Ever since Miami Dade College announced last month that it was donating land for the construction of Donald J. Trump’s presidential library, the community college has faced criticism. Now it is fighting in court to prevent a public hearing on the deal, which would resolve a lawsuit brought by a citizen who has argued the move is illegal.
At a Sept. 23 board meeting, Miami Dade College transferred land to the state of Florida to be used for Trump’s presidential library. Critics alleged that the meeting was rushed, failed to offer adequate public notice on the specifics of the deal and lacked any discussion or debate; a public notice referenced only a “potential real estate transaction” as the reason for the meeting.
Some estimates have put the value of the 2.6-acre site in downtown Miami at $250 million to $300 million, though others say it is worth $67 million. But regardless of the dollar amount, Miami Dade College is giving the land away for free.
Marvin Dunn, a local historian, sued to block the transfer, alleging in his lawsuit that the Board of Trustees “unquestionably violated” state anticorruption laws. Dunn argued in a court filing that “depriving the public of reasonable notice of this proposed decision was a plain violation of the Sunshine Act and of the Florida Constitution” and asked for an injunction to block the transfer.
Judge Mavel Ruiz of Florida’s 11th Judicial Circuit granted Dunn a temporary injunction earlier this month, noting that he is likely to prove his claims about sunshine law violations, but she did not altogether block the land transfer. She also left the door open for the Board of Trustees to redo the deal.
“It is understood that the board can provide the reasonable disclosure and convey this property as they see fit,” Ruiz said. “That’s why this is not a case, at least for this court, rooted in politics.”
Jesus Suarez, an attorney for Continental Strategy (founded in 2022 by former Republican lawmaker Richard Corcoran, who was later tapped to lead New College of Florida), which is representing Miami Dade College, has contended that the deal is completely aboveboard.
“The law doesn’t require that there be any specificity in the notice,” Suarez has argued. College lawyers also said they would appeal the ruling to temporarily block the transfer.
State officials have bristled at Ruiz’s temporary injunction. Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, who has assigned members of his staff to assist the college in its legal battle, told The Miami Herald the temporary injunction is not technically in place because it was not issued as a written order.
Dunn, meanwhile, is seeking to expedite legal proceedings, aiming for a trial to begin by January.
While Ruiz emphasized that the case is not about politics, the MDC board, which is appointed by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, is overwhelmingly comprised of Republican donors. Board chair Michael Bileca and trustee Jose Felix Diaz are also former GOP lawmakers.
Of the seven trustees, six have donated to Republican candidates and causes. Miami Dade College president Madeline Pumariega, who has defended the way the board handled the transfer, has also donated to GOP candidates, though she has given to Democrats in the past as well. (Most of the presidents at Florida’s 40 public institutions have either Republican ties or past donations.)
Miami Dade College officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
In early March, less than two months after President Donald Trump took office, his administration canceled $400 millionin federal research funding to the Ivy League institution.The funding cut came just days after federal officials announced a probe into the university, claiming it failed to protect Jewish students from harassment.
More civil rights investigations and funding freezes followed — at Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University,University of California, Los Angeles and others. Along with allegations related to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests, the administration has attacked diversity efforts and policies allowing transgender women to compete on sports teams aligning with their gender identity.
The first to face a funding hit, Columbia in March also became the first university to agree to a host of demands from the Trump administration to see its federal funding restored.
The university then cut a larger deal in July. That agreement included a $221 million payment to the federal government,as well as academic and policy changes, in exchange for having its suspended funding mostly restored.Despite concerns in the higher education world about Columbia’s concessions, Brown, Penn and the University of Virginia also inked their own accords with the administration to resolve investigations.
Other deals could follow. Harvard, for example, has been supposedly on the cusp of a deal with the administration for months now — according to periodic news reports — as it seeks an end to a multi-front attack on the university by Trump’s government.
