The Trump administration promised a select set of universities what the government said would be a great deal.
In exchange for agreeing to a list of demands, like limiting international students and protecting conservative voices, universities would get a leg up on grants, potentially beating out the competition for billions in federal funds.
At least one institution, the University of Texas, said it would be eager to sign up.
But to others in higher education, the Trump administration’s latest effort to use federal funding as leverage to push universities to conform to its own political policy agenda has provoked outrage.
They see it as another threat against their independence as the government attacks higher education over what it perceives as endemic liberal bias, and as a remarkable push to grab power for the executive branch.
“This is a real inflection point,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Under the compact, a mix of nine public and private universities would receive favorable terms for government aid if they agreed to conditions like banning consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions, capping international undergraduate enrollment, requiring that applicants pass admissions examinations and suppressing grade inflation. Universities with large endowments would be asked to waive tuition for students interested in the hard sciences.
While some of the ideas might be broadly embraced, like tamping down tuition increases, Dr. Zimmerman said, he was troubled by the idea that the federal government would be telling universities how to do it.
“The parts of the order that drive me crazy are the ones that I actually agree with, like we should have ideological diversity, we shouldn’t stigmatize conservative thought — I’m down with all that,” Dr. Zimmerman said. “Keeping tuition down — that seems fine, in fact laudable. But the federal government being the determinant of that is terrifying.”
The institutions approached by the administration included the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia. Most would not say Thursday whether they would agree to the terms.
But within hours of the Trump administration’s offer, the compact was inflaming divisions in higher education.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, said the requirement that universities monitor the speech of employees could violate the First Amendment.
“A government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow,” Tyler Coward, FIRE’s lead counsel for government affairs, said in a statement. “That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy.”
And the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, which represent faculty members, argued that the government’s demands on universities were hypocritical.
“They would reward campuses that toe the party line and punish those that cherish their independence,” a statement from the groups read. “In doing so, it would commit the very viewpoint discrimination it claims to redress.”
They referred to the compact as a “loyalty oath.”
And the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, a vocal political enemy of the president, vowed to strip state funding from any California university that signed on to the deal, saying in a statement Thursday that “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”
In contrast, Kevin Eltife, the chairman of the Board of Regents for the University of Texas, said the proposal appeared to complement Republican policies in the state of Texas.
“Higher education has been at a crossroads in recent years,” he said in a statement, noting that Texas leaders had implemented “sweeping changes for the benefit of our students and to strengthen our institutions to best serve the people of Texas.”
Some of those changes include banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices on every state university campus and strengthening the influence of the regents, who are appointed by the governor.
Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, said the document seemed to him like a naked exercise of power, lacking internal coherence. He said that if institutions agreed to the compact, it would set “a horrible precedent to cede power to the federal government.”
The compact is part of an emerging trend inside the administration to skirt traditional lawmaking and government spending protocols in Washington.
Instead of negotiating with Congress to overhaul federal policy, the administration has increasingly reached out directly to institutions and school systems, seeking their sign-off on pledges to adopt portions of the Trump administration’s agenda — often under the threat of losing federal funding.
In April, the Education Department ordered local school officials to sign pledges attesting that they had eliminated all programs aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, which the administration has argued unfairly discriminate against white Americans.
That move was blocked by Judge Landya B. McCafferty of the Federal District Court in New Hampshire, who ruled that the government had failed to adequately define “diversity, equity and inclusion.” She also said the policy threatened to restrict free speech in the classroom and overstepped the executive branch’s legal authority over local schools.
The administration has also used signed pledges to prioritize funding for groups to develop or expand artificial intelligence courses and certification programs.
Dr. Zimmerman argued that the compact was another example of a split screen in the Trump administration’s priorities. Government officials are on the one hand seeking to reduce federal power over education by gutting the Department of Education, while “at the same time they’ve been orchestrating an unprecedented centralization of power.”
Much about the compact was still opaque, even to the universities the administration said it had invited to participate.
The University of Virginia received a letter on Wednesday night from the secretary of education and White House officials regarding the compact, a spokesman, Brian Coy, said. The letter does not indicate why the University of Virginia was included, he said. The university’s interim president, Paul G. Mahoney, has formed a committee to advise him on how to respond.
To some inside higher education, the compact’s most worrisome terms revolved around enforcement. Regulations and laws, such as the Administrative Procedure Act, have long offered safeguards for universities and others in their dealings with the government.
The Trump administration has faced a run of lawsuits that accused it of violating those protections, including one in which Harvard University won a significant victory last month. But as higher education officials pored over the White House’s proposal on Wednesday and into Thursday, some worried that the terms amounted to a waiver of varied legal protections.
The universities that received the invitation to join the compact defied easy categorizing. They were a disparate collection of state universities and private institutions. But a number of them were in states controlled by Republican governors or had indicated a reluctance to fight the Trump administration or congressional Republicans.
The University of Arizona, one of three public institutions on the list, recently moved quickly to shut down affiliations with four colleges in China following criticism from the House’s Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
At the University of Virginia, where the board is currently firmly in Republican control, the president, Jim Ryan, recently stepped down under pressure from the Trump administration over his stances supporting diversity.
And Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt, has frequently discussed how he at least partially agrees with some aspects of the Trump administration’s criticism of academia’s drift to the left.
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
Anemona Hartocollis is a national reporter for The Times, covering higher education.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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