The approval marks a sudden reversal for the board. When administrators initially introduced the software, board members spent over an hour debating the merits of utilizing a digital curriculum to evaluate children’s social and emotional health, ultimately delaying the vote due to internal pushback. Yet, just one month later—and with minimal public dialogue—the board shifted its stance and authorized the purchase.

The decision comes at a time when local families are increasingly vocal about the volume of school-related screen time. During initial deliberations, board member Blair Mosner Feltham highlighted these apprehensions, questioning the sheer number of digital tools kids interact with daily. Feltham noted the inherent contradiction of asking children to input deeply personal feelings into a computer simply to transform their raw emotions into aggregated data points for the district.

District officials defended the decision by claiming a standardized social-emotional learning curriculum was necessary across Madison’s 32 elementary schools. Out of 14 competing bids evaluated by an 18-member review panel, the district selected the California-based vendor. Its pricing package ranked as the eighth most expensive submission, with competing quotes climbing as high as $1.6 million.

Sown to Grow, which currently operates in schools across 40 states, requires students to log in, select an emotional emoji, and write a brief reflection about their week. The software utilizes machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to automatically scan responses and flag “concerning” language. These flagged entries are reportedly checked by trained specialists before alerts are pushed to classroom teachers. The company states that it strips personal identifiers from student data to provide broad trend tracking for district leadership.

Nevertheless, the program continues to draw skepticism from parents. Amy Martino, a mother of two students at Thoreau Elementary and co-founder of the local advocacy group Parent Check on Tech, expressed immediate worry upon learning about the platform’s adoption, illustrating a widening rift between administrative tech reliance and parental oversight.

The skepticism voiced by these board members and parents is well-founded. Beyond the unnecessary screen time, the program utilizes emojis to categorize complex feelings for children who are far too young to accurately express themselves in writing—especially compared to a conversation with a real human being.

This platform is yet another example of how progressive administrators have abdicated their fundamental responsibilities to the children in their charge. The likely outcome is the production of a generation of socially and emotionally dependent students who will struggle to function in the real world.

Whatever happened to allowing children to grow up without these intrusive, “touchy-feely” administrative programs, letting them get their emotional and social needs met where they belong: from their parents and families?

*This article was written with the assistance of Google Gemini.

According to preliminary estimates for the 2025–2026 academic year, the average institutional tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time undergraduates reached 57.1 percent. That’s up from 54.5 percent in the previous year and marks the highest point in the last ten years. For all undergraduates combined, the discount rate climbed to 51.3 percent.

While a 57.1 percent discount sounds like a win for families looking at college affordability, it masks a structural crisis within university administration. The reality is that colleges are caught in a hyper-competitive arms race. With the impending demographic cliff—a shrinking pool of high school graduates—institutions are forced to offer massive financial incentives to entice applicants.

An estimated 90 percent of first-time undergraduates received some form of institutional aid this year. Yet despite these aggressive price cuts, baseline student enrollment across participating institutions has remained flat. Colleges aren’t actually growing their student bodies; they are simply paying significantly more per student just to maintain their current class sizes.

The NACUBO report reveals that after adjusting for inflation, average net tuition revenue from all undergraduates fell by 1.9 percent. For first-time students, it fell even sharper, at 2.2 percent.

To survive, independent colleges have attempted to improve retention and graduation rates to offset freshman recruitment losses. However, as NACUBO itself noted, “retention alone is not enough to eliminate financial strain at many tuition-dependent institutions.”

The report underscores the fallacy that tuition is based on what it costs an institution to educate students, as well as the actual value of an education. This trend has been driven by the student loan racket, which has made borrowing to fund a degree all too easy and allowed colleges and universities to ratchet up tuition since they get paid even if the student defaults on the loan. Tuition costs have become equated with the quality of the education received, when in actuality, they were just funding a bloated administrative structure that is now coming home to roost.

In a defiant follow-up video, Hesham—a member of the local Palestinian Youth Movement—remained unapologetic about violating the campus policy.

“This small act that I took waving the Palestinian flag, and the repression that followed it, is a small example of the UC system’s wider complicity toward the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he stated. “I’m demanding that UC Berkeley cuts ties with genocide, cuts ties with companies that are fueling this ongoing genocide.”

