Trump’s ‘Compact’ Is Freaking People Out

There's a way to raise your student financial confidence level by 56%. Intuit for Education offers free personal and professional financial education with real-world tools that empower students to achieve long-term success. Learn more at intuit.com/hirehead. This is College Matters from The Chronicle. Is this really about federal law or is this really about the administration's political priorities, and I think that's a question that's also probably going to come up in court if this is where we're headed. After months of negotiations with colleges and universities, the Trump administration seems to be looking for a grand bargain. Last week, administration officials presented nine universities with a proposal, agree in writing to support our priorities, and secure in return meaningful financial support from the federal government. Don't sign it? Well, best of luck to you. The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, as the agreement has been dubbed, provides the clearest indication yet of what the Trump administration wants to see in higher education. To talk about it, I'm joined today by my colleague Sarah Brown, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Sarah, welcome to College Matters. Hello. I'm so glad that we're doing the pod this week because we have a lot to talk about. Yes, and I can't think of anybody I'd prefer to talk to about it than you. You are a senior editor at The Chronicle. You are all over this with our team that is rapidly trying to understand this. Let's talk about what the Compact is exactly. What is it? What's the significance of it? Yeah, so this Compact, as the Trump administration is calling it, is essentially an attempt by the Trump administration to reshape its relationship with higher education. This is a 75-plus-year relationship that, yes, has changed over time, but generally speaking, hasn't changed all that much. The federal government gives higher education a lot of money, and higher education provides what have long been seen as benefits to society. This Compact went out to nine high-profile research universities. It was presented as though it was in draft form and that the Trump administration wanted feedback. It was billed publicly as a way for these universities to secure a funding advantage for federal grants. Basically, universities would have to agree to a set of policies, and these policies are a reflection of the Trump administration's higher education agenda related to admissions, hiring, discipline, speech. For example, the Compact would require universities to cap the percentage of international undergraduate students at their institutions. It would also explicitly ban race-conscious admissions, which was already banned by the Supreme Court, but then this Compact would also extend that to all financial aid, all scholarships that are awarded based on a student's identity. If you look at the Compact, it's actually not all that surprising what's in it. It's kind of the greatest hits of the past nine months of how the Trump administration is trying to advance its agenda for higher education. These are all the things they have been obsessed with since they came into office on admissions, things about race, on hiring. They want intellectual diversity across the faculty, on discipline. They tend to want people to go hard on students who protest or get out of line, that type of thing. Right. It reads a lot like some of the deals that the Trump administration has already struck with some universities to resolve investigations into alleged civil rights issues. You read this and you're not really surprised at what you're reading. It's interesting because when we were first talking about this at the Chronicle, I think some people were looking at, "Well, what are the carrots here? What is being dangled out here for colleges?" They're essentially saying, "We're going to give you some kind of competitive advantage for federal funds," or at least that's what the accompanying letter seems to be implying. But what strikes me is that the actual language of the compact doesn't necessarily sound as much like a choice. It says, "Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below if the institution elects to forgo federal benefits." That's a huge statement, don't you think? Yeah. And if you look at how the White House has been talking about this agreement publicly, they've said, for example, a Trump advisor talked to The Wall Street Journal and she said, "We're not planning on only reserving federal funding for institutions that sign on to this agreement. We're not going to limit your funding if you don't sign on. We're just going to give you a little edge. And we might invite you to the White House and invite you to consult with us on our higher education policies." So the way that they're pitching it publicly is as though this is just going to give you a little bit of an edge, a competitive edge. But if you do look at the document itself, it sounds like there are going to be some pretty steep penalties for violating it. It's like, "Is this really voluntary if you're a university that wants to have a financial relationship with the government?" I don't know. Right. It is a little bit confusing. I think it's one of the things that we want more answers on, but that language that you would forgo federal benefits if you don't adopt these values to me is huge when we talk about universities that might lose accreditation and lose access to federal funding. We talk about that in existential terms, like your toast. And if they're talking about things beyond federal grants and getting into things that the federal government provides like student loans and Pell, then