More on Trump’s “Compact” with higher education: rejections and expansion

Earlier this month I wrote about the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” That post appeared fresh off the announcement. Since then some developments have occurred, lately with increasing speed.  I’ll summarize them here, adding links to analyses along with a bit of my own.

To recap: the Trump administration pitched an agreement to a select group of nine elite colleges and universities.  It asked 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 to agree to certain internal changes in response for more favorable federal treatment.

Things have been happening since, especially over the past two weeks.

The compact’s text wasn’t publicly available when the news first broke, but folks have published it since.  Here’s one copy.  Here’s another, posted to a Reddit. And here’s a third, hosted by a conservative outlet. There’s also a Wikipedia page, naturally, which looks useful. Higher Ed Dive now has a compact tracker.

Institutional responses started appearing in small numbers after the compact’s announcement. Two faculty senates voted measures opposing the compact, those of the University of Arizona on October 1 and of the University of Virginia on October 3rd.  Also on the 3rd came a short statement by Dartmouth College’s president, Sian Leah Beilock:

I am deeply committed to Dartmouth’s academic mission and values and will always defend our fierce independence.

You have often heard me say that higher education is not perfect and that we can do better. At the same time, we will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves.

I think Beilock is the first president to speak against the compact.  A week later MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth came out openly against it: “with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.” Several days later Brown University’s president, Christina H. Paxson, stated that her campus “is respectfully declining to join the Compact.”  Brown’s student paper also came out against the proposal. Recall that Brown signed a deal with Trump earlier this year.

At the same time some academic associations also expressed opposition to the proposal. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) issued a deeply critical response including passages like this:

Universities and colleges have one mission: to advance knowledge. Faculty carry out the mission by conducting research and teaching students. The knowledge they produce and circulate is independently assessed by professional peers. Interfering with that process by forcing knowledge to pass through a political filter is a tactic adopted by the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states. The White House is dressing up its compact as a reasonable corrective to what it views as problems in campus culture. Let no one be deceived. This proposal imposes government censorship on academia. It is anti-American, and it weakens our democracy by devaluing academic expertise.

The head of the American Association of University Presidents (AAUP), Todd Wolfson, repeatedly expressed his opposition.  For example, one of Wolfson’s Bluesky posts reads: “Join Together and Reject Trump’s Loyalty Oath for Higher Ed-Penn, USC, Vanderbilt, University of Virginia, University of Arizona, UT-Austin, MIT, Brown & Dartmouth.”  It offers this graphic:

The AAUP also launched a public petition calling on campuses to refuse the deal.  AAUP then joined several other academic groups (Campus Climate Network, College Democrats of America, Higher Education Labor United (HELU), Indivisible Project, Students Rise Up, Sunrise) in hosting another petition which frames the compact as an oath of loyalty to Trump.

In the political realm, California’s governor ordered that any state college or university which signed onto the compact would lose state funds.   Newsom seems to be the only state leader making such a move that I can find.

In the wake of such refusals, silences, and zero agreements, President Trump then broadened his proposal immensely.  On October 12th he offered it to all higher education institutions in a Truth.Social post worth quoting at length, to get a sense of the discourse and ideas he sees as part of the compact:

To those Universities that continue to illegally discriminate based on Race or Sex, we will continue our current efforts to swiftly and forcefully enforce Federal Law. But for those Institutions that want to quickly return to the pursuit of Truth and Achievement, they are invited to enter into a forward looking Agreement with the Federal Government to help bring about the Golden Age of Academic Excellence in Higher Education. They will agree to follow Federal Law, and protect the Civil Rights of ALL Students, Faculty, and Employees on Campuses. They will stop racist Admission Policies, and put an end to unjust and illegal discrimination in Faculty Hiring. These Institutions will commit to High Quality Standards, an Intellectually Open Campus Environment (including the protection of Free Speech and Debate), Institutional Neutrality, major steps toward Affordability for Students, and an end to the entanglement of Foreign Money in the Finances of American Universities. Americans deserve to be treated in accordance with their demonstrated achievements and potential, and upon regaining this fundamentally American Value, our Nation will be unstoppable. We will once again have Universities that develop the talents of our amazing young people to lead lives of Success and Fulfillment, cultivate a Love of Country and a Culture of Achievement, and help make all Americans proud, safe, prosperous, and free! [all caps in original]

