The Trump administration this week tried to make nine elite research universities an offer they can’t refuse. In exchange for vaguely defined funds, MIT, Dartmouth, Brown, Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, and others were asked to sign a nine-page “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that amounts to complete adoption of the MAGA higher-education agenda. If they don’t agree? “The institution elects to forego federal benefits,” seemingly including federal contracts and access to student loans.
The compact is the newest escalation in Trump’s attempt to impose ideological dominance over America’s world-class colleges and universities. The document is breathtaking in its ambition, plainly illegal, and shot through with the tensions that mark Trumpism in its latest form.
Bringing higher education to heel has been a top White House priority. It began with massive cuts to federal research funding and charges that some schools violated the civil rights of Jewish students and faculty during protests about the war in Gaza. Whereas Harvard chose to fight the matter in court, Columbia agreed to a sweeping settlement that restored hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants. The deal went far beyond legitimate civil-rights concerns, requiring Columbia to implement Trump-dictated policies around hiring, admissions, DEI, academics, and student discipline, all under the monitoring of the Office of Civil Rights. That success spurred the White House to explore new ways of dictating terms to universities. The compact, it seems, is the result.
Although the conservative movement won a landmark legal victory when the Supreme Court abolished affirmative action in 2023, the compact expands the list of qualities that can’t be considered in admission to include “sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations, or proxies for any of those factors.” One wonders whether the White House realizes that elite schools routinely give admissions advantages to men, or that legacy status has a strong statistical correlation with being a white person, which arguably makes preferences for legacies an illegal racial “proxy.” The ability to donate large amounts of money to boost your child’s admissions chances is also correlated with being a white person, again suggesting that preferences for the children of rich families could be illegal.
The free-speech provisions of the compact are an exercise in contradiction. Until 2023, conservatives were mostly angry that Nazi-curious speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos were getting shouted down during public events on campus. Over the past two years, their attitude toward speech has swung around 180 degrees toward anger at what protesters are allowed to say and the positions university leaders and faculty choose to adopt.
Therefore, “signatories to this compact commit themselves to fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus,” while “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events.” This blatantly unconstitutional speech ban shall “apply with equal force to all of the university’s academic units, including all colleges, faculties, schools, departments, programs, centers, and institutes.” But “signatories shall adopt a policy protecting academic freedom in classrooms, teaching, research, and scholarship.” It only makes sense when understood as a license for the most extreme conservative ideas and a ban on speech with which the White House disagrees.
In yet another example of federal overreach, signatories must require all undergraduate applicants to take the SAT or an equivalent test, negating the “test optional” policies adopted by many universities, including Vanderbilt, and co-opting private universities’ authority to define academic merit. The compact also mandates a five-year tuition freeze for American students, a form of coercive price control. And it sharply limits enrollment of foreign students while meddling in university hiring, grading, and disciplinary policy.
Like most of what Trump proffers, the compact is a sucker’s deal. In a letter to the University of Virginia, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon promised “positive benefits for the school, including allowance for increased overhead payments where feasible, substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal partnerships.” For that, the university has to let the Trump White House decide who can enroll and how students are taught. And if the Justice Department decides, at its sole discretion, that the university has “willfully or negligently violated” the compact? “All monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation shall be returned.” Assuming “all monies” is what it sounds like, this punishment would go well beyond rescinding the “positive benefits,” affecting funding more broadly. The administration is inviting universities to voluntarily put on a yoke and hand it the keys.
For the entire history of this country, the federal government has allowed colleges and universities to grow and flourish according to their own determination of what higher education means. The resulting system is, for all its flaws, the envy of the world. The smartest people on Earth come to America to live, learn, invent, and prosper, because they know our universities are free. The Trump administration is trying to bring that tradition to an end.
The compact is not a statute passed by Congress or a regulation written with public consent. It is only the ideological will of the president, offered with the logic and ethics of a mafia protection racket. Shakedown artists browbeat and threaten so they can take something that doesn’t belong to them. They also do it to establish who has power and who should live in fear. Universities that accept this bargain will be selling their souls for nothing but a promise of safety that will surely be broken in turn.
