On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had offered nine schools a deal: manage your universities in a way that aligns with administration priorities and get “substantial and meaningful federal grants," along with other benefits. Failure to accept the bargain would result in a withdrawal of federal programs that would likely cripple most universities. The offer, sent to a mixture of state and private universities, would see the government dictate everything from hiring and admissions standards to grading and has provisions that appear intended to make conservative ideas more welcome on campus.
The document was sent to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia. However, independent reporting indicates that the administration will ultimately extend the deal to all colleges and universities.
Ars has obtained a copy of the proposed "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," which makes the scope of the bargain clear in its introduction. "Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits," it suggests, while mentioning that those benefits include access to fundamental needs, like student loans, federal contracts, research funding, tax benefits, and immigration visas for students and faculty.
It is difficult to imagine how it would be possible to run a major university without access to those programs, making this less a compact and more of an ultimatum.
Poorly thought through
The Compact itself would see universities agree to cede admissions standards to the federal government. The government, in this case, is demanding only the use of "objective" criteria such as GPA and standardized test scores as the basis of admissions decisions, and that schools publish those criteria on their websites. They would also have to publish anonymized data comparing how admitted and rejected students did relative to these criteria.
The micromanaging of admissions extends to foreign students, as the document warns that admitting them risks "saturating the campus with noxious values such as anti-Semitism and other anti-American values, creating serious national security risks." So every campus will have to cap foreign admissions at 15 percent of the student population. Those who are accepted will need to sit through instruction on American civics.
At the same time, the document is clearly calling for an affirmative action program for conservative ideas. "Signatories to this compact commit themselves to fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus," the Compact reads. "A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas."
Other specific proposals echo those that were present in a set of demands made to Harvard: assess viewpoint diversity on campus and take steps to ensure it is present "not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit." Universities must also prevent anyone protesting on campus, including non-students, from disrupting classes or study, or heckling other students.
One area where viewpoint diversity isn't welcome, however, is sex and gender. "Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting 'male,' 'female,' 'woman,' and 'man' according to reproductive function and biological processes." First Amendment rights are also targeted, as anyone representing the university "will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university."
The Compact also intends to micromanage grades to ensure they "only rigorously reflect the demonstrated mastery of a subject." Again, schools would be expected to post anonymized grade distributions so that grade inflation or deflation could be detected. Note that it's technically possible for entire classes to demonstrate mastery of a topic, which would, based on this standard, result in badly skewed grade distributions; there's no reason to expect that every class will produce a neat bell curve of grades. The fact that the people preparing this document don't seem aware of this provides an indication that these demands were not carefully thought through.
Also in the realm of poorly considered ideas: Any university that has an endowment that's worth more than $2 million per student will be required to give students free tuition if they're majoring in the hard sciences. Not only will that incentivize students to start in those fields and switch majors as late as possible, but it comes at a time when the administration's attacks on science and education are putting the job prospects of science majors at serious risk. Yet, at the same time, the Compact also demands that schools inform students of the earning potential of different majors.
Not real reform
There's a lot more there: demands for a five-year tuition freeze, compliance with money laundering rules for donations, hiring third parties to ensure compliance, etc. Each university will have to set up an entirely new bureaucracy to ensure that it can follow all these additional rules—in part because failure to do so will get them referred to the Department of Justice. At the same time, however, the Compact wants university administration to be reduced.
The number of demands that undercut the goals that are supposedly motivating other demands in this document make it very clear that it's not a serious attempt at educational reform. Instead, it can be best understood as part of the administration's larger campaign to cripple US universities and the science that goes on there.
As far back as 2021, now-Vice President JD Vance was saying, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” And the administration has been very blatant about pursuing that attack, using federal funding to try to force universities to make changes that have little to nothing to do with the reasons the funding was given in the first place. The Compact fits in directly with the larger campaign by giving universities a stark choice: give up control over basic university functions to this administration, or face sanctions that will essentially eliminate the ability to function as a research university.
For that research, it also represents an abandonment of the idea that the key determinant in funding should be scientific merit, a principle that has guided the US research endeavor for decades. Now, compliance with administration demands can overrule scientific merit in all circumstances, a situation that reinforces an executive order that placed the results of peer review by scientists behind political considerations evaluated by bureaucrats.
There is no way that these changes will do anything other than cripple the US research effort, with downstream impacts both domestically and globally.