this is earth shattering. Let's talk a little bit about who got this letter or this offer, depending on how you look at it. Who was involved? It's a mix. There are institutions on here like Penn that have already struck deals with the Trump administration to resolve concerns over civil rights issues. And then we have institutions like the University of Arizona, which, as far as we know, has not had any interactions or conflicts with the Trump administration so far. So a couple of IVs on this list, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, you've got MIT, you've got the University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia. As some may remember, the University of Virginia's president was pressured to resign over a conflict with the Department of Justice a couple of months ago, so that was interesting. And then we have Vanderbilt University as well. So it's an interesting mix. Trump advisor who talked to the Wall Street Journal about this said that these institutions were selected intentionally, that they were perceived as "good actors" in terms of either the presidents or their boards. So that seems to be an important detail about why these universities were selected. So I've seen a lot of response on social media from different people about this. There's been a lot written already. What's your sense of how higher ed land is responding to this letter? You know, the response from advocates for higher education is pretty predictable. Generally speaking, associations representing the sector have generally condemned what they see as the federal government's intrusions into higher education's operations. For instance, the American Association of Colleges and Universities put it this way, said that the Trump administration was trying to "impose its own ideologically-driven vision for higher education." They also pointed out that this appears to be an ultimatum, quote unquote. And they said that it's not constructive in terms of a way to go about redefining the relationship between the federal government and higher education. Right. There was one faint applause that I heard across all of higher education. Tell me about that. There was one response from an institution that received the compact and was the chair of the University of Texas Systems Board. And he said the University of Texas at Austin was quote unquote honored to be singled out for receiving this compact. And sounded really excited about it. And I think it's not that surprising if you think about the political situation that surrounds the University of Texas at Austin, especially right now. Texas is one of those states that has, over the past few years, really assumed this role as a venue for higher education reform. And Texas has been in this conversation alongside Florida, for example. There have been several different waves of efforts by Republican lawmakers to reshape policies, ban diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, influence the general education curriculum. And Texas has really been at the forefront of this. And I think it's also important to look at what's happened in Texas, even just in the past couple of weeks. So right before this compact comes out and is sent to UT Austin, another public university in Texas found itself mired in a political controversy. This was at Texas A&M, at their flagship in College Station. And where basically a professor was fired after talking about gender studies in her children's literature course that was caught on video. It went viral. It led to both the professor being fired, two administrators being removed, and ultimately the president of Texas A&M being forced to resign. And if you're a public university in Texas, and Republican lawmakers are telling you to do something, you're kind of in a bind right now. It feels like you can't really say no. And this missive comes from the Trump administration, and the University of Texas Systems Board Chair says we're so excited. I mean, it just feels like if you're a UT Austin, I don't know how else you respond to this. But this is not the site of the resistance, even if Austin wants to remain weird. And it's interesting that Kevin Altife, who is the chair of the Board of Regents, is a former Republican lawmaker himself, which is something we're seeing, obviously, across higher education, the politicization of governing boards. It's not surprising at all to me, as you say, that he would step into the fray. And if you want to be identified by the Trump administration as sort of a favored nation, or as a place that has proven it will play ball, all the better that you come from a state that recently deposed its president over his handling of a gender ideology controversy. I mean, that seems very on-brand, that they would be identified. And it would be a major coup, of course, to have an elite flagship like that that would go along. In fact, one of the higher education experts that one of my colleagues, Lee Gardner, talked to about the compact, made the point that if you're UT Austin, you might as well go ahead and sign on, because the state government is already essentially trying to pressure you to do all of these things that are outlined in the compact. And so it kind of feels like the, at least according to this professor's analysis, kind of feels like there are a lot more downsides to rejecting it than there are to accepting it. Yeah. I'm curious about this document as sort of a signal of what the Trump administration really wants. And I zeroed in immediately on the opening line of the document, I'm going to read it. American higher education is the envy of the world and represents a key strategic benefit for our nation. What's interesting to me about that seemingly