Moreover, the administration has directly offered priority for federal funding to select universities that agree to a broad set of terms covering academics, tuition, speech and other areas historically left to institutions to decide. So far, seven have rejected the compact and none have formally accepted, though Trump appeared to open the offer up to all colleges earlier in October.
Here’s a look at the deals signed so far between colleges and the government — and the impact on the institutions involved.
UVA officials told the Trump administration that they seek no special treatment.
Daxia Rojas/AFP via Getty Images
On a day of campus demonstrations urging officials to reject the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” the University of Virginia announced Friday that it opposes the president’s offer of yet-unrevealed special funding benefits in exchange for signing.
“The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship,” interim president Paul Mahoney wrote in a message Friday to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, which he shared with the university community. “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 decision makes UVA the fifth of the nine initial institutions presented with the deal to publicly turn it down. It’s 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 anti-compact rally Friday on the UVA campus in Charlottesville, Cville Right Nowreported.
Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University also haven’t revealed their decisions. 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, Arizona, Dartmouth, 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 calls 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.
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.
Two months after Education Secretary Linda McMahon was confirmed, she and a small team from the department met with leadership from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, an advocacy group that works on behalf of millions of students with dyslexia and other disorders.
Jacqueline Rodriguez, NCLD’s chief executive officer, recalled pressing McMahon on a question raised during her confirmation hearing: Was the Trump administration planning to move control and oversight of special education law from the Education Department to Health and Human Services?
Rodriguez was alarmed at the prospect of uprooting the 50-year-old Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which spells out the responsibility of schools to provide a “free, appropriate public education” to students with disabilities. Eliminating the Education Department entirely is a primary objective of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has guided much of the administration’s education policy. After the department is gone, Project 2025 said oversight of special education should move to HHS, which manages some programs that help adults with disabilities.
But the sprawling department that oversees public health has no expertise in the complex education law, Rodriguez told McMahon.
“Someone might be able to push the button to disseminate funding, but they wouldn’t be able to answer a question from a parent or a school district,” she said in an interview later.
For her part, McMahon had wavered during her confirmation hearing on the subject. “I’m not sure that it’s not better served in HHS, but I don’t know,” she told Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who shared concerns from parents worried about who would enforce the law’s provisions.
But nine days into a government shutdown that has furloughed most federal government workers, the Trump administration announced that it was planning a drastic “reduction in force” that would lay off more than 450 people, including almost everyone who works in the Office of Special Education Programs. Rodriguez believes the layoffs are a way that the administration plans to force the special education law to be managed by some other federal office.
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The Education Department press office did not respond to a question about the administration’s plans for special education oversight. Instead, the press office pointed to a social media post from McMahon on Oct. 15. The fact that schools are “operating as normal” during the government shutdown, McMahon wrote on X, “confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary.”’
Yet in that May meeting, Rodriguez said she was told that HHS might not be the right place for IDEA, she recalled. While the new department leadership made no promises, they assured her that any move of the law’s oversight would have to be done with congressional approval, Rodriguez said she was told.
The move to gut the office overseeing special education law was shocking to families and those who work with students with disabilities. About 7.5 million children ages 3 to 21 are served under IDEA, and the office had already lost staffers after the Trump administration dismissed nearly half the Education Department’s staff in March, bringing the agency’s total workforce to around 2,200 people.
For Rodriguez, whose organization supports students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, McMahon’s private assurances was the administration “just outright lying to the public about their intentions.”
“The audacity of this administration to communicate in her confirmation, in her recent testimony to Congress and to a disability rights leader to her face, ‘Don’t worry, we will support kids with disabilities,’” Rodriguez said. “And then to not just turn a 180-degree on that, but to decimate the ability to enforce the law that supports our kids.”
She added: “It could not just be contradictory. It feels like a bait and switch.”
