On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Trump administration had proposed a deal to nine institutions: manage your universities in accordance with administration priorities and receive “substantial and meaningful federal grants,” along with other advantages. Rejecting this offer would lead to the elimination of federal programs that could severely impact most universities. The proposal was communicated to a combination of state and private universities and would enable the government to control aspects from hiring and admissions requirements to grading, with provisions designed to foster conservative viewpoints on campus.
The correspondence was directed to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia. Nevertheless, independent sources suggest that the administration intends to eventually offer this deal to all higher education institutions.
Ars has obtained a draft of the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which clarifies the agreement’s objectives in its introduction. “Institutions of higher education have the liberty to create models and values different from those listed below, should the institution choose to forgo federal benefits,” it indicates, noting that such benefits encompass essential needs like student loans, federal contracts, research funding, tax advantages, and immigration visas for students and staff.
It is hard to envision how one could operate a significant university without access to those programs, framing this more as an ultimatum than an agreement.
Poorly conceptualized
The Compact itself would require universities to relinquish admissions criteria to the federal government. The government, in this scenario, mandates only the application of “objective” metrics like GPA and standardized test scores as the foundation for admissions choices, and that institutions must make those criteria publicly available on their websites. They would also need to disclose anonymized data contrasting the performance of admitted and rejected students in relation to these criteria.
