The president of Dartmouth College, an initial recipient of the Trump administration’s much-debated “compact” for higher education, has told faculty members that she will not endorse the current version of the agreement, two sources told The Chronicle.
The sources, who asked to speak anonymously to describe internal decision-making, said they participated in a meeting with President Sian Leah Beilock in which, as one of them put it, she said “she would not sign the compact as written.”
“She was very firm and clear on that, but it also had that very clear ‘as written’ part attached to it,” said that faculty member.
A Dartmouth spokesperson, Jana Barnello, told The Chronicle that Beilock “has been meeting with faculty across the institution to solicit their input and is looking forward to providing feedback to the White House, as requested,” and referred to Beilock’s October 3 message to the college community.
Meanwhile, the circumstances surrounding the compact are changing rapidly. On Friday, Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posted a statement saying that her institution “cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.” And on Tuesday, The Chronicle confirmed that a post from President Trump on Truth Social was intended as an invitation to “any institution” to sign on to the deal.
The administration had given the original nine institutions that received the compact until October 20 to deliver “feedback” on the document, which promises signers preferential treatment in taxes and federal funding, in return for commitments in admissions, hiring, institutional neutrality, and other areas, to be enforced by the Department of Justice.
The compact generated immediate opposition across higher education, although some stakeholders in academe aren’t opposed to all of its terms. Critics have said the agreement intrudes too much on colleges’ freedom to run their own affairs, and to debate ideas. (The compact asks colleges to commit to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”)
Philip J. Hanlon, a former president of Dartmouth and a professor of mathematics there, declined to comment specifically on his institution’s response to the compact. He said that while he agrees with some of the objectives the document addresses — such as controlling costs and ensuring free expression — the policies being proposed would mark an “unprecedented forfeiture of self-governance and academic freedom“ that “to me, make the compact just really difficult for any campus to accept.”
A Test of ‘Collective Will’
The Trump administration said earlier this month that it planned eventually to open the compact to all institutions. But Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, an advocacy group that represents colleges, told The Chronicle that its decision to do so now “is somewhere between plan B and desperation.” A Department of Education spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the rationale behind opening the compact to all.
Kornbluth’s rejection of the current compact, Mitchell said, may have dashed hopes within the White House that the administration could secure agreements from its initial nine invitees. “My guess is that they decided, rather than to wait for a victory that’s not going to come, they sort of opened the invitation now.” News of a broader swath of institutions signing on could dominate headlines, he said, and “outweigh the defeat that they’re likely to suffer at the hands of the nine.”
Lynn C. Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said she sees the open invitation as “an effort to see how much collective will there is to accede to the wishes of the president in this case.”
AAC&U released a statement this month condemning the compact as a high-stakes “ultimatum.” It was endorsed by more than 80 current and former college presidents and leaders of higher-education associations. Pasquerella said that her organization continues to convene presidents to discuss the sector’s shared response to the compact.
The administration has offered scant details about the benefits and how they might be conveyed to colleges that sign the compact, leaving institutional leaders to debate whether the document is an offer or a threat. Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, called Kornbluth’s rejection of the current compact “preposterous” in a Tuesday essay in City Journal, and encouraged the administration to “incrementally increase both the rewards for entering into the compact and the punishments for refusing.”
Of the compact’s original recipients, MIT and the University of Texas at Austin have offered the most vigorous responses. Kevin P. Eltife, chair of the University of Texas system’s Board of Regents, said in a statement after the compact’s release that the system was “honored” its flagship had been included. “We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately.”
On Tuesday, the executive committee of the University of Texas at Austin chapter of the American Association of University Professors issued a statement urging Eltife and others to reject the compact. The chapter’s president, Karma Chávez, added in a statement that the proposed deal “severely threatens UT’s independence.”
The Chronicle contacted more than two-dozen institutions on Tuesday asking whether they planned to respond to the compact. A spokesperson representing Iowa’s Board of Regents noted that that body “is reviewing the compact.” (Two Iowa lawmakers have called for the board to sign on, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.) Spokespeople for the University of Utah and Utah State University said their institutions had no comment. The rest did not reply.
Michael I. Kotlikoff, president of Cornell University, which was not an initial compact recipient but has been negotiating with the Trump administration over frozen research funding, said at a Tuesday event with reporters that one aspect of the current compact was particularly concerning for college presidents.
The document would require institutions to make merit-based decisions in admissions and hiring, “which is perfectly reasonable,” Kotlikoff said at the event, hosted by Arizona State University. “But it also creates a situation where universities that sign the compact escape merit-based consideration for grants — they get a special deal. That is fundamentally inappropriate.”
Hanlon, at Dartmouth, said the fact that the agreement is now open to all colleges shouldn’t change any individual institution’s response. “It’s up to every campus to figure out where their red lines are and how they want to approach this compact,” he said.
