Last week, the Trump administration unveiled its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The idea is to offer preferential access to federal funding for universities that will embrace certain educational policies. They would lose their funding if they failed to enforce the provisions of the compact on their campuses and to document their continued compliance. This offer is for nine large universities for now, but I suspect the intention is to use it as a model for higher education more broadly.
Equality and nondiscrimination
The most prominent of the compact’s stated goals are equality in admissions and nondiscrimination in hiring:
Therefore, no factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations, or proxies for any of those factors shall be considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions or financial support, with due exceptions for institutions that are solely or primarily comprised of students of a specific sex or religious denomination.
The compact asserts not only that favoritism toward underrepresented minorities violates civil rights laws, but it damages the very people it is intended to help. “Treating certain groups as categorically incapable of performing—and therefore in need of preferential treatment—perpetuates a dangerous badge of inferiority….” If the administration believes this, I find it strange that the compact requires universities to “publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishment, by race, national origin, and sex.” If the university is supposed to be race-blind in admissions, then why require it to measure and publicize racial disparities in achievement?
Ironically, this insistence that universities base their admissions and hiring decisions strictly on merit comes from an administration that is noted for placing political loyalty above merit in its own hiring. In the Justice Department, the President has been replacing career prosecutors with less qualified loyalists who are willing to drop investigations against his supporters and bring dubious charges against his enemies.
The marketplace of ideas
Here the compact starts with a noble intention:
Truth-seeking is a core function of institutions of higher education. Fulfilling this mission requires maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas where different views can be explored, debated, and challenged.
Again, the issue of hypocrisy looms large, since this administration is hardly a paragon of truth-seeking. Trump is the first president to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like the monthly employment numbers. The “truths” he posts on his Truth Social website are rife with misinformation.
When the compact elaborates on this academic marketplace, it takes a partisan stance. Institutions are charged with the responsibility of “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Nothing is said about protecting liberal ideas.
Some might say that liberals are currently too predominant on college campuses to need protecting. But not every university—and certainly not every academic department—is a bastion of liberalism. There is always a danger that people with minority viewpoints will be treated badly, but conservatives are hardly the only ones to experience this. There are staunchly conservative business departments as well as staunchly liberal sociology departments. Wealthy donors like the Koch brothers have funded academic programs explicitly designed to promote their conservative or libertarian views. (See Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains for a description of an academic program designed to produce more right-wing judges.)
In a variety of disciplines, liberalism and conservatism have ebbed and flowed in the natural evolution of intellectual and cultural life. In economics, the conservative views of Milton Friedman were in the ascendancy around the time of the “Reagan Revolution,” but have lost support more recently. Now that conservative ideas are on the defensive in many disciplines, the idea of using government power to bolster conservative views has its appeal, especially to right-wing autocrats and oligarchs. That is not the path to excellence.
The compact calls for a marketplace of ideas with civility on all sides. In practice, we can easily imagine censorship of liberal professors or publications if MAGA supporters have their way. This is, after all, the administration that cheered when corporations used their market power to force liberal comedians off the air, hoping to expand that power by currying favor with the government. This administration has been working to consolidate media under the control of wealthy conservatives like the Ellisons. Are its hopes and plans for our universities any more benign?
Far better to let different schools of though rise and fall on their scholarly merits, without a highly politicized federal administration putting its thumb on the scale.
Science and the public good
The compact says that “signatories shall responsibly deploy their endowments to the public good. Any university with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs.”
Like the commitment to truth, the commitment to science may be more than a little hypocritical, considering this administration’s habit of rejecting science in favor of entrenched ideology or personal opinion. On climate change, on covid, on autism, on tariffs, on immigrant crime, the administration has made many claims unsupported or contradicted by scientific facts. The President does seem to like computer science and the technological elite who are making their fortunes from it, but he is far from a student of scientific disciplines, “hard” or otherwise.
Without in any way disparaging science, I doubt that showing favoritism to science majors is good policy in the long run. Now that he has made himself Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Kennedy Center, perhaps Trump would do well to read the quotation from JFK inscribed on its outer wall:
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts.
The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias.
The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci.
The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare.
And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.
Trump wants to make America great again, but his conception of American greatness is depressingly narrow. The liberal arts and humanities have their place, especially as Americans struggle to define their humanity in the age of smart machines and find work that computers cannot do. As a Washington Post editorial put it:
Yes, “hard” sciences are important, but the artificial intelligence revolution could play out in unexpected ways. Many computer science majors might soon be unemployed, for example, because coding is easily automated. History or philosophy majors might find themselves better equipped to confront the hardest intellectual challenges of the years ahead.
Affordability
The compact is on firmer ground when it expresses concern about the affordability of college and the “life-altering debt” that students have had to take on. It asserts that “universities that receive federal funds have a duty to reduce administrative costs as far as reasonably possible and streamline or eliminate academic programs that fail to serve students.” I would like to see the federal government keep its focus on affordability, while leaving decisions about what to think and what to study to academic professionals and their students.
Here too, I am skeptical of the administration’s intentions. Threatening to withhold funding from American research universities that are the envy of the world does not inspire confidence. Nor is it encouraging that the same administration is making health insurance less affordable by cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and other health insurance subsidies. If Republicans are serious about supporting excellence in higher education or health care, they need to put their money where their mouth is.
Beneath the Surface 