The Trump administration shook higher education this week when it promised benefits to universities that signed a “compact” closely aligned with conservative priorities.
But much of the compact’s construction happened outside of the West Wing.
Many of the ideas included in the proposal — and, in some instances, their exact wording — came from a document circulated last winter at the behest of Marc Rowan, the billionaire financier. Mr. Rowan has been keenly interested in higher education and, as the University of Pennsylvania was mired in acrimony over antisemitism and pro-Palestinian activism in 2023, he wielded his wealth and influence to help oust his alma mater’s president.
The proposal that the government released this week called for universities to limit international students, protect conservative speech, generally require standardized testing for admissions and to adopt policies recognizing “that academic freedom is not absolute,” among other conditions. An accompanying cover letter dangled “substantial and meaningful federal grants” for schools that signed up, though those universities could also have their funding jeopardized if the Justice Department decided they had violated the agreement.
The letter sought feedback from nine handpicked universities, even as it described the proposal as “largely in its final form.”
Mr. Rowan and others, including some people in academia, had been molding the template for months, long before the White House adopted the ideas. Although Mr. Rowan was not the lone author of the document that the Trump administration embraced as a model, he was regarded as a central force behind its development.
The involvement of Mr. Rowan, who as recently as last fall was a contender to join President Trump’s cabinet as the Treasury secretary, and his allies was described by three people briefed on the effort. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Rowan declined to comment. The White House and the Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.
It is common for leading business figures to try to influence policy deliberations in Washington. But it has become clear in recent days that two financial titans — Mr. Rowan, who is chief executive of Apollo Global Management, and Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone — are helping shape seismic discussions related to the Trump administration’s campaign to upend American campuses.
Mr. Schwarzman has emerged as an intermediary for Harvard University in its negotiations with the federal government to end a monthslong dispute over research funding and other matters. And the ideas that flowed from Mr. Rowan and his allies are now the backbone of a potentially far-reaching administration effort to tie campus policies to Mr. Trump’s agenda and the federal government’s financial might.
The White House made no explicit mention of Mr. Rowan’s role in developing what the Trump administration called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
But in a letter to nine universities, Trump administration officials, including the education secretary, Linda McMahon, signaled their plan was “supported by philanthropists equally committed to the pursuit of this vision.”
The government requested comments by Oct. 20 from Brown University, Dartmouth College, M.I.T., Penn, the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University.
Ideas from Mr. Rowan’s group were quietly circulating in higher education circles by early March, when a handful of administrators and lawyers passed around an unsigned draft of what was then labeled a “university support and eligibility agreement.” Some knew that Mr. Rowan was helping to drive the document as others speculated about its origins. And just about all of them were left to wonder whether the document would become a blueprint for the Trump administration.
What emerged from the government on Wednesday closely resembled the Rowan group’s wintertime document.
Crucial portions of the government’s proposal this week are repeated verbatim from the draft document. The two documents, for example, stipulate that “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation shall be returned to the U.S. government.”
There are other instances of replicated language. Both documents included a provision calling for school policies to “recognize that academic freedom is not absolute, and universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.”
Even several footnotes match. One quotes Dartmouth’s president and another contends that a “federal judge recently noted, in disbelief” how some Jewish students had been treated at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Other proposed terms, such as ones around hiring and admissions practices and the concept of institutional neutrality, track closely with the Rowan document, with only minor wording adjustments.
It is not clear how much the Rowan group’s draft evolved from March until the White House began tailoring its own proposal. But the version that the government distributed to schools sometimes differed in the details from the document that higher education officials were studying in March.
The draft proposal envisioned requiring signatory universities to “reserve 5 percent of its incoming undergraduate class for members of the U.S. armed forces.” The document sent this week to universities called for schools to “make efforts to expand professional opportunities for America’s military service members and veterans,” including the acceptance of transfer credits tied to military education and training.
The White House’s version also included conditions that were not present in the March draft, covering topics such as “grade integrity” and a section on “foreign entanglements” that envisioned, for example, caps on international students and compliance with federal government demands for records about those students.
The latest iteration also proposed conditions around “single-sex spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, and fair competition, such as in sports” and frozen tuition levels for five years. The version that went to universities also included a provision for select signatories to not charge tuition at all for students studying the hard sciences, and a condition that schools take steps that might include “abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
The proposal provoked a full spectrum of responses in higher education. Most of the nine schools that received the proposal declined to comment about it in detail. The University of Texas System, however, said it was “honored” that its Austin campus was in the mix.
Other reactions to the proposal were far harsher. Some critics warned that the compact violated the Constitution, while others threatened significant repercussions for schools that agreed to the conditions.
But Mr. Rowan has become vocal about the need to shake up the system, and his penchant for using private memos and messages to try to shape elite higher education has been clear in recent years. In 2023, he led a crusade against M. Elizabeth Magill, who was then Penn’s president.
Arguing that Penn had become a bastion of antisemitism on Ms. Magill’s watch, Mr. Rowan sent daily emails to trustees to protest the school’s direction, taking care to number each email to drive his point home. The advisory board he chaired at Penn’s business school, Wharton, generated draft proposals that included ideas like speech codes.
Ms. Magill resigned in December 2023.
The following year, Mr. Rowan did not hesitate to depict American campuses as wayward.
“U.S. universities were and are the envy of the world,” Mr. Rowan told Bloomberg Television. “We can destroy that. We can lose it.”
Mr. Rowan said he was worried about what he saw as the growing prevalence of “favored groups and disfavored groups.”
The problems on campuses, he said, were “nothing more than the outgrowth of 20 years of bad management,” including by current and former trustees like himself.
“To think that any industry, even academia, is immune to the forces of change I think is just naïve,” he said. “I think this is a good opportunity for our universities to have a come-to-Jesus moment and really think about what the future is for them and who they want to be.”
This week, Mr. Rowan and his backers saw the government present just such an opportunity.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
The post The Billionaire Behind Trump’s Deal for Universities appeared first on New York Times.
