It has been a month since Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has spoken publicly about higher education.
During a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on June 6, Ms. DeVos spoke in support of the Trump administration’s budget. Senators from both sides of the aisle criticized the proposal, which calls for steep cuts to a range of education programs, as "difficult" to defend. Still, Ms. DeVos fielded questions from the lawmakers for more than two hours.
Since the hearing, the Education Department has announced major changes. On June 14, Ms. DeVos announced the delay and renegotiation of two key Obama-era consumer regulations aimed at reining in abuses by for-profit colleges. And later in the month, speaking at a closed meeting of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the secretary suggested that higher education’s foundational law should be scrapped.
Throughout that time, however, there has been a public silence from Ms. DeVos. It has been several weeks since her last open news event. There were two events listed as open on Ms. DeVos’s schedule in the middle of June, but when a reporter inquired about them, he was told they had been incorrectly posted by the department’s web team. The schedule was updated to reflect that the events were closed. There are no public events listed on the secretary’s schedule this week.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Silence-From-the-Secretary/240542