Benjamin Nathans Autonomy or obedience - Trump's compact is a threat to our university
By Benjamin Nathans
Oct. 7, 2025
Last week, the White House sent a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” to Penn and eight other universities. This marks phase two in the Trump administration’s war on higher education, following last spring’s assaults against individual institutions, including Penn. If successful, the compact will rob universities of their remaining autonomy and cripple our country’s preeminence in teaching and research. Penn President Larry Jameson should not sign the compact. Penn should rally other universities to do the same.
“American higher education is the envy of the world,” the compact announces, “and represents a key strategic benefit for our Nation.” You would think this means American universities have been largely successful. But no: The compact calls for unprecedented levels of government interference in both state and private universities, even as it requires those universities to extol the virtues of the free market. While the compact identifies a number of serious problems that have plagued higher education for decades — sky-high tuition fees, a deficit of viewpoint diversity (particularly when it comes to the right flank of the political spectrum), and rising grade inflation — it offers neither an analysis of those problems nor practical suggestions for solving them.
In its sweeping assertion of federal power to defund universities that fail or refuse to comply with its dictates, it aims at nothing less than a hostile takeover designed to gut and remake higher education, according to the preferences of President Trump. This is the same Donald Trump who founded a university that lasted six years before succumbing to multiple class-action lawsuits by former students, to whom Trump eventually paid a $25 million fine. The conservative magazine National Review called Trump University “a massive scam.”
The Trump compact’s demands for higher education are dangerously vague and practically invite political abuse. It forbids consideration not only of “sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] religious associations” in admissions and the awarding of financial aid but “proxies for any of those factors.” This could be used to defund schools that favor first-generation college applicants, recipients of Pell grants, applicants who are in the top 10% of their high school graduating class, and those from rural communities.
https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/10/compact-response-from-faculty-say-no-disgrace
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