Why we built The Quad

Mission

Keep one public, plain-language record of the federal call to action and how Maryland's colleges and universities answer it: the original document, the 7 questions it asks, the people who shaped it and where they stood, and a running tracker of which institutions have published a response. No login, no paywall, no need to already know who any of these people are.

Data sources

• U.S. Department of Education · A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards (August 3, 2026)The document this project is built around. The letter as the department issued it, mirrored here so it survives a URL change.
• The Baltimore Banner, Ellie Wolfe · Johns Hopkins president helped craft Trump's new higher education framework (August 6, 2026)Subscription required. The source for who was consulted, how, and the reaction at Hopkins. Quoted here in brief with attribution; not reproduced.
• Bloomberg · McMahon Asks Colleges to Pledge Campus Reforms by End of 2026 (August 3, 2026)Subscription required. Named the four presidents consulted.
• Gallup, Jeffrey M. Jones · U.S. Public Trust in Higher Ed Rises From Recent Low (July 15, 2025)The trust figure the call to action leans on. Gallup's own framing is that confidence rose for the first time in a decade, which cuts against a simple decline narrative.
• The Atlantic, Ronald J. Daniels · Why We Ended Legacy Admissions at Johns Hopkins (January 2020)Subscription required. Daniels on the admissions change that predates the federal ask by five years.

Data types

How it works

1. The primary document is pulled from ed.gov and mirrored here, so the text stays readable even if the original URL moves.
2. The seven questions are transcribed from that document. The "reasoning given" under each one summarizes the argument the department makes for asking it, and is our summary, not a quote.
3. The people roster is built from published reporting. Everyone listed is a public figure acting in a public role, and each entry says what they did and cites where the claim comes from.
4. The institution list is every degree-granting college and university in Maryland. Response status is checked by hand against each institution's own website, and anything unchecked stays marked not reviewed rather than being guessed.
5. Everything renders from one flat file, webapp/public/quad.json. There is no scraper, no database, and no AI in this project. Updating it is a text edit and a deploy.

Key roles

U.S. Department of Education and the Secretary of Education, who issued the call to action. University presidents and governing boards, who are being asked to answer it. The Association of American Universities, through which the consulted presidents routed their feedback. Faculty governance bodies and AAUP chapters, who have raised process objections. The University System of Maryland, Morgan State University, St. Mary's College of Maryland, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, and Maryland's independent colleges and universities, whose responses this project tracks.

What this project will not do

We do not republish other people's journalism. The reporting that surfaced this story is subscription-supported. We quote it briefly, with attribution, and link to it. We do not reproduce articles or reader comment threads, and we encourage you to read the originals at the source.

We do not infer silence. An institution is only ever marked as having published, or having declined, when there is something to point at. Absence of a check is recorded as absence of a check.

We do not grade the answers.Whether a given response is adequate is a judgment for readers, faculty, students, and voters. This project's job is to make sure the responses are findable in one place.

Caveats

Snapshot, not a live feed. The tracker currently covers 26 institutions and was last updated on August 9, 2026. The deadline is December 31, 2026, so expect this page to change through the fall.

Community colleges are in scope but not yet listed. The federal ask went to every postsecondary institution. Maryland has 16 community colleges that are not in the table yet.

The framing is contested and we say so. The call to action asserts that public trust in universities is at a record low. The Gallup survey it cites reported the first increase in confidence in a decade. Both are linked above so you can read them yourself.