The White House is telling some of the top colleges in the country to get in line with the administration’s policy priorities in exchange for more access to federal money and other perks.
The “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” encourages the schools to adopt the administration’s views on topics like college admissions, women’s sports, free speech, student discipline and college affordability.
It calls for the end of race, gender and other demographic-based admissions and a return to requiring undergraduates to submit ACT or SAT scores. It also calls on the schools to accept the administration’s definition of gender, and apply it to bathrooms, locker rooms and women’s sports. It asks for a cap on international student enrollment at the undergraduate level.
These are included in a 10-point proposal the White House sent to Vanderbilt, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia.
“Our hope is that a lot of schools see that this is highly reasonable,” May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House, told The Wall Street Journal.
The compact asks universities to make sure there is a “vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus” and to stop employees from sharing political views on behalf of the school, abolish any department that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” the newspaper reported.
In return, the schools would get priority access to some federal grants, White House events and discussions with officials. Government money would still be available to other schools, but after those that agree to the Trump vision were first offered.
A spokesperson for the University of Virginia said that Interim President Paul G. Mahoney received the letter from the Secretary of Education and White House officials regarding the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.
“This morning, he created a working group under the leadership of Executive Vice President and Provost Brie Gertler and Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis to advise him on the University of Virginia’s response to the letter. The University has not yet made any decision regarding the Compact,” the spokesperson said.
Some educators and education groups raised alarms. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council of Education, encouraged schools not to sign the compact.
“I hope that this just hits the ground with a thud. I hope institutions do not sign this compact,” he said on X. “I do not think it’s in their best interests individually, and collectively, it’s a horrible precedent to cede power to the federal government.”
Larry Summers, a former Harvard president who served as director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, panned the compact.
“I believe that in very important and costly ways America’s elite universities have lost their way over the last generation. Nonetheless, the @realDonaldTrump Administration’s proposed compact with universities is like trying to fix a watch with a hammer — ill-conceived and counterproductive,” he wrote on social media. “The backlash against its crudity will likely set back necessary reform efforts.”
The Trump administration previously slashed funding from Harvard and Columbia, among other universities, over antisemitism on campus and ideological disputes.
A federal judge overturned the funding cuts at Harvard last month, saying the administration overstepped. Columbia and Brown settled with the administration in July to restore federal funding.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.