Several days later Northwestern University’s interim president offered an ambiguous statement: “I want to do a deal with the federal government… I don’t want to get into suits with the federal government.”  In contrast, the University of Pennsylvania rejected the compact on October 16th.  At the same time the University of Southern California’s interim president also refused it.  On the next day the White House hosted a group of academic leaders, presumably to encourage them to sign up, but to no avail.  Education secretary Linda McMahon posted this to X/Twitter afterwards:

McMahon on White House meeting 2025 Oct

Right after that the University of Virginia refused the offer as did Dartmouth.  Then the University of Arizona also demurred, posting additionally “a Statement of Principles to the Department of Education.” As best I can tell two of the original nine have not yet responded, at least publicly: the University of Texas-Austin and Vanderbilt University.

How are other campuses responding?  The New York Times reports on a quiet, ill-defined meeting of academic executives who discussed the question:

when the leaders of 10 schools not included in the White House’s solicitation — including Arizona State, Baruch, Cornell, Virginia Tech and William & Mary — were asked, at a gathering in New York this week, who among them would sign the compact if asked, no one lifted a hand.

Meanwhile, there has been a steady flow of commentary on the compact campaign, most of it skeptical or simply opposed. Marc Rowan (CEO of Apollo Global Management) wrote a New York Times editorial justifying and defending the compact.

Critics include Henry Farrell (political science, Johns Hopkins) who argues that the Trump administration’s plan was based on hoping for public pressure on universities and colleges to agree to the deal. In turn he, like the AAUP, calls for unity among academic institutions.  Tim Snyder (history, now University of Toronto) pleads with us to sign the AAUP petition. Jan-Werner Müller (politics, Princeton University) also supports sectoral unity, being concerned about campus fragility, and concluding with this moving paragraph:

Precisely because they have been losing court cases over free speech and visas for foreign students, Trumpists now seek to entrap universities in a deal that effectively removes the protections of federal law and gives the administration arbitrary power over them. The carrots serve to lure institutions of higher learning into a dark alley where, rather than just waiting with a big stick, the government can put a gun to their heads at any time.

Institutional leaders also spoke out, offering their analyses. Erwin Chemerinsky (dean of law, University of California- Berkeley) interprets the compact as extortion. Michael Roth (president, Wesleyan University and great Future Trends Forum guest) cites Chemerinsky and views Trump’s pitch as part of a broader campaign against civil society, aimed at arrogating power and attention to the president.  Joseph Fishkin (law, UCLA) in a powerful analysis finds that the compact gives exceptional powers over participating universities to the Department of Justice.  Michael Ignatieff (rector and president,  Central European University, 2016 to 2021) describes the effort in terms of a Trump who “decided that the way to secure power as a group is to take charge of the commanding institutions of intellectual life.”

I also want to praise a thoughtful analysis by sibyledu on my last post on this subject:

It’s preposterous, but also par for the course for this administration. It gives us an explicit statement of the administration’s goals, but characteristically in vague ways that allow it to interpret it however it wishes. It defines “academic freedom” as the right to say conservative things, rather than the right to say anything in pursuit of learning. It tends to assume that all of higher education is like its most selective, highly rejective four-year institutions. (Imagine how a public two-year institution, which by law and/or practice admit all applicants, must change to comply.) It interferes with pricing practices in a way that would be unlawful if applied to any other business. It ignores the role of peer pressure in chilling student speech. It assumes that institutions can and will exercise authoritarian control over their students in ways that businesses exercise control over their employees. It can’t be enforced and is illegal and/or unconstitutional in spots. It doesn’t show a commitment to learning or even to addressing the forces that have made higher education something anathematical to the far right. It just says, if you are nice to us we will give you taxpayer dollars.

