In January, wildfires devastated large swaths of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, including Pacific Palisades, shown here on Jan. 13. Area colleges and universities—including Pepperdine, UCLA, Pasadena City College and Caltech—were forced to close, cancel events or provide shelter. Thousands of faculty, staff and students were displaced by the fires; hundreds lost their homes. Some are still suffering the consequences.

President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, appeared for her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Feb. 13. Two weeks later, the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment was confirmed by the Senate, 51 to 45. She vowed to uphold Trump’s mission to streamline the education department and “put herself out of a job.”

Texas A&M University’s Queer Empowerment Council organized a protest March 6 against the Texas A&M system’s efforts to ban drag shows. A district court blocked the ban, arguing that such shows are protected by the First Amendment, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to hear the case early next year. Transgender rights emerged as a major friction point on many public campuses across the country this year, but nowhere more so than in Texas.

Demonstrators gathered in lower Manhattan on March 10 to protest ICE’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student—and green card holder—who had led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus in 2024. A federal judge ordered his release in June. Thousands of other international students faced arrests, visa revocations and deportation amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreigners.

Surrounded by children sitting at desks, President Trump signed an executive order March 20 to start dismantling the Department of Education. Secretary Linda McMahon had already laid off nearly half the department’s staff the week before, effectively shrinking or shuttering offices including the Institute of Education Sciences and a number of regional offices for civil rights.

Ariel Beccia, Julia Marcus and Brittany Charlton (l to r), all affiliated with the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, had their National Institutes of Health grants terminated this spring—a decision that Charlton  unsuccessfully challenged in court. They were among the thousands of researchers who saw their federal funding frozen or cut, often because their work focused on subjects misaligned with the Trump administration’s priorities, such as DEI or climate change. Some researchers have since had their funding restored, but grant-making agencies continue to make changes.

Led by Speaker Mike Johnson, the House narrowly passed the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” Act on May 22, which levied new taxes on colleges, capped graduate student loans and expanded the Pell Grant to workforce training programs, among other things.. President Trump signed the legislation into law July 4.

Harvard President Alan Garber joined in the university’s May 28 graduation celebration amid escalating tensions with the Trump administration, which ordered more than $2 billion in federal funding cut after Harvard refused to acquiesce to a long list of demands.

Black University of Kentucky graduates held their own ceremony off-campus this spring after administrators called off separate commencement celebrations for all affinity groups—including first-gen and LGBTQ+ students—in response to a new state law banning DEI.

On July 15, interim Georgetown president Robert Groves, CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and University of California, Berkeley, chancellor Rich Lyons became the latest university leaders to testify before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which was investigating antisemitism in higher education.

A wave of swatting incidents disrupted the start of classes at campuses around the country in August, including at the University of Colorado Boulder, where police responded to an Aug. 25 call about an active shooter that turned out to be a hoax.

The murder of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10 spurred an outpouring of grief in conservative circles and among student supporters of Turning Point USA. It also heightened partisan tensions on some campuses where faculty members were punished or removed for making online comments about Kirk.