The Trump Administration appears to be broadening its pressure campaign on American higher education by reportedly offering a preferential federal funding plan to all universities and colleges.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump offered the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education to nine colleges, asking for feedback by Oct. 20. The compact promises preferential funding in exchange for certain policy changes. Days after the proposal was rejected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the White House extended the offer to all higher education institutions, a source told Bloomberg.
“Higher Education has lost its way, and is now corrupting our Youth and Society with WOKE, SOCIALIST, and ANTI-AMERICAN Ideology,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday. “My Administration is fixing this, and FAST, with our Great Reform Agenda in Higher Education.”
During his second presidential term, Trump has scrutinized American academic institutions and pressured them to make changes to their policies and curricula in line with his Administration’s priorities. A month after Trump was inaugurated, his Administration pulled $400 million of federal funding from Columbia University over alleged antisemitism; the funding was partially restored only after Columbia agreed to pay the Administration $200 million and implement a number of policy changes. The Trump Administration also attempted to block Harvard from enrolling international students in apparent retaliation for its non-compliance with the Administration’s demands. And the Administration has withheld federal funding from some of the top American universities, while slashing diversity-related research grants.
But the latest move marks an escalation beyond targeting a few elite universities. The compact was first offered to MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Southern California, Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, and Brown. MIT was the first to publicly reject the proposal, describing it on Friday as “inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”
TIME has reached out to the remaining universities for comment. The Presidents of UPenn, Dartmouth, and Brown have shared statements noting that they received the offer. Meanwhile faculty and students at several of the universities have opposed signing the compact.
“Any university that refuses this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform higher education isn’t serving its students or their parents—they’re bowing to radical, left-wing bureaucrats,” Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, told Bloomberg after MIT rejected the compact.
Experts tell TIME that if enough universities agree to the compact, it could have profound consequences on the landscape of American higher education and, by extension, public discourse.
“If successful it would establish a level of federal control of the national mind that has never been seen before,” says Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at Oxford University. “It cuts across both the long tradition of independent university teaching and research, and also state prerogatives in the public higher education systems.”
Compact includes commitments on DEI, gendered bathrooms
The 10-point compact, several points of which include multiple requirements, calls for:
- Banning the consideration of sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations in admission or financial aid decisions
- Requiring standardized testing like the SAT or ACT in undergraduate applications
- Abolishing “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”
- Prohibiting “incitement to violence,” including the support of entities designated by the government as terrorist organizations
- Ensuring hiring does not consider sex, ethnicity, race, national origin, disability, or religion
- Guaranteeing institutional neutrality at all levels, including requiring all employees to abstain in their official capacity from actions or speech related to politics
- Committing to “grade integrity” and avoiding grade inflation or deflation for any non-academic reason
- Requiring “single-sex spaces” such as bathrooms and locker rooms
- Defining gender based on reproductive function and biological processes and requiring “fair competition” in sports
- Capping the amount of undergraduate students on foreign visas at a school at 15% or less and no more than 5% from any country
- Providing free tuition for students pursuing hard science programs at universities with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student
- Disclosing all foreign funding
Trump also warned that institutions that do not comply could face investigations. “To those Universities that continue to illegally discriminate based on Race or Sex, we will continue our current efforts to swiftly and forcefully enforce Federal Law,” Trump wrote.
Marginson says that while many students and faculty have opposed the compact, university presidents and boards may be more inclined to accept.
“As stewards of the institutions, their job is to keep resources flowing and people in jobs,” Marginson says. “The Administration’s plan has the potential to divide individual higher education communities down the middle and also to divide the higher education sector between the compliant and the non-compliant universities.”
Universities that agree to the compact could benefit significantly from a boost in funding, while universities that don’t may see their grants frozen and could even face financial costs from legal battles, as Columbia and Harvard have, or spend resources to deal with potential investigations. In March, Attorney General Pam Bondi launched an investigation to probe admissions policies at several universities in California, including Stanford and U.C. Berkeley.
Futao Huang, a professor at the Research Institute for Higher Education at Hiroshima University in Japan, tells TIME that he does not see the compact, at least in the short term, triggering “any revolutionary structural change in the overall U.S. higher education system.”
“If enough U.S. universities were to accept such a preferential funding plan, the immediate impact would likely be concentrated in sensitive areas—particularly in graduate-level education and research involving high-tech and strategic fields,” he says.
