A university, a rural town and their fight to survive Trump's war on higher education

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

71% : Southern Illinois University, just 40 miles north, opened up my world.
62% : And in late February, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which ranks universities by research spending, elevated SIU to its "very high" Research 1 status.
53% : "This is definitely one of those baby-in-the-bathwater moments," said Cecilia Orphan, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Denver, who is a lead researcher with the regional colleges alliance.
52% : There are nearly 500 regional public universities across the U.S., serving around 5 million students -- about half of all undergraduates enrolled in public universities, according to the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges at Appalachian State University.
52% : It is going to have far-reaching consequences for higher education," said Mary Louise Cashel, a clinical psychology professor at SIU whose research, which focuses on youth violence prevention among diverse populations, relies on federal funding.
50% : And in terms of research, while attention goes to large, elite schools, hundreds of the schools spending at least $2.5 million on scientific studies -- the threshold for qualifying as a research school -- are regional public universities.
50% : Since its founding in 1869, the university has turned Carbondale into a tiny cultural mecca and a powerful economic engine in an otherwise vast, rural region that has been battered by the decline of manufacturing and coal mining.
47% : But the federal financial directives and cultural wars roiling higher education are, once again, unsettling the campus and wider community.
45% : That's because diversity also means something more in regional public universities: Many students at SIU come from families that are poor, or barely middle class, and depend on scholarships and mentorship to succeed.
26% : SIU is violating Trump's EO and should be stripped of their federal funding," it read, tagging Elon Musk's cost-cutting federal Department of Government Efficiency.
21% : The post, about an openly gay School of Medicine professor who has been publicly critical of Trump, took off, racking up more than 3 million views and hundreds of shares and comments.
18% : " Schools like SIU, located in a region that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump, may not be the primary targets of his threatened funding cuts, but they -- along with the communities they serve -- stand to lose the most.

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