Where does this leave us know?  How might the situation unfold?

There’s now a trend of institutions falling into line by refusing the compact. to describe this Robert Kelchen applies the term “institutional isomorphism,” while I prefer “a lot of offline conversations among leaders;” I suspect some would choose “herd mentality.” The key point is a shared and growing sense that these campuses cannot assent to the compact, nor can they remain silent. 

How many other colleges and universities will follow suit, out of the roughly 4,000 in the United States? Who else will refuse publicly? Perhaps ones expressing a progressive heritage, such as Oberlin College or Evergreen State College, will make a point of this. Yet it’s a risky move, given Trump’s well established tendency to strike at perceived enemies and to nurse grudges. What benefits might such refusing campuses – or their leaders – anticipate?  Some of these institutions might experience pressure to do so internally, from organized faculty, staff, or students.  Activist boards, interested donors, Democratic state politicians, local communities might also encourage their colleges and universities to publicly resist the compact.

Conversely, we haven’t had one embrace the compact. How many will sign up, and which ones, or what types?  Perhaps we should expect some very conservative private institutions to join the compact, like Liberty University. Northwestern might join up, maybe for a modified version.  Elsewhere we should also expect pressure from red state politicians on their public universities to get them on board. Doubtless that’s happening in Texas now. Some private donors, meanwhile, are similarly nudging both private and public campuses to accept terms. Hillsdale College might, but that would be largely symbolic as they historically refuse federal funding.

We might expect some suites of campuses to join up on either side, given institutional isomorphism/peer conversations/herd mentality. If and once we see a few colleges and universities sign up for the compact, more should follow.  And more refusals should beget further refusals.

I do wonder about the process nature of such decisions.  To what extent are a given institutions’ senior administrators involving their full community? How much deliberation and decision making on the compact occurs behind closed doors, in executive sessions and offline conversations?  Anecdotally I’ve heard from professors and staff that they feel shut out from decisions.

I also wonder about the impact of associations like AAUP, ACLS, and AAC&U.  Some of these have really stepped up, taking strong and very public positions.  Have such groups become the leading edge of academic resistance to Trump? Are members protesting this internally?  I am interesting in how the risk/benefit calculus differs for associations compared to campuses.  And I do wonder if and when the Trump administration will turn its attention to them.

Yet it’s important to step back and consider the broader picture.  This second Trump administration has sought to intervene in higher education at an extraordinary level, as I’ve been documenting in this YouTube series.  For months it targeted individual, often elite campuses, trying to punish them and to alter some of their internal operations.  As historian Ellen Schrecker told us, this goes beyond the McCarthy period, as those campaigns went after individual faculty and staff largely for extramural activities.  In contrast, the Trump administration specifically targets academic teaching, research, and professional activities.  Now that Trump enlarged his compact offer to all of higher education, we are seeing an immense effort to intervene in and to redesign colleges and universities. That is the context within which we make our individual campus decisions.

Let’s close with speculation about the Trump administration.  How might they take this compact further, given how it’s played out?  If a group of campuses agree to the compact, will the administration celebrate them, lavishing federal support? If a majority of campuses either explicitly or quietly refuse it, what will the government do next?  One can imagine doubling down on the offer, perhaps tweaking its contours, more aggressively courting institutions, or adding threats to the noncompliant.  Perhaps we should anticipate a second compact offer, with new dimensions.  Or might Trump TACO (chicken out) and drop it in the face of massive refusal, especially as other topics and events occupy the president’s short attention span?

Over to you all.  What conversations and decisions are you seeing, or engaging in, at your institution?  The comment box is open. If you’d rather not write in public, please use my contact page to reach me directly.

(thanks to Corey Robin)