milk toast line, Sarah, is that no one would disagree with it. This is the argument that all of the associations that represent colleges and universities have been making since the Trump administration came in and started slashing federal funding at universities. They've been saying, look, we're the envy of the world. We're the best higher education system out there. No one disagrees with that. What's distinctive to me is that higher education people by and large believe that the sector is exceptional because of its independence, because of its academic freedom, because scholars are able to research what they want, because they don't live under the yoke of the government in a way that limits their ability to do what they think they ought to do in terms of the research that they pursue. Trumpland is saying through this and other actions, in my view, that higher ed somehow remains exceptional in the United States in spite of its independence. Its instincts are sort of wayward and not to the benefit of the country, but somehow miraculously, it's still the envy of the world. Did you zero in on that at all? Yeah, I think what actually struck me about it in addition to what you pointed out is that if you take this line at sort of face value in a vacuum and you don't read the rest of the document, this is actually a pretty full-throated defense of higher education coming from a pretty conservative administration. We've seen politicians on the right for years painting higher education as this cancer on society. These colleges are liberal indoctrination camps. This line alone is actually a pretty full-throated defense of the sector, but then you read the rest of the compact and you see, oh, this is once again part of the same thing that politicians on the right have been kind of puddling for the last few years, which is that higher education has just lost its way. Right. It's not a but, but, but. You're doing great except for these 20 things. You mentioned earlier that the sort of relationship between the federal government and higher education is essentially what's at issue here and that it hasn't changed much over the last 70 years or something. Give me a little bit of history here that might be relevant. Not talking about the compact as in this document, but talking about the relationship between the federal government and higher education as a compact. There has been this understanding that the federal government gives universities a lot of money for research and then later on they begin giving universities money for financial aid to democratize access to higher education. The idea is that the government gives institutions this money and then the institutions provide good to society. They provide research. They educate the population. They support economic development. This relationship really traces back to World War II where the government essentially started pouring money into universities in order to win the war and build nuclear weapons. Now if you look at where we're at today, US universities spent $60 billion in federal money. I know that we just throw numbers around and you don't even really know what they mean, but that's a lot of money. Is that a big one even by your standards? I think it's pretty big. And if you correct for inflation, it's more than 30 times what universities spent in 1953 when the relationship between the feds and higher ed was so sort of in its nascent stage. This is public data, but we should give a shout out to former Chronicle reporter Andrea Fuller who helped pull some of that together for the New York Times along with one of her colleagues just as the Trump administration was really putting a lot of pressure on colleges around federal money. And it raises an interesting question. This was all fine and good until the federal government started saying, "Maybe we want a little more for that money than just you telling us you're going to cure cancer and make the world a better place." And I think, Jack, you can't divorce that message from these broader debates that we've been having for the last few years about the public perception of higher education. In fact, in a recent opinion piece in the Chronicle, Harvard professor Danielle Allen pointed out that higher education was already vulnerable to these kinds of intrusions because college costs have gone up so much and concerns about student debt are so pervasive that trust among the general public that higher education is a good thing was already eroding. And so it left higher education in this position where it was really vulnerable to an administration that wanted to take a more aggressive approach to imposing its agenda. Making more and more federal money and charging students more and more. Not a great recipe for preserving your autonomy. Yeah, exactly. And I think the point that Harvard professor Danielle Allen makes in her Chronicle opinion piece is that no colleges shouldn't sign on to this compact as proposed. But given that higher ed was already on the ropes, now is actually a great time for colleges to come together and work to negotiate a package of reforms. Stick around, we'll be back in a minute. One of the top reasons students drop out of college is money. It's not just academics, it's financial stress. Intuit for education provides free personal and professional financial education programs to schools with real world tools designed to make an impact. Students can learn to manage expenses, learn about credit, navigate financial aid and much more. It's a no cost way for your institution to bolster retention and advance your mission in solidifying student success from their first year to their first job and beyond. Learn more at Intuit.com/HireEd. Jack, I'm