Predictably, the incident sparked a viral wave of online outrage from progressive activists, who claimed the move was an act of targeted political censorship. Yet the reality of the situation points to standard, content-neutral rule enforcement. UC Berkeley’s official, pre-published commencement guidelines explicitly list banners, signs, and flags as prohibited items within its graduation venues to prevent views from being obscured and ceremonies from being derailed. The Executive Vice Chancellor’s office had previously issued reminders reinforcing that while students may wear identity-based regalia, carrying large, disruptive objects onto the stage violates university policy.

We commend the UC Berkeley administrators for firmly enforcing their policy. At a time when universities nationwide are facing heavy scrutiny for allowing their campuses to be turned into pro-Palestinian activism camps following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, seeing Berkeley stand behind its policies instead of caving into the left is a welcome change.

To stem the bleeding immediately, the administration has instituted an immediate hiring freeze, halted pay adjustments, and capped nonessential travel.

The immediate catalyst for this latest emergency is a projected, significant drop in incoming out-of-state freshman enrollment. In UO’s case tuition accounts for roughly 80% of its Education and General Fund, with high out-of-state tuition fees heavily subsidizing in-state students to prop up university operations. Nonresident students make up nearly half the student body, meaning even a minor dip in their numbers triggers an outsized financial earthquake.

President Scholz listed various macro-level excuses for the decline, including “demographic shifts,” economic uncertainty, and a “declining trust” in public higher education. These shifts however didn’t just spring up overnight but have been developing for years going back to at least 2020 when Covid changed attitudes about the value of a college education and the explosion of online learning.

The administration ignored these real-world issues and like many colleges and universities continued to operate as if nothing changed. Like most other schools UO suffers from rampant administrative bloat. While specialized administrative offices and non-academic bureaucracies have expanded, the core academic mission has shrunk. Rather than trimming the top-heavy administrative state, the university’s first instinct in past crises has been to target faculty lines and look at eliminating legacy academic programs like classics, religious studies, and German.

The cutback in academic programs is not necessarily a bad thing as enrollment shrinks, but ignoring the administrative bloat is and UO appears to be blind when it comes down to the best ways to trim a bloated budget much to its own peril. If they don’t get a handle on this, these budget cuts will not be last.

The university released a statement Thursday addressing the reversal:

“Due to increased safety concerns related to the speaker and in consultation with public safety professionals and Sharon McMahon, Utah Valley University has decided to proceed without a featured commencement speaker for this year’s ceremony,” “We look forward to coming together as a community to celebrate UVU’s largest graduating class in history, with more than 13,400 graduates, about one-third of whom are the first in their families to graduate from college.”

The initial selection of McMahon drew sharp condemnation from students and community members, including Caleb Chilcutt, president of the UVU chapter of Turning Point USA. Chilcutt issued a strongly worded statement regarding the administration’s choice:

]]> https://www.academia.org/utah-valley-university-gets-a-n-f-for-choosing-charlie-kirk-critic-as-commencement-speaker/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:52:33 +0000 https://www.academia.org/?p=38560 Utah Valley University (UVU) where TPUSA leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September has found itself in the middle of a controversy of its own making. The controversy began when the university announced that their commencement speaker would be Sharon McMahon who is often referred to as “America’s Government Teacher,” and a Kirk critic.

Kirk who was an outspoken conservative and supporter of President Trump was assassinated while speaking to a large group of students and supporters at UVU.

Two days after Kirk’s death McMahon posted parts of quotes from Kirk about Blacks and Muslims, adding “Millions of people feel they were harmed, and the murder that was horrific and should never have happened does not magically erase what was said or done. … But if you were a Charlie Kirk fan, you might not realize why there is so much backlash to posts eulogizing his death.”

Other comments from McMahon have also outraged conservatives who found her selection tone deaf.

“To many Americans, especially if you are Black, LGBTQ or Muslim, Charlie Kirk was not a person who simply engaged in good-faith debates on college campuses,” adding, “It’s important to remember that the incredible tragedy of a public assassination does not erase the harm many experienced from his words and the ensuing actions his followers took.”

McMahon defended her comments in a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune, through a spokesperson stating that she “unequivocally condemned the murder of Charlie Kirk, repeatedly and publicly calling his death a tragedy and stressing that public debate must never be met with violence.”

