Why the Compact Failed

It was not a given that the proffered Trump “compact” for colleges would be dead on arrival. When the administration offered its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” to nine universities earlier this month, it was the latest volley in a long campaign to bring higher education to heel. After months of browbeating Columbia, Brown, Harvard, and other universities by yanking funds and threatening visas, the White House dangled a new bargain: privileged access to grants and loan forgiveness in exchange for compliance with a set of “reforms.”

The compact, originally aimed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College, Brown and Vanderbilt Universities, and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Southern California, Arizona, Texas at Austin, and Virginia, was designed as an offer universities could not refuse. Initially it appeared as if the gambit might work. UT Austin immediately signaled openness to the deal. Efforts to swiftly assemble a united front of college presidents to “just say no” to the compact fell flat; leaders were biding their time and weighing options. Yet, just two weeks later, seven of the nine institutions have rejected the compact, while Vanderbilt has signaled misgivings and UT Austin has, for now, gone mum. The calculus of most of these universities, putting reputation, values, and integrity above potential political and financial advantage, marks a turning point in the Trump administration’s battle against higher education. It also represents a notable victory against the administration’s authoritarian impulses, and a potential blueprint for future resistance.

On its surface, some of the compact’s tenets sounded reasonable. Who could oppose freezing tuition, expanding merit aid, or recommitting to nondiscrimination? Yet these crowd-pleasers were sugar-coating for a bitter pill: provisions limiting foreign-student enrollment, banning diversity and gender-identity programs, and meeting stiff standards of mandated “viewpoint diversity” in teaching, hiring, and scholarship — a euphemism for government-imposed orthodoxy.

It was another Trumpian test of institutional pliancy. While Harvard had sued to stave off a particularly outlandish set of demands, Columbia, Penn, and Brown had given in to White House ultimatums, agreeing to policy changes in order to restore government funding. Prestigious law firms had bent the knee in response to White House threats, signing pledges to aid the president’s favorite causes, abolish DEI and expunge supposed “political bias.” Major media companies paid to settle spurious allegations brought by Trump. After threats from the Federal Communications Commission’s chairman, Disney briefly took the comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Yet, this time was different. So far, nearly all the targeted universities have held firm. The outcome reflected a sharpening societal understanding of how authoritarianism advances — and how it can be stopped.

The response to the compact reveals that American institutions are no longer in denial about the White House’s authoritarian impulses. When Trump first targeted law firms and colleges last spring, many were inclined to make nice — assuming good faith, acknowledging kernels of validity in the administration’s complaints, and striving to come to terms that would keep them in the White House’s good graces. Over the last nine months institutions have learned that a rapacious White House cannot be satiated. Despite their earlier compromises with the Trump administration, Penn and Brown were still targeted by this latest form of pressure. Law firms that cut deals with Trump have found that their obligations are a moving target; it turns out the administration has its own definition of “pro bono,” which apparently includes doing unpaid work for the government. Dealmakers have also witnessed that, no matter what leaders might claim about upholding their principles, capitulation has costs. Columbia, Brown, and Penn have heard from alarmed alumni, students, and faculty who see the institutions’ bargains as Faustian. Law firms have lost prominent rainmakers who did not want their reputations sullied. Disney suffered the loss of millions of subscriptions in a matter of days before it reinstated Kimmel. Against that backdrop, institutions are no longer naïve about what it means to accede to the administration’s demands.

Associations, civil-society organizations, scholars, and citizens also stepped up their game. When the law firms were first targeted, the legal profession was wracked by fierce debates over how to respond. Efforts to rally top firms that had not themselves been targeted to support an amicus brief on behalf of their colleagues failed. Businesses with revenues and jobs at stake were unwilling to put themselves in the line of fire. When it came to the compact, while individual university presidents at peer institutions were similarly hesitant to speak out, other voices quickly filled the void, crucially avoiding the appearance of a sector divided. The American Association of Colleges and Universities, an umbrella group of about 1,000 higher-education institutions, issued a thunderous rebuke of the compact within 48 hours. The normally circumspect Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges followed with its own denunciation, warning that the compact would turn institutions into “compliance machines rather than mission-driven centers of learning and discovery.” Dozens more chimed in. Alumni, normally activated mostly to make donations and join tailgates, mobilized under the banner of Stand for Campus Freedom to petition the nine institutions to hang tough. Students at Dartmouth, UVa, and elsewhere filled campus quads in protest.

Importantly, the chorus was ideologically plural. Conservative legal scholars like Princeton’s Keith E. Whittington and Robert P. George joined liberal stalwarts like Yale’s Robert C. Post in a joint essay in these pages, calling the compact “incompatible with the self-determination that colleges and universities must enjoy if they are to pursue their mission as truth-seeking institutions.” The conservative Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute weighed in against the compact.

Finally, institutions stiffened one another’s spines. Harvard’s staunch resistance, culminating in a courtroom victory, set a tone of defiance, winning plaudits for a campus that no one would have expected to become the David to anyone’s Goliath. When MIT became the first of the nine to reject the compact, its statement was crisp, unhedged, and morally confident. The university bluntly stated that the compact included principles “with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution.” The effect was electric. Within hours, Brown followed, then Penn, UVa, Dartmouth, and even the University of Arizona, a public institution in a mostly red state. Each refusal made the next one easier. The universities each cleverly co-opted principles that the administration itself had championed, including academic freedom and a commitment to merit-based decision-making, as grounds to eschew the compact. Whereas Trump had originally indicated that the compact would be offered to every university in America, its round rejection by top institutions seems to have halted that momentum.

Victory in this round against the higher-education compact does not mean the administration’s war on colleges is over, nor that campuses won’t make quiet compromises to try to avoid Washington’s ire. But after months of witnessing media companies, law firms, and politicians and courts buckle under authoritarian pressure, higher education deserves credit not just for hanging tough but for teaching the rest of us how it can be done.