Six of the nine universities invited to join President Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education have now declined to sign, underscoring deep resistance within higher education to the administration’s plan to tie federal funding to new admissions and governance requirements.
The University of Virginia and Dartmouth College became the latest to reject the proposal this week, joining MIT, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California. Each cited concerns that the compact would compromise institutional autonomy and academic freedom.
At Virginia, Interim President Paul Mahoney said the university shared some of the compact’s goals but objected to its binding structure and its potential to politicize research funding.
In a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, he wrote that while UVA supports efforts to promote affordability, free expression, and intellectual diversity, “we seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals.” Linking research funding to compliance, he warned, “would undermine merit-based assessment of research and scholarship” and erode public confidence in higher education’s independence.
Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock voiced similar objections, saying she “does not believe that a compact — with any administration — is the right approach to achieve academic excellence.” She said the agreement would jeopardize “our academic freedom, our ability to govern ourselves, and the principle that federal research funds should be awarded to the best, most promising ideas.”
The administration introduced the compact on October 1, offering what it called “substantial and meaningful federal grants” to universities that agreed to adopt standardized-test-only admissions, cap foreign-student enrollment, freeze tuition, and pledge institutional neutrality on political issues. So far, none of the invited institutions have signed on, and three others — Vanderbilt, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Arizona — have not yet announced decisions.
The White House has portrayed the initiative as a bid to restore “rigor, fairness, and value” in higher education, but critics see it as an effort to impose political control over universities.
With two-thirds of the invited schools now saying no, the administration faces growing pushback from some of the nation’s most prominent academic institutions over the limits of federal authority in campus life.
Faced with the potential of unanimous rejection, the adminstration reached out to several additional schools in a virutal meeting on October 17. Washington University, the University of Kansas, and Arizona State University were asked to discuss the compact and work on refinements to the language.
