On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had offered nine schools a deal: manage your universities in a way that aligns with administration priorities and get “substantial and meaningful federal grants,” along with other benefits. Failure to accept the bargain would result in a withdrawal of federal programs that would likely cripple most universities. The offer, sent to a mixture of state and private universities, would see the government dictate everything from hiring and admissions standards to grading and has provisions that appear intended to make conservative ideas more welcome on campus.
The document was sent 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. However, independent reporting indicates that the administration will ultimately extend the deal to all colleges and universities.
Ars has obtained a copy of the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which makes the scope of the bargain clear in its introduction. “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits,” it suggests, while mentioning that those benefits include access to fundamental needs, like student loans, federal contracts, research funding, tax benefits, and immigration visas for students and faculty.
It is difficult to imagine how it would be possible to run a major university without access to those programs, making this less a compact and more of an ultimatum.
Poorly thought through
The Compact itself would see universities agree to cede admissions standards to the federal government. The government, in this case, is demanding only the use of “objective” criteria such as GPA and standardized test scores as the basis of admissions decisions, and that schools publish those criteria on their websites. They would also have to publish anonymized data comparing how admitted and rejected students did relative to these criteria.