Five days after the firings were announced, a U.S. district judge temporarily blocked the administration’s actions, setting up a legal showdown that is likely to end up before the Supreme Court. The high court has sided with the president on most of his efforts to drastically reshape the federal workforce. And President Donald Trump said at a Tuesday press briefing that more cuts to “Democrat programs” are coming.
“They’re never going to come back in many cases,” he added.
In her post on X, McMahon also said that “no education funding is impacted by the RIF, including funding for special education,” referring to the layoffs.
But special education is more than just money, said Danielle Kovach, a special education teacher in Hopatcong, N.J. Kovach is also a former president of the Council for Exceptional Children, a national organization for special educators.
“I equate it to, what would happen if we dismantled a control tower at a busy airport?” Kovach said. “It doesn’t fly the plane. It doesn’t tell people where to go. But it ensures that everyone flies smoothly.”
Katy Neas, a deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services during the Biden administration, said that most people involved in the education system want to do right by children.
“You can’t do right if you don’t know what the answer is,” said Neas, who is now the chief executive officer of The Arc of the United States, which advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. “You can’t get there if you don’t know how to get your questions answered.”
Families also rely on IDEA’s mandate that each child with a disability receives a free, appropriate public education — and the protections that they can receive if a school or district does not live up to that requirement.
Maribel Gardea, a parent in San Antonio, said she fought with her son’s school district for years over accommodations for his disability. Her son Voozeki, 14, has cerebral palsy and is nonverbal. He uses an eye-gaze device that allows him to communicate when he looks at different symbols on a portable screen. The district resisted getting the device for him to use at school until, Gardea said, she reminded them of IDEA’s requirements.
Gardea, the co-founder of MindShiftED, an organization that helps parents become better advocates for their children with disabilities, said the upheaval at the Education Department has her wondering what kind of advice she can give families now.
For example, an upcoming group session will teach parents how to file official grievances to the federal government if they have disputes with their child’s school or district about services. Now, she has to add in an explanation of what the deep federal cuts will mean for parents.
Voozeki Gardea, who attends school in the San Antonio area, uses an eye-gaze communication device with the assistance of school paraprofessional Vanessa Martinez. The device verbalizes words and phrases when Voozeki looks at different symbols. Credit: Courtesy Maribel Gardea
“I have to tell you how to do a grievance,” she said she plans to tell parents. “But I have to tell you no one will answer.”
Maybe grassroots organizations may find themselves trying to track parent complaints on their own, she said, but the prospect is exhausting. “It’s a really gross feeling to know that no one has my back.”
In addition to the office that oversees special education law, the Rehabilitation Services Administration, which is also housed at the Department of Education and supports employment and training of people with disabilities, was told most of its staff would be fired.
“Regardless of which office you’re worried about, this is all very intentional,” said Julie Christensen, the executive director of the Association of People Supporting Employment First, which advocates for the full inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce. “There’s no one who can officially answer questions. It feels like that was kind of the intent, to just create a lot of confusion and chaos.”
Those staffers “are the voice within the federal government to make sure policies and funding are aligned to help people with disabilities get into work,” Christensen said. Firing them, she added, is counterintuitive to everything the administration says it cares about.
For now, advocates say they are bracing for a battle similar to those fought decades ago that led to the enactment of civil rights law protecting children and adults with disabilities. Before the law was passed, there was no federal guarantee that a student with a disability would be allowed to attend public school.
“We need to put together our collective voices. It was our collective voices that got us here,” Kovach said.
And, Rodriguez said, parents of children in special education need to be prepared to be their own watchdogs. “You have to become the compliance monitor.”
It’s unfair, she said, but necessary.
Contact staff writer Christina Samuels at 212-678-3635 or [email protected].
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Four of the nine universities initially asked to sign have rejected the document.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Jumping Rocks/Universal Images Group/Getty Images | Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Universities of Pennsylvania and Southern California have now refused to sign the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” making them the third and fourth of the nine initial institutions that were presented the deal to publicly turn it down. No institution has agreed to sign so far.
