Against Trump’s New Higher Education “Compact”

The Trump administration recently announced a new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The “deal” was initially offered to nine universities, and of those MIT and Brown have already said no. The administration is now rolling out the offer to more universities. Only a fool would take this deal.

The Compact marks a new tactic in the administration’s effort to massively transform American higher education. The substantive demands remain much the same as the administration has pushed before, and it continues to rely on threats to financial vulnerabilities of universities. Now the administration promises not only to withhold federal grants from dissenting universities, but to strip them of nonprofit tax status, deny them access to international students, and prevent their students from receiving federal loans. Universities that “voluntarily” agree to the Compact will put themselves under permanent oversight of the Department of Justice, which will be empowered unilaterally to declare them noncompliant at any time and impose devastating financial penalties. It is an extraordinary bid to put essentially every university under the control of the federal executive branch. The Trump administration does not lack for boldness.

The Joint Statement

I have joined a group of five other scholars in a statement urging universities to reject this deal. The signatories are a politically diverse group known for their writing and work on free speech issues relating to American universities. They include Robert George (Princeton), Jeannie Suk Gersen (Harvard), Tom Ginsburg (Chicago), Robert Post (Yale), David Rabban (Texas), and Keith Whittington (Yale). We all speak on this in our individual capacities, but it is worth noting that two of the signatories were former leaders of the American Association of the University Professors and four are in the leadership of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

The joint statement can be found here.

From the conclusion of the statement:

Much has been gained, and much more is to be gained, by a partnership between the federal government and universities as institutions of teaching and research. Both partners need to behave responsibly. On the one side, universities must strictly comply with reasonable grant conditions, including non-discrimination requirements and civil rights laws. On the other side, governments must strictly respect the legitimate autonomy of universities and the academic freedom of their faculty and students.

Read the whole thing.

The Solo Analysis

Separately, I have my own analysis of the Compact at The Dispatch. This piece reviews the several components of the Compact, the mechanisms of enforcement, the radical changes it would make to how higher education has worked for decades in the United States, its willingness to cast aside existing legislative commitments and requirements, and the threat it poses to anything like academic freedom or independent civil institutions in the future. It is rife with unconstitutional conditions on First Amendment-protected speech but seeks to avoid any judicial scrutiny of those constitutional violations by forcing universities into a “voluntary” agreement with the federal executive branch.

From the conclusion of the piece:

There are real problems on college campuses, and the compact at least gestures toward some of those problems. Gesturing toward real problems does not make good policy, however. The compact is vague in its demands, but extraordinary in the amount of control that it wants to claim over the academic, intellectual, and political life of private and public universities. It effectively conditions the continued existence of universities on their ability to satisfy the current policy and political preferences of whomever occupies the White House at any given moment. This is not only incompatible with the existing law and Constitution; it is incompatible with any liberal conception of civil society. Universities are extremely resistant to needed reforms, and some would argue that a sledgehammer is needed to get them to see the light. Well, this is certainly a sledgehammer. If the hammer drops or opens the door to more such demands by this or future administrations, it will be an unmitigated disaster for American higher education.

Read the whole thing here.

As I write there, the Compact is a “sucker’s deal.” Worse yet, there is no reason to believe that the administration is a good faith partner in any such agreement, and its own terms leave the administration with essentially unfettered discretion to demand more down the road. We have seen this movie before. “I am altering the deal; pray I do not alter it any further.”