The U.S. has now experienced more than 100 days of Trump’s power. His strategy of flooding the zone makes it difficult to focus on the actual harm to real people. The human mind is overwhelmed by enormity. How many of us have momentarily confused billions with trillions — a difference of only one letter but a super-highway stretch in dollars? For many, it was the story of Anne Frank that brought home the reality of 6 million Jews lost in the Holocaust. Generalities often wind up in that vast cognitive dustbin. The particular stays with us emotionally and intellectually.

Significant cuts and chaos from the dismantling of USAID? It’s personal when we think of babies dying in refugee camps in Syria — a country that has just extracted itself from years of civil war and has a chance for a reasonable government not hostile to the United States.

Since higher education is my beat, let me focus for a moment not on the large-scale issues — the dismantling of the Department of Education, the $330 billion in cuts to higher education proposed by the House GOP, the $175 million in frozen research funding at Penn for arbitrary reasons unrelated to research, and other big-ticket items. Instead, let’s look at something small in size but large in impact — a little engine that could that is now being impeded in the name of reducing waste and fraud.

PHENND’s remarkable impacts

Since 1987, PHENND (the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development) has set an example for cooperation among colleges and universities. PHENND offers pre-college mentoring and coaching for low-income high school students, providing counselling on the full extent of college opportunities. It runs summer programming and internships offering work experience and support to ensure further education. Most important, PHENND brings together Philadelphia-area colleges and universities, promoting partnerships that make every participating institution stronger.

You may have read about PHENND in a recent Inquirer article highlighting the devastating effects of DOGE cuts of $17.9 million to AmeriCorps, a domestic version of the Peace Corps established by the Clinton administration in 1993, and a major funder of PHENND. Thanks to Governor Josh Shapiro for joining a coalition of state attorneys general to sue the Trump administration over its cuts to AmeriCorps. (Where, by the way, is Republican Attorney General David W. Sunday, Jr., in these lawsuits? His website is entitled “Protecting All Pennsylvanians,” so why isn’t he doing his job?)

While lamenting the AmeriCorps losses, I want to expand the grief by highlighting the absurdity of undermining PHENND’s persistent efforts in educational reform. These efforts should be promoted as a national model of efficiency and effectiveness. PHENND has received national recognition as a local partner in Bringing Theory to Practice’s (BT2P) Paradigm Project, a multi-year initiative focused on systemic change across higher education. From my position on the national Working Group of the Paradigm Project, I have witnessed PHENND’s accomplishments firsthand.

PHENND is a consortium of 25 colleges and universities in the greater Philadelphia area (Penn, Temple, Drexel, Community College of Philadelphia, LaSalle, Villanova, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Arcadia and several more). According to its website, “The consortium actively seeks to revitalize local communities and schools and foster civic responsibility among the region’s colleges and universities.” Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships houses and administratively manages PHENND.

PHENND can claim credit for a tighter relationship between Temple and the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP), helping to build trust between the two institutions over time. Two years into the establishment of the College Success Professional Learning Community, when CCP is offered a grant opportunity, they reach out to Temple to collaborate, and vice versa.

This February, PHENND convened a conference entitled, “Navigating Complex Financial Aid Situations,” bringing together practitioners assisting families applying for financial aid under unusual circumstances, including refugees and students granted asylum, and unhoused students in the foster care system. CASE (College Access & Success Ecosystem) and the Philadelphia College Prep Roundtable co-sponsored. Financial aid administrators from Temple, Gwynedd Mercy, and CCP volunteered as panelists. Representatives from the Philadelphia Election Fund, HIAS PA and Schoolhouse Connection lent their expertise as program speakers. Colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, as well as families and students need this hard-to-get information, and PHENND made sure they got it.

The justification for DOGE’s chainsaw is to reduce waste and fraud. I’ve rarely seen a more blatant example of the psychological defense mechanism called “projection,” attributing one’s own unacceptable qualities to others.

Since 2018, PHENND has worked with the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) to establish budgeted positions called Assistant Program Coordinator for Community Partnerships (APC-CP). Today approximately 15 Philadelphia public schools have an APC-CP, specifically charged with connecting the school with the local community.