Mark Cogan, an associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Japan’s Kansai Gaidai University, says the plan may not have a significant impact on many universities that rely relatively little on federal resources. But he says the compact, which is “certainly ideological in nature,” will have an impact on support for “bread and butter parts of academia” and liberal arts curricula.
Texts that have long been part of many academic syllabi could become taboo, Cogan says. After Trump signed two executive orders related to “gender ideology” and “racial indoctrination” earlier this year, the Department of Defense pulled nearly 600 books from the shelves at schools serving military families.
“When you demonize cultural studies, when you demonize discussions about gender and race,” Cogan says, “you wreck a fundamental part of our understanding of how the world works.”
U.S. may see brain drain
While Huang says the U.S.’s global reputation for higher education may not be significantly impacted in the short term, “over time, however, if such policies are sustained, they may reinforce perceptions of politicization in American academia, especially regarding international cooperation and diversity commitments.”
“Universities are carriers of U.S. power in the world, like American business, or media,” Marginson says. “The suborning of the universities expands Trump’s influence but reduces American influence.”
Last week, Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee said they will leave the U.S. for Switzerland. The developmental economists did not explain why they were choosing to leave, but Duflo in March had co-signed an op-ed condemning the Trump Administration’s “unprecedented attacks” on academic and scientific freedom.
Several high profile Chinese scientists and academics have also left the U.S., including Intel chip engineer Su Fei and Chinese-American mathematician Zhongwei Shen. The Trump Administration has ramped up its attacks on visa-holders from China in particular, including threatening to “aggressively” revoke Chinese student visas and introducing stricter visa rules for Chinese applicants. Universities in Europe and Asia have sought to court international students looking to transfer out of the U.S. or that would have otherwise gone to top American universities amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on international students. Trump has also restricted legal immigration pathways to work in the U.S., including imposing a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications, while China has introduced new visa pathways with lower barriers to entry.
The Trump Administration has also pursued deportations of students who allegedly participated in pro-Palestinian activism, including high-profile immigration actions against Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, amid a broader mass deportation campaign that has involved large-scale raids of workplaces and arrests by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“Very few countries have direct governmental control of this kind, in the form of explicit agreements to give away independence on what seems to be an ongoing basis,” Marginson says. “However, it is fair to say that Trump is not concerned with external audiences, only with internal audiences and securing political control within the United States.”
Additionally, the compact’s “emphasis on reducing ‘foreign entanglements’ and scrutinizing overseas funding will likely make U.S. universities—particularly those in STEM and other non-social science disciplines—more cautious in accepting Chinese research grants or partnership funds,” Huang says. “Many institutions will seek to diversify their funding sources toward domestic or non-Chinese partners.”
Still Huang notes that academic exchange between the U.S. and China “will not be completely severed.”
“Instead, formal institutional cooperation may shrink, while informal or individual-level scholarly exchanges may persist in more discreet ways,” he says.
Politicization of academic spaces
Critics say that the compact politicizes academia at a time when the U.S. government has appeared to reshape civil rights discourse.
The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said in a statement that the Trump Administration has “weaponized” civil rights for the enforcement of its political purposes, which the organization notes is unlawful. CAP pointed to the Trump Administration’s use of civil rights investigations into pro-Palestinian student demonstrators on the basis of antisemitism. The Trump Administration has also directed the Justice Department to prioritize investigations advancing its policy objectives, which include combatting private sector DEI programs and policies, investigating medical practitioners that have provided gender-affirming care to minors, pursuing denaturalization of individuals who became naturalized citizens through “unlawful” means, and eliminating sanctuary cities.
If higher educational institutions were to accept the compact, critics say that in and of itself would go against the very idea of neutrality that the compact demands.
“The inclusion of language to transform or abolish units that ‘punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas’ exposes the compact’s true intent: to chill expression disfavored by the government and lift up their preferred speakers and speech; to bring a potential voice of political opposition to heel; and to quash free intellectual inquiry,” CAP wrote.
The MIT Chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in a statement about the compact, “Universities do not exist to fall into ‘alignment’ with the ideological agendas of the administration of the day. MIT serves the nation and the world, but its ability to do so depends precisely on not being held in a stranglehold by narrow, politicized conceptions of the national interest and the challenges facing the world as a whole.”
Cogan says such actions will have effects beyond university campuses. “What we’re talking about is a reinterpretation of federal law,” he says. “We are redefining the boundaries of civil rights, and our very definition of free speech or free expression is set by these kinds of boundaries.”
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