The Trump administration’s recently released Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education has landed in the inboxes of nine universities, including our own University of Southern California. Included in the proposed terms — which, if agreed to, are supposed to loosen the spigots of federal funding for academic collaborators — is a warning that units should not “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
Threatening punishment and violence for contrary opinions is beyond the pale for any civic actor — a lesson that should be shared with Trump consigliere Stephen Miller, who recently labeled left-leaning advocacy groups and foundations part of a “vast domestic terror movement.” But the idea that one should not “belittle” seems a bit overheated coming from a set of political actors that have shared AI-generated memes of Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House adorned in sombreros and spouting fabricated quotes.
Plus, the compact itself invites more than a bit of skepticism. On Friday, MIT became the first of the nine universities to reject the terms, and it’s easy to understand why it would.
Consider the stern warnings against using race and gender in hiring and admissions. News alert: The use of race in both situations is already a settled matter for institutions taking federal dollars.
When it comes to admissions, the Supreme Court banned race-conscious decisions in a 2023 ruling. But in any case, USC’s approach to expanding access has been to invest in local recruitment pipelines through a highly respected Neighborhood Academic Initiative and to provide tuition waivers for low-income families, regardless of race.
As for the hiring side, USC’s diversity gains over the last 15 years have been incremental and reflect underlying trends. The share of tenure or tenure-track faculty at USC that is Black creeped to 5% from 3% between 2010 and 2025, while the Latino share edged to 6% from 5%, and the Asian American share rose to 19% from 17%. According to the National Science Foundation, that’s pretty much in line with the growth in recent PhDs by ethnicity — although we do seem to be lagging in hiring from the newly minted Latino professoriate. As empirical social scientists, we fail to see much evidence of a heavy affirmative action thumb on the scale.
The compact would also toss away once-cherished conservative ideas about the sanctity of markets. Even as the GOP tears into New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for daring to suggest a rent freeze, the compact seeks to prohibit tuition hikes over the next five years. It couples that with a sharp limit on foreign students that is sure to diminish the reputation of USC, a place whose steady reputational climb in the last few decades has included attracting a high-caliber student body that is now 27% “non-resident.”
The compact also seeks to alter what sort of education will be delivered. It proposes another market intervention in which tuition would be waived for those pursuing the hard sciences. Adding up the five-year freeze, the loss of revenue from foreign students (who often pay full freight and so help to subsidize others) and the selective tuition breaks, the proposal seems less like reform and more like a blueprint to bankrupt a university already experiencing financial distress.
So how would we grade the compact that the administration has submitted?
First: As professors, we warn our students that we run their papers through a plagiarism-checker — and this compact would have failed that test. As reported in the New York Times, many of the ideas and even some of the exact language — including what’s in the only two seemingly academic footnotes — were lifted directly from a memo drafted months earlier by a conservative group linked to billionaire Marc Rowan.
Second: When we grade, we always try to offer some positive notes — after all, one doesn’t want to belittle. One has to really scour the compact for praiseworthy nuggets, but here’s one: We wholeheartedly agree that encouraging military veterans to enroll should be an even higher priority than it already is at USC. We have experienced such students (as well as those in the campus ROTC) as dedicated, earnest and hard-working — and far more open to the benefits of diversity than the authors of this compact seem to be. After all, the military is far more diverse than the overall U.S. population (for now).
After praising the compact’s creators for that one worthy thought, we’re sort of at a loss. They correctly point out that grade inflation is a problem but propose no real solution. Most of the grammar seems correct, so that’s something? But this is a dismally researched — and often frightening — document that ultimately seeks to legislate ideology under the guise of academic excellence.
USC already stands for academic excellence, and we do it without ideological loyalty oaths. We hope our leaders will see this deal for the folly that it is and will have the courage to call it out as MIT did. That’s the way to stand up for academic freedom, fiscal responsibility and just plain common sense.
Manuel Pastor and Jody Agius Vallejo are professors of sociology at USC.
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