Four of the nine universities initially asked to sign have rejected the document.
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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.
