Trump’s new “Compact” for higher education

This will be a quick and dirty post, as I’m racing off for a day of meetings, teaching two seminars, and leading this week’s Future Trends Forum.  But what I’m writing about today is an important development for higher ed.  I’ll share what information I’ve found, as much of it is behind paywalls and the story is emerging.

The gist: the Trump administration just sent a proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” to a group of elite colleges and universities.  If one of the campuses agrees to the demands requests, the federal government will treat them generously.  In Bloomberg’s summary, they “will enjoy benefits including access to federal student loans, grants and contracts as well as research funding, approval of visas for foreign scholars, and preferential treatment under the tax code.”

Institutions receiving this proposal include Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University.

The government’s demands requests are par for the administration’s course so far. I haven’t found a copy of the letter itself yet (readers?), so here’s Bloomberg’s list:

• Disallowing consideration of sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations in admission or financial aid decisions
• Requiring undergraduate applicants to take a standardized test like the SAT or ACT
• Adopting policies protecting academic freedom and abolishing “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”
• Requirements against political demonstrations that disrupt study locations or harass individual students or groups
• Hiring that does not consider sex, ethnicity, race, national origin, disability, or religion
• Requiring all university employees to abstain in their official capacity from actions or speech related to politics
• Fighting grade inflation or deflation for non-academic reasons
• Maintaining “single-sex spaces” in bathrooms and locker rooms
• Free tuition for students pursuing hard science programs at universities with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student
• Limiting undergraduate populations to have no more than 15% of students on foreign visas, with no more than 5% of students from any one country
• Disclosure of all foreign funding

It wouldn’t be the Department of Education overseeing such agreements: “The compact also says that adherence to the principles will be subject to review by the Department of Justice, and that violations would result in a loss of access to federal benefits for no less than two years.”  The point person here is May Mailman, according to the New York Times.  (Weirdly, that Wikipedia article says she left government.)

The Dartmouth College paper notes that “Of the nine total [campuses addressed], presidents of five — including Dartmouth — did not sign an April 22 letter from the American Association of Colleges and Universities criticizing the Trump administration for revoking federal funding from universities.”

None of the universities issued a formal response in public.  There was one enthusiastic response from a member of the relevant Texas governance body:

Bloomberg’s assessment sounds accurate to me:

It’s not clear to what extent the administration could implement a preferential system without running afoul of constitutional free speech protections. Universities put at a disadvantage in funding competitions are likely to mount legal challenges over how the administration is awarding grants.

Still, the compact will ramp up pressure on universities eager to avoid the fate of some top-tier institutions targeted by the White House, which has argued that higher education institutions aren’t doing enough to promote academic freedom and ideological diversity on campuses.

Along these lines, the Wall Street Journal article cites Ted Mitchell (American Council on Education), who

found the idea of a compact troubling, particularly its points regarding political expression and views.

“Who decides if the intellectual environment is vigorous and open-ended? This is not something the federal government should be involved in and adjudicating,” he said. “The implications for free speech are horrifying.”

Swarthmore College history professor Tim Burke thinks any institutional decision  agreeing to the compact would be “a dumb thing”:

You’re going to sign over control over every detail of your life, accept that you’ll have to betray the people you’ve chosen to be with and value, lose your values and self-respect, just to get some money that will likely be yanked from you anyway after you’ve put the collar on and agreed to servitude? What are you going to do with that money if you don’t have any mission, if you don’t have any values, if you have to betray people when you’re told to. When you’re likely to get whacked by a baseball bat the day that something goes wrong for the gangster, your new boss? You’re not even buying your own future.

Now I’m off to the next meeting.  Over to you, readers.  What do you think of this Compact?