President Maud S. Mandel announced the establishment of a series of working groups led by senior administrators and discussed the College’s lobbying and advocacy efforts in her opening remarks at the Feb. 12 faculty meeting. Mandel announced the plans in response to what she described as the threats posed to higher education by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“The assault on higher education is well underway,” Mandel said. “[Trump’s] executive orders … have, one after the other, come after our core mission and our enduring values.”
Mandel said that potential disruptions to research funding, threats to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming, and policies that target transgender, immigrant, and international students are of particular concern to the College.
In an interview with the Record, Mandel identified Republican-sponsored bills that propose increasing the excise tax rate on the College’s endowment from the current 1.4 percent to either 10 percent or 21 percent as one of her top concerns. The proposals are part of Congress’ annual budget reconciliation bill, for which negotiations will continue throughout much of the year.
At the meeting, Mandel announced a working group, chaired by Provost Eiko Maruko Siniawer ’97, which will study the potential effects of an endowment tax increase on the College’s budget and investment strategy and advocate against the policy change.
“What’s now called the Endowment Tax Working Group started as coordinated conversations in the late fall about government relations [and] legal, investment, and financial issues raised by proposed legislation to increase the endowment tax,” Siniawer wrote in an email to the Record. The group also includes Associate General Counsel Laura Gura ’06, Special Assistant to the President and Secretary of the Board of Trustees Gina Puc, Vice President for Finance & Operations Mike Wagner, and Chief Investment Officer Abigail Wattley ’05.
The possible endowment tax increase was a major focus of Mandel’s recent trip to Washington, D.C. from Feb. 2 to 5, during which she attended the annual conference of the National Association of Independent Colleges & Universities (NAICU) for the second time.
“I decided to go again this year, given the issues facing higher education,” she said.
Mandel said that she will likely make more trips to Washington in the future, given the shifting relationship between the federal government and institutions of higher education.
“This administration has had a much larger number of policies that they’ve been articulating quickly that have a direct impact on higher education,” she said. “We are responding to more pressures … coming out of the White House.”
While in Washington, Mandel and leaders of other institutions in the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts met with members of the commonwealth’s congressional delegation, largely to discuss endowment tax legislation.
The College, along with three other institutions that Mandel declined to name, recently hired the government relations lobbying firm Lewis-Burke Associates. Mandel said that the College engaging in advocacy practices is not unusual, but that there is no previous record of the College hiring a lobbying firm.
Mandel said that lobbying firms can help track legislation and provide expertise, as well as advocation for the College’s interests. “It gives us some additional capacity on fact-finding and keeping up with current events.”
In addition to the Endowment Tax Working Group, several other working groups were formed last November to look into the College’s response to other policy concerns, according to Chief Communications Officer Meike Kaan. These include one working group supporting immigrant and international students and another focused on supporting transgender students.
The group focused on immigrant and international students is led by Dean of the College Gretchen Long and includes Director of International Student Services Ninah Pretto, Vice President for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leticia S.E. Haynes ’99, Kaan, and General Counsel Jamie Art ’93. The group is focused on supporting students facing visa and documentation issues, Long wrote in an email to the Record.
“We have been consulting with legal experts about how various executive orders might affect our operations as we strive to support all students, faculty, and staff while remaining compliant with state and federal law,” Long wrote.
She noted that the College has not yet changed its admissions policies in response to potential changes to international students’ visa eligibility.
The group has also created a collection of resources, which were available to faculty at the meeting, related to the possible presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on campus. Mandel instructed faculty to refer ICE agents to Campus Safety Services.
“CSS will work together with [the] College Counsel if we are approached by any government agency with questions about any student,” Long wrote.
Another committee, led by Haynes, was formed to assess how the College can respond to any new civil rights policies.
Mandel also discussed recent policies that target transgender people and their access to healthcare, including the NCAA’s recent national ban on trans women’s participation in sports. She said that the College is navigating conflicting state and federal laws on this issue, but that the ban does not affect any current students, Mandel said.
The standing Trans Inclusion Committee, led by Associate Director for Inclusive Learning Environments Aly Corey and Dialogue Facilitator Dre Finley, has been discussing these issues and how to support transgender students, Mandel said.
She also acknowledged a recent executive order specifically targeting DEI programs at institutions with endowments greater than $1 billion, which includes the College.
Following the issuance of a letter from the Department of Education that threatened to rescind federal funding to any institutions that continue many forms of race-based programming on Feb. 18, Mandel issued a follow-up statement to the Record.
“Many experts argue that this interpretation does not have a sound legal basis,” she wrote. “So Williams will promptly consult with educational and civil rights lawyers and others to better understand the issue before we can assess the letter’s impact on the College.”
She added that the future of federal funding for research is similarly unknown, given pending court cases for lawsuits relating to some of Trump’s executive orders. “I urge us all to keep a close eye on those cases — it’s not yet the case that we have to assume the research funding we rely on will disappear,” she said.
In the face of political uncertainty, Mandel said she hopes that members of the College community will remain steadfast in their work supporting the College’s mission.
“We want to do the hard work of educating ourselves, preparing for advocacy, [and] building relationships with people with whom we need to advocate while simultaneously teaching students, doing our research, and continuing to promote all the important things that go on at Williams,” she said.
