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☀️Sunny day with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 7:54 p.m.

Today we explore the painful decisions facing one small college as it confronts sweeping changes to the higher ed landscape. But first: Gov. Maura Healey signed a bill yesterday expanding protections for health care workers and patients seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. That means the state will: limit the release of sensitive patient data to out-of-state individuals; allow doctors to write prescriptions using their practice name instead of their own; and require that abortion be offered whenever it’s deemed medically necessary.

“It’s a true honor today to celebrate a law that will save lives, including my own, and so many other trans people who I know,” said Dallas Ducar, Fenway Health’s executive vice president of donor engagement and external relations. “This will save families, will protect families and remind our country what leadership looks like.”

Four Things to Know

1. Gov. Maura Healey’s administration is considering a voluntary program to buy out homeowners whose properties are in areas prone to coastal flooding. They’re studying how that might work and are expected to make a recommendation this summer.

It could be a way to protect both people and property, said Bryan McCormack, who studies coastal hazards at the Woods Hole Sea Grant and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension. “It’s a very tough conversation around, 'Which properties do you acquire? Which ones do you not acquire? How do you gauge who needs this the most and what environments need it the most?’” he said.

2. It’s been nine months since voters in Massachusetts passed a law that says the state’s auditor should be allowed to audit the legislature. So why hasn’t the audit started? 

“The number-one goal of everybody involved in this on Beacon Hill is to keep us out of the courtroom, so that we can’t get a decision, so that this will linger on forever,” said State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, who ran on the issue and campaigned in favor of the ballot question. “It is not democratic. It is, in fact, anti-democratic.”

3. A man in East Boston is filing a legal claim against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying agents violated his constitutional rights when they detained him for two days in May. José Pineda, 60, is in the U.S. legally under the Temporary Protected Status program, but said agents ignored him when he tried to show them his documents. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

His wife, Mercedes Pineda, told GBH News that her husband is back home but often can’t sleep and “wakes up yelling and terrified out of fear.” “We want these detentions to stop happening,” she said. “We don’t want what happened to us to happen to other families.”

4. It’s been 349 years since English settlers killed approximately 250 Native people, including children, near what is now Greenfield. For the last decade, a group of native historians and researchers have been putting together an account of what happened. 

“I find it incredibly important for people to know who was here, who were the victims and that those victims’ descendants or their tribal relations are still here,” said Native historian David Brule, president of the nonprofit Nolumbeka Project and a member of the Nehantic Tribal Council. “There are living Nipmuc numbering in the thousands in Massachusetts.”

Clark University braces for a harsh new reality as higher ed recession looms

People usually feel a bit odd talking about colleges and universities as businesses, said David Fithian, president of Clark University in Worcester. But that’s what they are, he said.

“We have to be able to generate resources to reinvest in the institution — to pay faculty and staff to work and support our students,” Fithian said.

And the financial reality in higher education is changing fast. A lot of the national focus on how colleges are dealing with the Trump administration’s policies on research, funding and immigration has been on big-name schools like Harvard. But smaller colleges, like Clark, are also thinking about how to make it through.

“We’re seeing pressure on any federal funding, whether it’s research funding or potentially even financial aid for students,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee. “We’re also seeing the possibility that international students will not be able to come to the United States.”

At Clark, about a third of undergraduate students and two-thirds of grad students are international. And federal grant funding is less reliable than it once was.

“Whether it’s visa issues or the perception that America may not be the best place right now, we’re expecting some negative effects,” Fithian said. “We’re prepared to deal with that financially.”

University administrators are trying to adapt. That means cutting faculty — between 25 and 30% of professors in the coming years — and changing course offerings to target fields that prospective students might see as more relevant, like climate, media and computing and health and human behavior.

Political science professor Cyril Ghosh said he thinks the U.S. is giving up its role as a higher education leader — but that colleges should focus on their missions: getting students ready for the workforce and the world.

“Internationalization is a good thing. I’m proud of the fact that I walk around campus and it’s extremely diverse,” he said.

Read Kirk Carapezza’s full reporting here.