The University of Virginia and Dartmouth College have become the latest higher ed institutions to publicly reject the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Now just three of the nine institutions that the federal government originally presented with the document have yet to announce whether they will sign.
UVA announced Friday that it opposes the offer of yet-unrevealed special funding benefits in exchange for signing the compact. The statement came the day of an on-campus demonstration urging university leaders not to sign. Dartmouth unveiled its response Saturday morning. Both rejections came despite the universities attending a meeting Friday with White House officials about the deal.
“As I shared on the call, I do not believe that the involvement of the government through a compact—whether it is a Republican- or Democratic-led White House—is the right way to focus America’s leading colleges and universities on their teaching and research mission,” Dartmouth president Sian Leah Beilock wrote in a message to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, which the president also shared with her community.
“Our universities have a responsibility to set our own academic and institutional policies, guided by our mission and values, our commitment to free expression, and our obligations under the law,” Beilock wrote. “Staying true to this responsibility is what will help American higher education build bipartisan public trust and continue to uphold its place as the envy of the world.”
Beilock hasn’t been a publicly outspoken opponent of Trump; at a Heterodox Academy conference in June, she said, “It’s really a problem to say just because the administration, with many things that we all object to, is suggesting something inherently means it’s wrong.” But she also said back then that “we shouldn’t have the government telling us what to do.”
In a message Friday to McMahon, also shared with the community, UVA interim president Paul Mahoney wrote that “the integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship. A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.”
The compact asks colleges to agree to overhaul or abolish departments “that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” without further defining what those terms mean. It also asks universities, among other things, to commit to not considering transgender women to be women; reject foreign applicants “who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values”; and freeze “effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.”
In exchange for these agreements, the White House has said signatories would “be given [funding] priority when possible as well as invitations to collaborate with the White House.” But the administration hasn’t revealed how much extra funding universities would be eligible for, and the nine-page compact doesn’t detail the potential benefits. The compact, as well as a Thursday statement from the White House, can also be read as threatening colleges’ current federal funding if they don’t sign.
Mahoney told McMahon that his university agrees “with many of the principles outlined in the Compact, including a fair and unbiased admissions process, an affordable and academically rigorous education, a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality, and equal treatment of students, faculty, and staff in all aspects of university operations.”
“Indeed,” Mahoney wrote, “the University of Virginia leads in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them. We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals.”
The decisions make UVA the fifth and Dartmouth the sixth of the nine initial institutions presented with the deal to publicly turn it down. UVA is also the first public university and first Southern institution to reject it. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the first of the nine to turn it down, on Oct. 10, followed by Brown University and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Southern California.
UVA’s rejection of the compact comes after the Trump administration successfully pressured then–UVA president James Ryan to step down in June. The Justice Department had demanded he step down. The UVA Board of Visitors voted to dissolve the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion office in March, but multiple conservative alumni groups and legal entities complained that Ryan failed to eliminate DEI from all corners of campus.
A coalition of groups opposed to the compact, including the UVA chapter of the American Association of University Professors, praised the rejection in a Friday news release.
“Today’s events demonstrate the power of collective organizing and action to defeat tyranny,” the statement said. “We hope that we serve as an example to the other public universities that received the ‘Compact’—the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Arizona—giving them the courage and clarity not to buckle.”
UVA faculty groups had overwhelmingly urged university leaders to reject the compact. And hundreds of demonstrators showed up to the anticompact rally Friday on the UVA campus in Charlottesville, Cville Right Now reported.
Alongside Arizona and UT Austin, Vanderbilt University also hasn’t revealed its decision. But after MIT announced its refusal of the compact, Trump offered it to all U.S. colleges and universities to sign.
White House officials met Friday with some universities about the proposal. The Wall Street Journal reported that UVA, Dartmouth, Arizona, UT Austin and Vanderbilt were invited, along with universities that weren’t part of the original nine: Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston compared the compact in a statement to efforts from former presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who she said “called on our universities to be of greater service to the nation.”
“President Trump has called on universities to do their part in returning America to its economic and diplomatic successes of the past: a nation of full employment, pioneering innovations that change the world, and committed to merit and hard work as the ingredients to success,” she said, adding the administration hosted “a productive call” with several universities.
A White House official said UVA and the other seven invited universities participated in the call.
“They now have the baton to consider, discuss, and propose meaningful reforms, including their form and implementation, to ensure college campuses serve as laboratories of American greatness,” Huston said.
