critical thought, inclusion and intellectual independence.

Congress passed Title IX to expand educational opportunities for women. Now, the administration is attempting to weaponize that same civil rights law to undermine women’s education and bully colleges into abandoning their own principles.

From Smith College to Florida’s New College: MAGA’s Campaign Against Universities, Women’s Studies and Liberal Arts

PUBLISHED 5/6/2026 by

As a professor at Smith College and chair of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, I have closely followed the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education—and on my field in particular.

This week, those attacks landed squarely on my own campus: The Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into Smith’s policy of admitting transgender women, arguing the college may be violating Title IX by recognizing gender identity rather than “biological sex.” The probe—prompted by a complaint from a conservative advocacy group—questions whether a women’s college can remain legally “single sex” while including trans women, and raises the possibility of federal penalties or loss of status.

This move is not an isolated action. It is part of a broader campaign to redefine civil rights protections in ways that exclude transgender people, and to pressure colleges and universities into compliance with that vision.

It is also one of many recent attacks on higher education—especially liberal arts institutions—by Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration, aimed at universities they view as out of step with a conservative, anti-feminist agenda. In a 2021 speech titled “Universities Are the Enemy,” JD Vance declared, “We must aggressively attack the universities in this country. … Maybe it’s time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues.”

Women’s, gender and sexuality studies teaches students to think critically, to question the status quo and to understand how power shapes our lives across gender, race, class, sexuality and more. These are precisely the kinds of questions that have made the field a target. Rather than engage with this work, critics have increasingly sought to discredit or dismantle it altogether. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 provides a roadmap for doing just that—but many of these strategies have already been tested at the state level.

A New Playbook for College Athletes: Consent, Intervention and Prevention

PUBLISHED 5/5/2026 by

June 2026 will mark the 54th anniversary of Title IX, the 1972 federal law barring sex-based discrimination in education, ensuring equal participation in sports and prohibiting sexual violence in educational programs receiving federal funding.

But even though Title IX passed more than half a century ago, and significantly more women now go to college than men, gender-based violence is still rampant among college students. Thirteen percent of U.S. college students experience rape or sexual assault during their time on (or off) campus. For women, that number doubles: 26.4 percent of women (and 6.8 percent of men) undergraduates experience sexual violence. Young women are especially vulnerable, compared to older grad students, and women college students aged 18 to 24 are three times more likely to experience gender-based violence than women in general.

Most colleges and universities have standard anti-sexual violence training during freshman orientation (often just required videos or something students click through online), but this information is often quickly forgotten or not practical enough for students to easily apply to their own lives and interactions. The nonprofit sexual assault prevention organization It’s On Us is seeking to change that with the The Playbook 2.0, a research-based workshop series for college athletes.

Banned From Talking About Third-Trimester Abortion Care at a Texas Medical School: The Ms. Q&A with Dr. Shelley Sella

PUBLISHED 4/23/2026 by

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) cancelled Dr. Shelley Sella’s scheduled campus talk in January about her recent book Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care, which she had been invited to give by the Texas Tech chapter of Medical Students for Choice (MSFC) in collaboration with MSFC’s Board of Directors. The administration told right-wing outlet Texas Scorecard that it decided hosting her was “not in the best interest of the university.” The decision to ban Sella from campus was made after days of coordinated activism by the Turning Point USA chapter at Texas Tech in conjunction with two antiabortion activists: Mark Lee Dickson and Jim Baxa. 

The cancellation of Sella’s talk was not “an anomaly,” as Jessica Valenti of Abortion, Every Day writes, but part and parcel of the “antiabortion snitch culture” on college campuses—”part of the broader conservative attack on academia that’s gained steam over the last few years.”

“And it’s not just impacting a few schools or professors,” Valenti continues. “Antiabortion groups are determined to eradicate any iota of pro-choice speech on college campuses. Now is the time for us to make as much noise as possible and not back off one single inch.”

Taking seriously Valenti’s call to “make noise” rather than retreat in the face of escalating efforts to suppress pro-abortion speech, Ms. sat down with both Sella and Claire Surkis, a medical student in Connecticut who serves on MSFC’s Board of Directors, to explore the impact and implications of the university’s actions.

For Women Leaving Prison, Education Can Be a Way Out

PUBLISHED 4/21/2026 by

Standing at the bottom of the steps at Tulane University, waiting for her name to be called, Stephanie King took a deep breath. At 63, after nearly three decades in prison, she was about to receive her college diploma—something she had never imagined possible.

For King, who left high school as a pregnant teenager and earned her GED while incarcerated, the moment marked more than a personal milestone. “I just wanted to walk across that stage,” she told me. But beneath that was a deeper realization: Education could be the way out of the cycles that had defined her life.

That belief drives programs like Operation Restoration’s partnership with Tulane, which brings college and job training opportunities to women inside and beyond prison walls. Founded by formerly incarcerated advocate Syrita Steib, the organization helps women build stability through education, employment and support systems often denied to them. The path is rarely easy—students face limited resources inside prison and steep barriers upon release—but again and again, women point to the same truth: Education offers not just opportunity, but a chance to rebuild their futures on their own terms.

(This story is part of “Breaking the Cycle,” a three-part Ms. series on how women impacted by incarceration are building new futures—from education and job training, to debate teams and book clubs inside jails. Later this week: how women behind bars are finding their voices in public debate, and building community through literature.)

Educating Women: A History of Access, Exclusion and Backlash

PUBLISHED 4/13/2026 by

The war against “radical gender ideology” has been staggering. The ascent of President Trump brought calls for the elimination of women’s and LGBTQ centers, rollbacks on Title IX protections, the exclusion of trans women from college sports and the purging of gender and sexuality studies from college curricula across U.S. higher education. These actions signal a massive backlash against decades of progress—and are inseparable from a broader assault on civil rights-era protections for people of color.

However, this moment is nothing new. It echoes an earlier race- and gender-based backlash over a century ago, when growing numbers of white middle-class women began to attend college. Against the backdrop of Black emancipation, increased migration and the expanding feminist movement, women’s education was cast as a threat—not just to patriarchy, but to the future of the white race.

Today’s backlash is the latest attempt to restore the status quo—to draw boundaries around who is entitled to higher education and to reinforce a racial and gender hierarchy that has always shaped access to learning in the United States.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Stop Calling Hungary an Authoritarian Playbook

PUBLISHED 4/11/2026 by | UPDATED 4/13/2026 at 7:33 A.M. PT

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. This metaphor suggests the future is inevitable. It’s not. And now, with Orbán voted out of power after 16 years, that assumption looks even more fragile.

For the feminist scholars who experienced—and resisted—Hungary’s attacks on higher education, the idea that Orbán fashioned a playbook that others are now copying misses the point.

Instead, what we are seeing is an international illiberal movement that circulates money, ideas and strategies across borders. When Hungarian politicians attack “gender” and higher education, they use these concepts as a shorthand for rejecting the liberal world order.

That means Hungary’s approach should serve as a warning, but not a script.

The attacks succeed when the conditions are ripe. And those conditions are not fixed. As Hungary’s recent election makes clear, expecting the worst won’t save U.S. higher education. Treating democratic backsliding as inevitable risks obscuring the very possibility of change.

‘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.