curious if you look at the actual details of the compact. What else is striking to you controversial? Well, certainly the marketplace of ideas section. I mean, the marketplace of ideas sounds like a splendid place to visit, but if you are a college president, you are probably freaking out about what's for sale there. Maybe what they describe is something that's not at all controversial, certainly among conservatives. The idea that we want to have colleges and universities that have, frankly, more faculty who are conservative to balance the scales against the perception that the academy is just dominated by liberal professors. They describe signing on to this agreement as part of the agreement saying that you will create a "vibrant marketplace" of ideas, and you will also look to abolish units that quote, "belittle conservative ideas." So how are you going to go about that? Are colleges and universities going to start taking surveys of students or others to figure out where this belittlement of conservative ideas is happening? If you have a situation like you had at Texas A&M where somebody spoke about gender ideology in a children's literature class, do you then audit the English department and figure out how liberal it is? And then do you abolish it because you determine that it is hostile to conservative views? This sounds kind of like a mess, at least from the people that I've talked to about it. Ted Mitchell, who's the president of the American Council on Education, said, "The implications for free speech are horrifying." I think he was probably speaking to this aspect of it, but there are other aspects of it as well. The enforcement section you've already talked about I think is worthy of really zeroing in on. You can talk about the idea that higher education has a trust deficit and that it needs to do more to make its case to the public. But this idea that the violators of this will lose not only the benefits of the agreement but "all monies" from the federal government in return for these violations is pretty serious. And then there's another one that I think we really should focus on for a second, which is one of the things that higher education has tried to do in response to declining support from various federal and state entities is to raise a heck of a lot more money so they become ever more reliant on private donors to help do their business. What this agreement says is that if you're found to be in violation of this agreement, which we should stress is nine pages of sometimes very subjective stuff about whether conservatives are being belittled on your campus. If you're found in violation of this, you're obligated to return to donors any funds that they donated within that year if they ask you. No due process, no legal question. It just looks like you've got to cut them a check and return the $100 million they gave you for your chemistry building. That would be a startling development. So I thought that was pretty eye-popping. I'm curious what you think though, were there things that stuck out to you as red flags? I think if you look at one of the provisions you just talked about, which you have to get rid of units that if they're found to quote "belittle conservative ideas," I look at it and I see a parallel to a ruling that we just got from a federal judge in Harvard University's lawsuit against the Trump administration. So to be clear, I'm not a lawyer, but we at the Chronicle have talked to a number of experts who've analyzed this ruling for us. The judge was ruling in this case brought by Harvard in which the university argued that the Trump administration violated both their First Amendment rights and federal procedural requirements when it froze much of the university's research funding. What the judge said is that canceling Harvard's research grants was unconstitutional retaliation against the university for speech that is protected under the First Amendment. One of the demands that the judge pointed to were the asks for Harvard to "rebalance few points" on campus, and that sounds a whole lot like this compact. So I think if we end up in a situation where this goes to court, which a lot of Trump's policies related to higher education have ended up in court, you could see one of the points that's going to be a real question that has to be wrestled over in court. There's something else in here about that you need to prevent students supporting "entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations." While I'm immediately thinking of the pro-Palestinian protest we've seen on college campuses over the past couple of years, that would include Hamas. So do universities go through and determine whether pro-Palestinian speech is supportive of Hamas, which is a terrorist organization, and now I have to expel the student? A lot of these things are related to speech. I don't know how it plays out in court if you agree voluntarily to all this stuff, but that's a question for lawyers that will be interesting to explore. Just to add one point to this as well, I think an important question as you're looking at the provisions in this compact, the way that the White House is presenting a lot of these principles is we're just outlining ways for you, Institution X, to follow federal law. Now what we're talking about if you actually look at the details is we're talking about the Trump administration's interpretation of federal law. So for example, yes, we all know that the Supreme Court has banned race from being used as a consideration in admissions decisions at selective colleges. The Trump administration has taken that ruling and expanded it to a whole lot of other aspects of campus life. And they've said our interpretation of this ruling