Outgoing UVU president Astrid Tuminez said in a statement issued by UVU announcing McMahon’s selection

Sharon McMahon is an original. She is a force of nature and a force for good. As a former history teacher, she understands that education can inform, inspire, and instigate courageous action, adding “Sharon’s work reminds us of the power we each hold, and that every individual is mighty in some way. She underlines how each of us can contribute to a vibrant democracy and how strength comes from knowledge, kindness, and collective action. I think our graduates are very lucky to have her as commencement speaker!”

It hasn’t even been a year since the tragic day that Kirk was assassinated which shook the university, the surrounding community and the world at large who were shocked at the brazen nature of his death. Many people are still healing, but that seems to have gone unnoticed by Tuminez and her staff and is a black eye on a fast-growing school.

Chancelor Brandon Creighton outlined the phase out process for programs in an April 9 memo that stated in part the following:

To govern this comprehensive phase-out and ensure statutory compliance for all remaining academic offerings, this document establishes strict course content guidelines. To uphold institutional objectivity, this framework requires the legal recognition of only two human sexes and strictly prohibits the endorsement of a gender spectrum or fluid gender identities as empirical biological science.

To operationalize these standards across all component universities, this document introduces thresholds for SOGI content and establishes the Alternate Materials Rule. The core components of this guidance include:

• System-Wide Program Phase-Out: A formal program review, followed by an admissions freeze, to initiate the closure of all academic credentials centered on SOGI.
• Core Prohibition and Advanced Course Exceptions: A strict prohibition on SOGI content in all core and lower-level undergraduate courses, requiring alternate materials if primary texts center on or include these topics. Conversely, upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses are restricted but feature clear exemptions for strictly defined academic purposes.

Students who are currently enrolled in these programs will be allowed to complete their degrees but no new students will be admitted once the ban takes effect.

These courses expanded rapidly in the last 20-30 years, but with the Trump administration’s war on DEI they have quickly fallen out of favor in conservative states and at colleges and universities that have come under fire from the president himself.

The decision means the department will no longer enforce those agreements, which previously required schools to take specific steps to comply with federal civil rights law regarding gender identity. The affected institutions include the Fife School District in Washington; the Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware; the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District in California; the Sacramento City Unified School District; the Delaware Valley School District in rural eastern Pennsylvania; and Taft College in California.

Both the Obama and Biden administrations had expanded the interpretation of Title IX—which prohibits sex discrimination in education—to include protections for gay and transgender students.

“Today, the Trump Administration is removing the unnecessary and unlawful burdens that prior administrations imposed on schools in its relentless pursuit of a radical transgender agenda,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a DOE news release.

Since taking office last year, President Trump has been dismantling protections granted to gay and transgender students regarding gender identity, bathroom use, and sports participation. The administration has argued that participation in sports should be based on biological sex at birth rather than gender identity, citing an increasing problem of biological males competing in women’s sports and capturing titles that otherwise would have gone to female athletes.

With just under three years remaining in his term, Trump has shown he is serious about restoring what he considers “sanity” to education—and he appears to be just getting started.

The latest school to cancel is Thomaston High School, following complaints from a group of indignant parents. This occurred despite reassurances from Board of Education Chairman Nathan Vieira that the event would be strictly educational and non-political.

The Board’s Stance and McMahon’s Response

Vieira stated, “The Thomaston Board of Education takes community trust seriously… There will be no campaigning, no partisan messaging, and no political endorsements. The event will be supervised by school staff and conducted in accordance with district safety and visitor procedures.”

McMahon did not comment on the most recent cancellation, but told the New York Times last month, after the first school canceled her appearance: “Some have tried to brand this tour as ‘radical,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘partisan indoctrination.’ How absurd. What you see is not politics—it is a shared commitment to our nation’s story.” She added that it “speaks volumes about certain voices in our society that they would seek to distort a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and deprive children of this experience.”

The Persistence of Cancel Culture

It appears some critics cannot tolerate even overtly pro-American history when it concerns our nation’s birth and independence. These activists are making sure “cancel culture” remains alive and well, specifically targeting individuals with whom they personally disagree and puttin politics over education.