Both announcements came Thursday, a few days before the Oct. 20 deadline to provide feedback on the proposal. Beong-Soo Kim, interim president of the University of Southern California, shared his message to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, which outlined how USC already seems to adhere to the compact.
“Notwithstanding these areas of alignment, we are concerned that even though the Compact would be voluntary, tying research benefits to it would, over time, undermine the same values of free inquiry and academic excellence that the Compact seeks to promote,” Kim wrote. “Other countries whose governments lack America’s commitment to freedom and democracy have shown how academic excellence can suffer when shifting external priorities tilt the research playing field away from free, meritocratic competition.”
Kim added that the compact does raise issues “worthy of a broader national conversation to which USC would be eager to contribute its insights and expertise.”
California governor Gavin Newsom, a possible Democratic presidential contender in 2028, had threatened that any university in his state that signed the compact would “instantly” lose billions of state dollars.
Over at Penn, President J. Larry Jameson wrote in a message to his community Thursday that his university “respectfully declines to sign the proposed Compact.” He added that his university did provide feedback to the department on the proposal.
Penn spokespeople didn’t say Thursday whether the university would sign any possible amended version of the compact that addressed the university’s concerns, nor did they provide Inside Higher Ed a copy of the feedback provided to the Trump administration. (Penn is the only university of the four that didn’t provide its response to McMahon.)
The White House also didn’t provide a copy of Penn’s feedback, but it emailed a statement apparently threatening funding cuts for universities that don’t sign the compact.
“Merit should be the primary criteria for federal grant funding. Yet too many universities have abandoned academic excellence in favor of divisive and destructive efforts such as ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’” spokesperson Liz Huston said in the statement. “The Compact for Academic Excellence embraces universities that reform their institutions to elevate common sense once again, ushering a new era of American innovation. Any higher education institution unwilling to assume accountability and confront these overdue and necessary reforms will find itself without future government and taxpayers support.”
Brown University announced it had rejected the compact Wednesday, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did the same last Friday. Following MIT’s rejection, the Trump administration said the compact was open to all colleges and universities that want to sign it.
The compact is a boilerplate contract asking colleges to voluntarily 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 to, among other things, commit to not considering transgender women to be women, to reject foreign applicants “who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values” and to 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 White House 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, and the Thursday statement from the White House, can also be read as threatening colleges’ current federal funding if they don’t sign. Multiple higher ed organizations have allied in calling on universities to reject the compact.
Jameson said in his statement that “at Penn, we are committed to merit-based achievement and accountability.”
Earlier this year, the Trump administration said that Penn violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 when it allowed a transgender woman to swim on the women’s team in 2022, and officials issued several demands to the university. Penn ultimately conceded to those demands over the summer, a decision that the administration said restored about $175 million in frozen federal funds.
Marc Rowan, a Penn graduate with two degrees from its Wharton School of Business who’s now chief executive officer and board chair for Apollo Global Management, wrote in The New York Times that he “played a part in the compact’s initial formulation, working alongside an administration working group.” Rowan argued that the compact doesn’t threaten free speech or academic freedom.
Apollo has funded the online, for-profit University of Phoenix. AP VIII Queso Holdings LP—the previous name for majority owner of the University of Phoenix—was the successor of Apollo Education Group, which went private in 2017 in a $1.1 billion deal backed by Apollo Global Management Inc. and the Vistria Group.
AP VIII Queso Holdings LP was recently renamed Phoenix Education Partners as part of a new deal to take the company public once again. Phoenix Education Partners, now owner of the University of Phoenix and backed by both Apollo and Vistria, started trading on the stock market last week and was valued at about $1.35 billion after the first day.
Four of the nine universities initially asked to sign have rejected the document.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Jumping Rocks/Universal Images Group/Getty Images | Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Universities of Pennsylvania and Southern California have now refused to sign the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” making them the third and fourth of the nine initial institutions that were presented the deal to publicly turn it down. No institution has agreed to sign so far.
