The Trump administration’s initial effort to convince universities to join its “Compact for Academic Excellence” did not go well. Of the original nine colleges and universities, so far none has signed it, and seven—Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Universities of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Southern California and Virginia—have loudly and forcefully rejected it, citing “our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone” (MIT) and “the government’s lack of authority to dictate our curriculum or the content of academic speech” (Brown).
The Trump administration made more headway with its earlier efforts to force a “deal” on one university at a time. But that was never going to be enough. An authoritarian needs to establish control over the entire higher education sector, not just a handful of institutions. But the truth is, this government does not have the legal leverage or even the staff to negotiate bespoke agreements with the thousands of colleges and universities in the United States.
The compact is an effort to overcome that problem. But it is also a gift. It has flipped the default: Now collective action does not necessarily require affirmative acts like banding together to file a lawsuit (although several are warranted). Collective action can simply take the form of nonacquiescence. All university leaders need to do is … nothing.
Last week, the Trump administration—apparently unafraid to look desperate—decided to open the compact to any American college or university that will accept its terms. Suddenly, literally anyone affiliated with any college or university—faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, trustees, donors—has the opportunity to use their voice to help persuade their institution not to sign, as their counterparts at the original nine invitees have been doing rather vociferously and, in six cases so far, successfully. By opening the compact so broadly, the government is risking, or inviting, an equally broad response: a recognition throughout the vast American higher education sector that the integrity and value of our whole enterprise depend on independence from government control.
Regardless of their politics, every university leader should reject this compact. University leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to plan ahead on a time scale longer than three years. As Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT, explained, “America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition,” not special “preferences” for institutions that submit to government control. Future federal governments are much more likely to embrace Kornbluth’s view than Trump’s. It does not put a university in a strong position to compete for future faculty and students if the university enthusiastically agrees to toe one administration’s political line.
To sign the compact is to invite a breathtaking degree of federal government control. Colleges signing it agree that in the future, if the Department of Justice—perhaps acting on orders from the president—“finds” that the university is disobeying any one of the compact’s many ambiguous commands, the department can take away all the university’s federal funding for a year or more. That includes not only scientific research grants but also student loans or Pell Grants, potentially even the university’s 501(c)(3) status—and not only future funds but also, incredibly, funds already spent that must somehow be returned.
The ambiguous rules that signing institutions must avoid transgressing are numerous. Signing universities must “abolish” or “transform” academic departments that “belittle” “conservative ideas.” They must screen out foreign students with “anti-American values” and those with “hostility” toward any of America’s “allies.” They must punish students or faculty whose speech, in the DOJ’s opinion, “support[s]” any group the government deems a terrorist group, which would include “antifa” as well as Hamas (and the government has a long recent record of defining “support for Hamas” extremely broadly, so that it encompasses much pro-Palestinian speech).
They must commit to “defining” and “interpreting” gender in the government’s preferred way, which denies that transgender people exist. Signing institutions must obtain, to the DOJ’s satisfaction, “a broad spectrum of viewpoints” not only in the university as a whole, but “within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.” They must admit students on the basis of sufficiently “objective” criteria. Leaders of signing universities must avoid speaking out about “societal and political events” beyond those that directly affect the university.
Not a single one of those terms is self-defining. The arbiter of whether a university is fulfilling these vague promises is a Department of Justice that has a record of acting in bad faith and takes orders from a notoriously mercurial president. No university leader or trustee can truthfully say that it fulfills their fiduciary responsibility to sign their school up for this.
The compact is also blatantly illegal. The Trump administration has cited no statutes that give it the authority to boss universities around in this way, because there aren’t any. Many of the compact’s provisions listed above—and others—violate the First Amendment. Clear black-letter law holds that what the government cannot impose by law, it also cannot impose as a condition of receiving government funds.
It is crucial to keep in mind the larger context here: the rise of an authoritarian regime that seeks to undermine the independence of many types of civil society institutions, not just universities. The national governments in both Turkey and Hungary have increased political control over their universities as part of their consolidation of power, but neither has gone as far as this compact would go in putting universities under the government’s thumb. To sign the compact is to participate in an authoritarian project.
Any university leaders still inclined to join the compact should consider a final argument: The dollars and cents simply don’t add up. The compact requires, among many other things, a five-year tuition freeze. In the high-inflation environment of the second Trump administration, this is very costly. (At today’s 3 percent inflation rate, it amounts to a 16 percent cut in real terms over five years; if inflation continues to rise, that could easily become a 20 to 25 percent cut.)
The government offers a vague, nonbinding promise that it will give signing institutions extra research grants, but such grants do not easily make up for lost tuition in an environment of rising costs. The grants require doing the research; that eats up most of the money. Any college that becomes dependent on extra grants, beyond those they would have been qualified to receive without the compact, is going to be in big fiscal trouble down the line.
This compact has vast implications, which deserve careful study. For faculty, staff, students, parents, donors and alumni hoping for a no but willing to settle for silence, time is your friend; inaction is your goal. A faculty committee would certainly be in order. If you do nothing, and most other universities do nothing, the government will have no more leverage over your institution than over any other, and academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge and truth will continue for another day.
