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What We’re Reading this Week, February 16-19

Here’s a selection of articles the federal relations team is reading this week.

Standoff –  Education Department is standing by its controversial guidance to colleges on sexual harassment and sexual assault in response to questions raised by a prominent Senate critic.  Catherine E. Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, defended her agency’s actions in a letter on Wednesday to Sen. James Lankford, who, as head of the Senate’s subcommittee on regulatory affairs and federal management, had accused the department of overreach in pressuring colleges to fight sexual discrimination to comply with the gender-equity law known as Title IX. Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Regular Order – Speaker Ryan has pledged to return Congress to regular order, but what is that exactly? Read more in Roll Call.

Not Exactly – In a country where 40 million people owe upward of $1.2 trillion on their student loans, it’s not hard to imagine why a tale about armed federal agents’ showing up at the door of a Texas man to arrest him over unpaid student loans set the Internet abuzz. But as is the case with many stories that go viral, the truth is a bit more complicated: Mainly, the authorities said they had been trying for years to get the Houston resident, Paul Aker, to pay back a single student loan from almost three decades ago. Read more in the New York Times. 

Slash or Burn – Facing a $940 million budget deficit, Louisiana will stop funding its merit-based scholarship program for the rest of the year. And if the Legislature doesn’t find new sources of revenue by June, Louisiana’s commissioner of higher education warned, the state’s public colleges and universities will have to suspend operations. Read more in Inside Higher Ed. 

Building Bernie Buzz – More Democrats are seeing Sanders as electable. Read more in Political Wire. 

Zika – As late as 2007, there had only been 14 documented Zika cases in the world. Research on the virus was so limited, in fact, that printouts of all the world’s published literature could basically fit into a shoebox. With the explosion, scientists still have five big questions. Read more in Vox. 

Cardboard – The ugly side of e-commerce is all the cardboard it uses, and the environmental impact. Read more in the New York Times. 

Payback – It’s not just the amount of student debt that someone takes on that matters. It also comes down to how well positioned one is to pay it back. And that’s an area where racial disparities show up glaringly – in a new set of student-debt delinquency heat maps released Wednesday by two groups pushing for solutions to income inequality. Read more in the Christian Science Monitor.