PHENND works with the School District and the Mayor’s Office of Education to oversee the Community Schools program, providing joint training for personnel from VISTA and SDP.

PHENND’s director, Hillary Kane, has led the organization for 25 years, providing continuity, creativity and talent. She is especially successful in attracting grants and other funding resources. Janine Wright, Manager of K-12 Partnerships, has been with PHENND since 2020 — just in time to keep partnerships thriving through the pandemic. Kane and Wright are leaders who bring people together — something all too rare in Philadelphia education settings. Through PHENND, they build relationships to share resources and information — and to encourage collaboration and the cross pollination of ideas. PHENND raises money, saves money, and creates opportunities for cooperation and creativity.

I have often lamented the lack of cooperation and collaboration among Philadelphia-area educational institutions. For a quarter century, PHENND has been chugging along, bringing colleges and universities together, in short, doing better at that than anyone else in this city. PHENND’s website states that its primary mission is “to support our member campuses with their own community partnership programs. PHENND also coordinates its own programs through which area campuses can collaborate on city-wide or regional initiatives for greater impact.”

Here are a few of these programs:

• PHENND Fellows (an AmeriCorps VISTA project that places recent college graduates at local nonprofits and public schools)
• Summer Associates (enrolls recently graduated high school seniors in 8-week Vista positions)
• College Success Professional Learning Community (focused on systemic change across higher education), bringing together institutions like Temple and CCP, at the level where real, long-term work is done.
• West Philadelphia Promise Corps (a collaboration of school leaders, community members, families and youth advocates to support high school students in post-secondary planning)
• College Success Network (aimed at increasing college degree completion among low-income and first-generation students in the Philadelphia region)
• Social media outreach to twelfth graders applying for FAFSA for the first time

PHENND also sponsors local events, workshops, and an annual conference. The 2025 conference entitled, “From Financial Aid to Economic Inclusion,” was held on Feb 21, at Arcadia University and brought together 92 attendees from 14 Philadelphia-area institutions, plus two from outside the region.

Among the brutal and unjustified attacks on higher education, there is some truth in the criticism of elitism and lack of partnerships across educational levels and with local communities. PHENND is an example of reform in exactly the right direction. And yet DOGE is chainsawing its effectiveness through cuts to AmeriCorps and draconian freezes and reductions at Penn and at the other 25 colleges and universities that form the PHENND consortium.

Trump and DOGE should look in the mirror

The justification for DOGE’s chainsaw is to reduce waste and fraud. I’ve rarely seen a more blatant example of the psychological defense mechanism called “projection,” attributing one’s own unacceptable qualities to others.

Neil Steinberg, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, draws lessons from Tolstoy’s War and Peace for our current situation. (Another instance of the humanities helping us through life events.) Steinberg writes, “We follow rulers because they follow us, leading us where we want to go … The present dynamic can be hard to grasp. The United States is set up to dilute power — Congress abdicating its traditional role is a major factor in the current disaster.” In other words, we the people must exercise power in every peaceful way available to us.

What we can do:

• Bombard Congressional offices with accounts of DOGE’s own waste and fraud.
• Bombard Congressional offices with demands that the federal budget now under consideration support work of proven efficiency and effectiveness.
• Encourage Penn, Temple, Drexel, and other colleges and universities in the PHENND consortium to make up for the removal of AmeriCorps funding. Contributing funds to PHENND during a time when these universities themselves are undergoing massive and unjustified cuts may be particularly hard to do. But such unified responses are instances of power invested in what is right.
• If you are able, contribute philanthropically to PHENND and/or to the AmeriCorps emergency fund. You can donate to this Philly fund designated specifically for Philadelphia AmeriCorps members here.

Elaine Maimon, Ph.D., is the author of Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation. Her long career in higher education has encompassed top executive positions at public universities as well as distinction as a scholar in rhetoric/composition. Her co-authored book, Writing In The Arts and Sciences, has been designated as a landmark text. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.

MORE FROM ELAINE MAIMON