and of what civil rights law requires is that you cannot confer any benefits whatsoever that have anything to do with racial or ethnic identity. And so the question here is the Trump administration says this compact is we are outlining ways for you to yes, advance federal priorities, but also in many cases, just follow what we see as our interpretation of federal law. But then is this really about federal law or is this really about the administration's political priorities? And I think that's a question that's also probably going to come up in court if this is where we're headed. Yeah, there's a lot about this agreement that seems sort of unprecedented to me. It probably has to do with just how it's been done, the sort of brazenness of it quite frankly. The Trump administration has just been very full-throated in its demands of higher education in a way that feels different just in terms of rhetoric and tenor. But what's your sense as to whether there are corollaries from prior administrations to this kind of pressure from the federal government on colleges? Let's be clear about what is normal. So it is normal for a president to sign executive orders outlining the administration's priorities. It's normal for those priorities to change from administration to administration. So for example, President Biden on his first day in office signed an executive order saying, "I believe it's the role of the federal government to advance equity for everyone." And that includes racial equity. And we will be taking intentional steps in my administration to support underserved communities. So one way that this played out was within the National Institutes of Health. So for certain research grants, applicants had to start submitting what the Biden administration called plans for enhancing diverse perspectives. And those plans were used as a factor in evaluating grant applications. And the stated goal was to increase opportunities for scientists from underrepresented backgrounds. It was all designed to basically benefit and diversify the STEM workforce in this country. So we've seen examples in the past of presidents articulating priorities and making that a condition of receiving federal funding, or at the very least, it's been used as a factor in who receives federal funding. Now, what the Trump administration is doing is, first of all, far more punitive. No previous administration has suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants as a bargaining chip as the Trump administration has done with Columbia, with Harvard, with other elite research universities. It's also important to emphasize that most people in higher education think that what the Trump administration is asking colleges to do, that this level of government influence is inappropriate. They think it's imperative for the pursuit of knowledge that colleges remain autonomous, particularly around academic freedom. So I don't want to suggest that what President Biden did is equivalent at all to what we're seeing from the Trump administration. There is some precedent for federal governments to establish their priorities and use that in their negotiations with how they want colleges to comport themselves. This feels like in scale, in temper, in regularity, to be more prescriptive than a lot of things at least I've seen covering this type of thing. Jack, tell me what you've heard from higher ed leaders about the compact and kind of how they're thinking about their posture and response to this. Yeah, well, in anticipation of this conversation and just wanting to educate myself, I did contact a few former college presidents. These were background conversations, but I can give you a little bit of a flavor for them. What I'm kind of hearing is that there's a general feeling, again, not all across higher education but among people I've spoken to, that the government shouldn't be doing this. But there's also a normalization setting in that this government does do this. They do this all the time. So people are thinking more about where they draw red lines. I talked to Chris Eisgruber on the podcast just a week ago. The president of Princeton, he was saying, "I have a lot of red lines, Jack. These are the things I care about." They tend to be the things you would think. I don't want limitations on who I can hire, how they can teach, what they write. And so college presidents are in this weird situation where they're trying to figure out like, "How do I carve out this little piece of territory and protect it and give just enough perhaps to placate the Trump administration on other things?" Or maybe there are areas where they actually feel empowered by this. Maybe college presidents have wanted to diversify the politics of their faculty and now they have a reason to do it. The options, though, are limited for institutions that don't go along to get along. When you think about research revenue opportunities outside of the federal government, they're really limited. I mean, private industry, to the extent that it funds research, they want market-ready research. It's a drug that they can take to market. They're not in the business of funding basic research, which is what colleges and universities do. And that's how you end up with cures for diseases, et cetera. So there's a fundamental misalignment between what the private sector can offer and what colleges and universities historically want to do. Well, and remember that $60 billion number that we were talking about in terms of what U.S. universities spend in federal research funding, according to the most recent data we have, $60 billion. Private industry is not in a position to give higher education $60 billion. I mean, we're talking about a scale that there's