Earlier this month, the Trump administration made nine elite universities an offer they couldn’t refuse: bring in more conservatives while shutting down “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” give up control of admissions and hiring decisions, agree to “biological” definitions of sex and gender, don’t raise tuition for five years, clamp down on student protests, and stay institutionally “neutral” on current events. Do this and you won’t be cut off from “federal benefits,” which could include research funding, student loans, federal contracts, and even student and faculty immigration visas. Instead, you may gain “substantial and meaningful federal grants.”
But the universities are refusing. With the initial deadline of October 20 approaching, four of the nine universities—the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, University of Southern California, and MIT—that received the federal “compact” have announced that they will not sign it.
In addition, the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, today issued a statement calling for the compact to be completely withdrawn.
The compact would “impose unprecedented litmus tests on colleges and universities as a condition for receiving ill-defined ‘federal benefits’ related to funding and grants,” the statement says, and goes on to add that “it offers nothing less than government control of a university’s basic and necessary freedoms—the freedoms to decide who we teach, what we teach, and who teaches… The compact is just the kind of excessive federal overreach and regulation, to the detriment of state and local input and control, that this administration says it is against.”
That is, of course, the irony of the whole situation—it is coming from a Department of Education led by someone who claims to value local control and an end to the federal education bureaucracy but who is instead pushing heavy-handed national restrictions from within the very organization she says should be shuttered. But whatever the approach lacks in basic intellectual consistency, it at least tracks with the views of Vice President JD Vance, himself a Yale graduate, who has in recent years called for conservatives to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
Other forces are fighting back, however. The universities are not generally keen to sell out their institutional values and independence, while states like California have pledged to take action against schools that sign the Trump compact. “If any California university signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding—including Cal grants—instantly,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote after the compact was released. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”
In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced that he supported Penn’s decision and said that he had “engaged closely with university leaders on this.”
Even FIRE, a legal group that has often represented conservatives on college campuses, has issued a statement opposing the compact, saying that “a government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow. That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy.”
But the Trump administration badly wants a win against higher ed. According to the Associated Press, the White House today convened a call with the five other schools (University of Arizona, University of Virginia, University of Texas, Dartmouth, and Vanderbilt).
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