Both announcements came Thursday, a few days before the Oct. 20 deadline to provide feedback on the proposal. Beong-Soo Kim, interim president of the University of Southern California, shared his message to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, which outlined how USC already seems to adhere to the compact.
“Notwithstanding these areas of alignment, we are concerned that even though the Compact would be voluntary, tying research benefits to it would, over time, undermine the same values of free inquiry and academic excellence that the Compact seeks to promote,” Kim wrote. “Other countries whose governments lack America’s commitment to freedom and democracy have shown how academic excellence can suffer when shifting external priorities tilt the research playing field away from free, meritocratic competition.”
Kim added that the compact does raise issues “worthy of a broader national conversation to which USC would be eager to contribute its insights and expertise.”
California governor Gavin Newsom, a possible Democratic presidential contender in 2028, had threatened that any university in his state that signed the compact would “instantly” lose billions of state dollars.
Over at Penn, President J. Larry Jameson wrote in a message to his community Thursday that his university “respectfully declines to sign the proposed Compact.” He added that his university did provide feedback to the department on the proposal.
Penn spokespeople didn’t say Thursday whether the university would sign any possible amended version of the compact that addressed the university’s concerns, nor did they provide Inside Higher Ed a copy of the feedback provided to the Trump administration. (Penn is the only university of the four that didn’t provide its response to McMahon.)
The White House also didn’t provide a copy of Penn’s feedback, but it emailed a statement apparently threatening funding cuts for universities that don’t sign the compact.
“Merit should be the primary criteria for federal grant funding. Yet too many universities have abandoned academic excellence in favor of divisive and destructive efforts such as ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’” spokesperson Liz Huston said in the statement. “The Compact for Academic Excellence embraces universities that reform their institutions to elevate common sense once again, ushering a new era of American innovation. Any higher education institution unwilling to assume accountability and confront these overdue and necessary reforms will find itself without future government and taxpayers support.”
Brown University announced it had rejected the compact Wednesday, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did the same last Friday. Following MIT’s rejection, the Trump administration said the compact was open to all colleges and universities that want to sign it.
The compact is a boilerplate contract asking colleges to voluntarily 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 to, among other things, commit to not considering transgender women to be women, to reject foreign applicants “who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values” and to 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 White House 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, and the Thursday statement from the White House, can also be read as threatening colleges’ current federal funding if they don’t sign. Multiple higher ed organizations have allied in calling on universities to reject the compact.
Jameson said in his statement that “at Penn, we are committed to merit-based achievement and accountability.”
Earlier this year, the Trump administration said that Penn violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 when it allowed a transgender woman to swim on the women’s team in 2022, and officials issued several demands to the university. Penn ultimately conceded to those demands over the summer, a decision that the administration said restored about $175 million in frozen federal funds.
Marc Rowan, a Penn graduate with two degrees from its Wharton School of Business who’s now chief executive officer and board chair for Apollo Global Management, wrote in The New York Times that he “played a part in the compact’s initial formulation, working alongside an administration working group.” Rowan argued that the compact doesn’t threaten free speech or academic freedom.
Apollo has funded the online, for-profit University of Phoenix. AP VIII Queso Holdings LP—the previous name for majority owner of the University of Phoenix—was the successor of Apollo Education Group, which went private in 2017 in a $1.1 billion deal backed by Apollo Global Management Inc. and the Vistria Group.
AP VIII Queso Holdings LP was recently renamed Phoenix Education Partners as part of a new deal to take the company public once again. Phoenix Education Partners, now owner of the University of Phoenix and backed by both Apollo and Vistria, started trading on the stock market last week and was valued at about $1.35 billion after the first day.
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More than three dozen higher education organizations, led by the American Council on Education,are urging the Trump administrationto reconsider its plan to require colleges to submit years of new data on applicants and enrolled students, disaggregated by race and sex.
