Last October Chronicle reporters and editors met to start plotting the package of stories you’ll find in our 2025 Trends Report. This special issue is a cornerstone of our annual calendar, and we aim to make it a durable document — a synthesis of how tectonic shifts we’ve begun to observe will make themselves felt in the year ahead. So the stocktaking process begins early.
This time, with Election Day barreling toward us, many of our glimpses into the future came with a caveat: Of course, we’ll have to see what the election brings.
We now know. Less than two months into his second term, President Donald J. Trump has issued a flurry of orders and actions directed at the sector. Teasing out their implications has become a high-stakes game of daily catch-up. The cumulative effect, as my colleague Jennifer Ruark wrote in a recent special issue on the academic workplace, has been “head-spinning.”
When your head is spinning, it’s hard to train your eyes on the crystal ball. Yet it’s as important as ever to try.
