Rumors of a second Trump administration compact for higher education have been swirling for months. Last week the whispers got a little louder.
Some history: When the White House released the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” in October, it said it was looking for feedback from the nine institutions initially invited to sign on. The universities rejected the compact in its original form, but most suggested they were open to further engagement, leaving the door open for a second iteration of the agreement.
And last week at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting, Nicholas Kent, under secretary for higher education, hinted at that next phase: “Over the past few months, Secretary McMahon and I have participated in robust discussions about the compact with university leaders and stakeholders at several roundtables to collaboratively chart a better future together,” he told a room full of sector leaders.
He made those remarks after boasting about the administration’s deals with Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He called it “flexing the muscle of common-sense accountability.” (Columbia signed a deal to restore research funding that the administration froze in response to allegations of antisemitism on campus, and the deal with Penn was a retroactively applied punishment for allowing a trans woman athlete to compete against other women in 2021 in accordance with then-existing NCAA policies.)
These agreements and frameworks like the compact, Kent said, “serve as stepping-stones for a brighter and more prosperous future for institutions and the students that they serve.”
Kent listed the reforms that would ensure higher ed is meeting high standards, such as equal treatment in admissions, promoting universities as a marketplace of ideas and sites of civil discourse, using nondiscriminatory hiring practices, advancing academic rigor, and having predictable pricing models. “Every one of these provisions was designed to provide students with access to quality at an affordable cost,” the under secretary said.
Across these deals and the original compact, several themes recur. Among them: new restrictions on international student numbers, defining men and women by their biological sex, mandatory standardized testing for admissions, and regular compliance reports.
All of these conditions will improve the standards and quality of American institutions, the administration claims. In exchange for their efforts, signatories of the first compact would have received preferential treatment in research funding.
In remarks following the under secretary’s, Jon Fansmith, ACE’s senior vice president for government relations and national engagement, reminded the leaders in the room that the White House drove most of the administration’s efforts to reform the sector in the last year. But, with the upcoming midterms, another war in the Middle East and a host of domestic policy concerns, the president is less likely to be talking about Harvard now, Fansmith said. Rather than a break for higher ed, Fansmith foresees the Education Department taking up the push for systemic change. And it will not be “targeting one school at a time, not withholding money from one school at a time, but putting the things in place that will impact 4,000 institutions rather than 50 institutions,” he said.
If the administration is aiming for broader agreement with a second compact, any incentive would need to be more widely appealing than research funding advantages. But given this administration’s track record, the second compact could be all stick and no carrot. “Compliance isn’t flexible and neither are the consequences,” Kent told leaders at ACE. And this administration has proven itself to be particularly skilled in finding levers of punishment, which so far include investigations from the department’s Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Justice, freezing research funding, litigation, and grant cancellations.
In rejecting the compact, institutions underlined the values they shared with the administration—controlling costs and protecting free expression—but ultimately chose to preserve institutional independence and academic freedom over getting a leg up on research funding; to do otherwise would be to abandon scientific merit, some signaled. So if a second compact is indeed coming, it will need to reflect the administration’s priorities enough to read as a win for Kent and other officials, be agreeable enough that institutions will actually sign it this time, and be broad enough to apply to a diverse set of institutions, not just an elite few.
It’s a seemingly impossible needle to thread. But if the administration does manage it, the kind of “hard reset” Kent said he wants will only be meaningful if higher ed is treated like a partner in the process, not just a target.
Sara Custer is editor in chief at Inside Higher Ed.