As proposed, the reporting requirements would begin on Dec. 3., giving colleges just 17 weeks to provide extensive new admissions data, ACE President Ted Mitchell wrote in an Oct. 7 public comment. Mitchell argued that isn’t enough time for most colleges to effectively comply and would lead to significant errors.
ACE’s comment came as part of a chorus of higher education groups and colleges panning the proposal. The plan’s public comment period ended Tuesday, drawing over 3,000 responses.
A survey conducted by ACE and the Association for Institutional Research found that 91% of polled college leaders expressed concern about the proposed timeline,and 84% said they didn’t have the resources and staff necessary to collect and process the data.
Delaying new reporting requirements would leave time for necessary trainings and support services to be created, Mitchell said. The Education Department — which has cut about half its staff under President Donald Trump — should also ensure that its help desk is fully crewed to assist colleges during implementation, Mitchell said.
Unreliable and misleading data?
In August, Trumpissued a memo requiring colleges to annually report significantly more admissions data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
The Education Department’s resulting proposal would require colleges to submit six years’ worth of undergraduate and graduate data in the first year of the IPEDS reporting cycle, including information on standardized test scores, parental education level and GPA.
In a Federal Register notice, the Education Department said this information would increase transparency and “help to expose unlawful practices″ at colleges. The initial multi-year data requirement would “establish a baseline of admissions practices” before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions, it said.
But the department’s proposal and comments have caused unease among colleges, higher ed systems and advocacy groups in the sector.
“While we support better data collection that will help students and families make informed decisions regarding postsecondary education, we fear that the new survey component will instead result in unreliable and misleading data that is intended to be used against institutions of higher education,” Mitchell said in the coalition’s public comment.
The wording of the data collection survey — or lack thereof — also raised some red flags.
Mitchell criticized the Trump administration for introducing the plan without including the text of the proposed questions. Without having the actual survey to examine, “determining whether the Department is using ‘effective and efficient’ statistical survey methodology seems unachievable,” he said.
The Education Department said in the Federal Register notice that the additional reporting requirements will likely apply to four-year colleges with selective admissions processes,contending their admissions and scholarships “have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws.”
During the public comment period, the department specifically sought feedback on which types of colleges should be required to submit the new data.
The strain on institutions ‘cannot be overstated’
Several religious colleges voiced concerns about the feasibility of completing the Education Department’s proposed request without additional manpower.
“Meeting the new requirements would necessitate developing new data extracts, coding structures, validation routines, and quality assurance checks — all while maintaining existing reporting obligations,”Ryon Kaopuiki, vice president for enrollment management at the University of Indianapolis, said in a submitted comment.
The religious college’s Office of Institutional Research has just two staff members, Kaopuiki said. The Education Department would not provide additional funding and did not suggest it would offer technical support.
Vanguard University of Southern California, another religious institution, said in a public comment that the new work would fall on just one staff member.
A majority of the college leaders surveyed by ACE and AIR said it would take their institution between 250 to 499 hours of work to comply with the new reporting requirements.The federal proposal estimated that the changes will create over 740,000 hours of additional work across the higher ed sector.
But the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities said required labor will be much worse.
“The strain this collection will place on institutions cannot be overstated,” NAICU, which signed on to ACE’s letter, said in a separately submitted comment. “The proposal greatly underestimates both the burden and timeframe, particularly for colleges with limited staff, infrastructure, and resources already stretched thin” by other new reporting requirements.
Vanguard and the University of Indianapolis urged the department to delay implementing the new requirements until the 2027–28 collection cycleand to test them via a pilot with volunteer institutions before rolling them out nationally.
The institutions also proposed an exemption for small colleges, though they suggested different enrollment cut-offs — the University of Indianapolis suggested fewer than 750 full-time students, while Vanguard pitched fewer than 3,000.
Other concerns from colleges
The University of Texas System, along with the University of Alabama System and the ACE coalition, raised concerns about student privacy and the feasibility of collecting graduate-level data.