no replacement for it. If the federal government steps back from its support for higher education, higher education will just need to shrink what it's doing. That's the fundamental fact here. One person I spoke with said he thought higher education misjudged the strength and durability of its independence. In other words, this whole agreement we've been talking about that higher ed's been very satisfied with, which is you give us money and we cure cancer, that's been a lot more vulnerable than people have realized. Exactly. What are the big questions for you going forward, Sarah? Well, a lot of faculty on campuses and a lot of higher ed advocates too have been crying out for collective action. They have been saying universities need to band together and say, "We will not be adopting some of these policies that the Trump administration is trying to impose," and that if universities collectively decide to stand up and refuse, that that will have enough power to push back against the Trump administration. I think the question for me here is, now we've got these nine universities that have been initial recipients of this compact, are we going to see some kind of collective response? The challenge, higher ed leaders have said, "Well, we all have different constituencies. We're all in different states, some of us are publics that have to be responsive to our state legislatures, some of us are privates, we have to be responsive to our donors, we all have different student bodies, we all have different purposes," and so it's really difficult if you talk to higher ed leaders. They say it's really difficult to come together and say, "If my peer institution down the road has all their federal funding pulled, we will mount some kind of response. We will all mount some kind of lawsuit," for example. Human instinct is to duck one's head and hope they don't come for you. Totally. I think for me, I'm really wondering, is this going to be an inflection point in this Trump versus higher ed conflict that we've been following over the last few months? Will this be a moment where institutions actually stand up and say, "We will not be adhering to any of these policies? We reject this full stop?" When do you think we might have an answer on that? We do actually have some deadlines, so we actually might know pretty soon. According to a cover letter sent to the University of Virginia that one of our colleagues, Francie Diep, obtained, the comment deadline for these universities that were initial recipients of the compact is October 20th. And then it says, "After receiving feedback, schools that show clear alignment and a strong readiness to champion this effort will be invited to the White House to finalize language and be initial signatories." And then it says, "We are aiming to have a signed agreement by no later than November 21." So before Thanksgiving ostensibly, the Trump administration wants initial colleges to be signed onto this agreement. I am just imagining this, Sarah. Can you imagine the Presidents of Brown and Dartmouth and Vandy and University of Texas at Austin going to a Rose Garden ceremony where they shake hands with the Trump administration on common values? I mean, that would just be really unexpected, but maybe it'll happen. It would be a scene that goes down in higher education history as a critical moment. Yeah. And that's what I've been thinking about kind of as we close the conversation, Sarah. I've been thinking about what this means, what's the deeper meaning of all of this. And it's going to surprise you who I quote here. Sean Penn, noted left-leaning actor. Where are we going with this, Jack? I've been thinking a lot about one battle after another. Sorry. I'm really into it. I was listening to Sean Penn's recent interview on the New York Times podcast with David Marquesi. And they were talking actually about Charlie Kirk, but I wrote this now because I thought it was so relevant to our conversation. I was listening to it yesterday and he said, "We are not going to be what we were before. We can be better. We can be worse. But what's going to be the architecture of the New America?" So no person other than Jeff Spicoli asked this profound question. But I actually think, and this may sound a little forced, but I actually think that's what this story is about, which is what is going to be the architecture of the New America. That's what we're wrestling with. That's what these colleges and universities are wrestling with. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say this, that we are on the cusp of a huge change, not only in higher education, but in terms of the way the country operates. And those two things are so intimately connected. So I'm super interested to see where this goes. That feels, I have, I have, I can't. You have nothing to say to the profit, Sean Penn. I can't, I can't possibly follow. I can't possibly follow that. All right. Well, let's end there. Thanks, Sarah. Appreciate it. Thanks, Jack. College Matters From The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation's leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at Chronicle.com/collegematters. If you'd like, drop us a note at [email protected]. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Reid, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Cottington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I'm Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening. It's a fact. 70% of students claim they experience financial stress after arriving on campus. Intuit for Education offers free personal and professional financial education with real world tools that empower students to achieve long term success. Learn more at intuit.com/hirehead.