“Graduate admissions are inherently decentralized and vary by program,” Archie Holmes, the Texas system’s executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, wrote in a public comment. “Required data elements such as program-level GPA and test scores are not uniformly collected and may not be directly comparable.”
He recommended that the Education Department focus on undergraduate data until the process has been standardized.
Holmes also flagged that colleges risk inadvertently sharing private student data by disaggregating it so significantly, especially in smaller programs.
The University of Alabama System likewise warned of “significant legal and privacy risks” if the Education Department did not provide “clear federal guidance” on privacy protections.
The presidents of Capella and Strayer universities, two for-profit institutions owned by the same company, asked that the Education Department exclude noncompetitive scholarships from its reporting requirements for colleges that accept all or a “vast majority” of their applicants.
For example, a scholarship “whose only eligibility requirement is student persistence” does not “bear any connection to race” and reporting data on its recipients “would not advance the Department’s goal of detecting or preventing racial discrimination,” they said in a joint comment. But it would add an unnecessary administrative burden for colleges, they said.
The U.S. Department of Education has terminated nearly every employee in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in a sweeping wave of layoffs that began Friday, according to the union representing agency staff—a move that advocates say will devastate services for millions of students with disabilities.
While the agency has not provided official numbers, reports from staff and managers indicate that most employees below the leadership level in the division were eliminated, said Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252. Employees in the college access program known as TRIO, housed in a different office, were also let go.
The union has challenged the firings in court, arguing they “double down on the harm to K-12 students and schools across the country,” Gittleman told USA TODAY.
Education Department spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment. However, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has previously stated that safeguarding students with disabilities and ensuring their access to legally mandated educational resources is a top priority. “I would like to see even more funding go to the states for that,” she told CNN in March.
In a Friday court filing, the Justice Department confirmed that more than 460 Education Department employees had been laid off, cutting roughly one-fifth of the agency’s workforce. The terminations, which have affected more than half a dozen federal agencies, are part of a broader Trump administration effort to pressure congressional Democrats to end the ongoing government shutdown. Nearly 90% of the Education Department remains furloughed.
The agency eliminated nearly every employee responsible for administering funding under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—the primary federal law supporting students with disabilities. The staffer expressed uncertainty about how these programs will continue to function.
Secretary McMahon has suggested that oversight of IDEA funding might be better positioned within the Department of Health and Human Services rather than at the Education Department, though officially moving it would require congressional action.
The mass firings have drawn sharp criticism from education equity advocates who warn of dire consequences for vulnerable students.
“The Trump administration’s attack on public education continued this weekend as students with disabilities are at risk of losing the services, supports, and oversight that protect their civil rights,” said Denise Forte, president and CEO of The Education Trust.
“The administration’s unfathomable decision to fire all employees who administer the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) abandons the 7.5 million students with disabilities and their families,” Forte continued. “Roughly 15% of public school students have a disability, and federal enforcement of IDEA is crucial to ensuring that these students receive a free and appropriate public education.”
Forte said that the layoffs will have particularly significant consequences for students of color with disabilities, who already face greater barriers to accessing services and are subjected to disproportionately harsher discipline.
“This is a direct assault on all parents of and students with disabilities and all students and families who know that an excellent education system is a diverse and inclusive one,” Forte said. “I call on the Trump administration to reverse these cuts immediately.”
The firings come amid widespread disruption across the Education Department, which has also experienced problems with financial aid administration following earlier rounds of layoffs.
As of Friday afternoon, it remained unclear how many staff members would be affected.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images | BraunS and Prostock-Studio/iStock/Getty Images
Staff members at the Department of Education will be affected by the mass layoffs taking place across the federal government, a spokesperson said Friday.
Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has threatened the layoffs for weeks, citing the government shutdown. Vought wrote on social media Friday that his promised reduction in force had begun.
A department spokesperson then confirmed in an email to Inside Higher Ed that “ED employees will be impacted by the RIF.” The spokesperson did not clarify how many employees will be affected or in which offices. Other sources say no one who works in the Office of Federal Student Aid will be laid off.
Trump administration officials said in a court filing that an estimated 466 employees were given reduction-in-force notices. About 1,100 to 1,200 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services also got laid off. Overall, more than 4,200 workers across eight agencies were fired.
At the Education Department, the estimated layoffs will leave the department with just over 2,001 employees. The agency, which President Trump wants to close, already lost nearly half its career staff members during a first round of mass layoffs in March. In the wake of those layoffs, former staffers warned that the cuts would lead to technical mishaps, gaps in oversight and a loss of institutional knowledge. College administrators have also reported delays and issues in getting communications and updates from the department, though agency officials say critical services have continued.
The federal workers’ union and multiple outside education advocacy groups challenged the first round of layoffs in court. Lower courts blocked the RIF, but the Supreme Court overturned those rulings in July. Affected staff members officially left the department in August.
Another lawsuit challenged this latest round when Vought threatened the layoffs – before the pink slips had even been distributed today. It was filed at the end of September.
The union representing Education Department employees as well as sources with connections to staffers who were still working at the department as of Friday morning said that the latest round of cuts will at least affect staff members from the offices of elementary and secondary education and communications and outreach. A union representative added that all of the employees in the communications office’s state and local engagement division were laid off.
A senior department leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Inside Higher Ed that the layoffs were directed by OMB and came as a surprise.
“Last week the [education] secretary’s office had said no RIFs at all,” the senior leader explained. “We heard on Tuesday that OMB sent over a list of people for ED to RIF … ED apparently edited it and sent it back.”
In neither case were cuts planned for the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages the Pell Grant and student loans, the senior leader added.
Rachel Gittleman, president of the union that represents Education Department employees, promised in a statement to fight the layoffs.
“This administration continues to use every opportunity to illegally dismantle the Department of Education against congressional intent,” Gittleman said. “They are using the same playbook to cut staff without regard for the impacts to students and families in communities across the country … Dismantling the government through mass firings, especially at the ED, is not the solution to our problems as a country.”
Through late September and into the first 10 days of the shutdown, both Vought and President Trump used the threat of further RIFs to try to convince Democrats in the Senate to acquiesce and sign the Republicans’ budget stopgap bill. But Democrats have stood firm, refusing to sign the bill unless the GOP meets their demands and extends an expiring tax credit for health insurance.
Health and Human Services Department spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed earlier on Friday that “HHS employees across multiple divisions” received layoff notices. But he didn’t provide an interview or answer written questions about whether the layoffs include employees at the National Institutes of Health, a major funder of university research.
Nixon wrote that “HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy” and “all HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions. HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”
Democrats and some Republicans have warned against the layoffs. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who chairs the powerful appropriations committee, opposed the layoffs in a statement while also blaming Democrats in the shutdown.
“Arbitrary layoffs result in a lack of sufficient personnel needed to conduct the mission of the agency and to deliver essential programs, and cause harm to families in Maine and throughout our country,” she said.
But Democrats in particular have argued that firing federal workers during a shutdown is unconstitutional.
“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers—they just want to,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington State Democrat and vice chair of the appropriations committee, said in a statement Friday afternoon. “A shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers to cause more chaos or permanently weaken more basic services for the American people … This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks.”
Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia democrat and ranking member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, pointed out in a statement that the administration has had to rehire employees who were fired earlier this year.
“In addition to wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to fire and rehire government employees, arbitrarily firing government employees means there are fewer people to help administer essential programs,” he said. “Moreover, I fear the lasting impact of mass firings will be an incredible loss of invaluable institutional knowledge. Furthermore, random and chaotic layoffs will make it difficult to recruit qualified employees in the future.”
