President Trump has described the nation’s elite universities as anti-American, called campus leaders “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and choked off schools from billions of dollars to force their submission to his political agenda.
Now, those aggressive tactics are complicating his effort to usher in large-scale change across academia.
This week, several of the nation’s elite universities refused to support a “compact” that would link their support for the administration’s strict definition of gender, proposed caps on international students and other policy changes to enhanced access to federal research funding.
So the White House scrambled to enlist a new set of schools to consider a proposal that many higher education leaders have criticized as an erosion of basic free speech protections.
The last-minute effort to recruit colleges willing to even discuss Mr. Trump’s higher education agenda is the latest example of how the administration has struggled, whether in education or other policy areas, to build the kind of broad alliances often needed to carry out its agenda.
The compact was meant to be enticing. The government spends roughly $60 billion annually on academic research, which is central to the financial stability of the nation’s largest public and private colleges.
But five of the nine schools originally solicited for feedback have already declined the offer: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California and the University of Virginia. Brown and Penn faced especially strong pressure on campus to draw the line with the White House following settlement agreements each signed in the summer that helped restore their frozen research funding.
Marc Rowan, the billionaire financier who has been one of the chief proponents of the compact, insisted on including invitations to Brown and Penn, according to three people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. A spokeswoman for Mr. Rowan declined to comment.
Most of the other schools have not yet signaled how they will respond. The University of Texas is the sole system that reacted enthusiastically.
As skepticism of the compact mounted, the White House reached out to Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis, hoping the three schools would effectively slide into seats at the negotiating table intended for schools that had rejected initial offers.
The gambit seemed to work, at least partly.
Leaders from A.S.U., Kansas and Washington University showed up to a meeting with the administration on Friday. The virtual meeting was described as both preliminary and productive by the White House.
But just hours after the meeting, Virginia, which had participated in the call, announced that school officials would not sign the compact. In a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Paul Mahoney, who is leading the school on an interim basis after the Trump administration effectively forced out the previous president, took issue with White House’s plan to link research funding to support of the proposal.
“We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals,” Mr. Mahoney wrote, adding that assessing research grants on any measure other than merit “will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.”
The meeting on Friday also included officials from the University of Arizona, Dartmouth College, the University of Texas and Vanderbilt University, all of which had been included in the initial round of invitations.
White House officials have argued that the administration’s mission to protect Jewish students and end the industry’s liberal tilt requires urgent and sometimes aggressive steps.
This week, Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, warned that “any higher education institution unwilling to assume accountability and confront these overdue and necessary reforms will find itself without future government and taxpayers support.”
May Mailman, a White House senior adviser who helped craft the compact, suggested the diminishing faith that Americans place in universities was a more pressing issue for college leaders than the Trump administration’s tactics.
“There is a fundamental culture shift that needs to happen in universities,” Ms. Mailman said. “These are still gems that Americans treasure, but they are teetering.”
Still, the rejections from top academic institutions highlight the risks of the president’s penchant for enforcing loyalty through aggressive, punitive tactics that can alienate potential allies. Mr. Trump’s polarizing political instincts have hampered his ability to build the sort of coalitions often needed to pass significant legislative reforms, or even to end the current government shutdown.
When it comes to higher education, the White House has largely ignored the legislative process while trying to impose policy changes on college campuses, which the West Wing views as hostile to conservatives broadly and Mr. Trump, specifically.
Instead, the administration has relied on the investigatory powers of the federal government to paint elite institutions as hostile to Jewish students and faculty, discriminatory against white college applicants and too cozy with adversarial foreign nations. At the U.S. Naval Academy, the administration has banned hundreds of library books that do not align with Mr. Trump’s political agenda.
The move to ban books forced some potential Trump allies to think twice about working with the administration, including Ted Carter, the president of Ohio State University. Mr. Carter, who ran the Naval Academy as superintendent during Mr. Trump’s first term, said he was open to some of Mr. Trump’s agenda for higher education. He had already been exploring policies that would help make one of the nation’s largest universities less exclusive and more affordable.
But the administration’s combative approach on issues like book banning forced Mr. Carter and other college presidents into more defensive crouches.
“If they had tried to remove books on my watch, it would have been over my dead body,” Mr. Carter said in April. Since then, many of the books have been returned to the Naval Academy library, according to a Defense Department spokesman, and Mr. Carter has met with administration officials since.
Alan M. Garber, the president of Harvard University, had spoken publicly before Mr. Trump’s election about his school’s need to be more welcoming to opposing political views, a major priority for Trump officials. But then, Harvard became the administration’s premier target in an extraordinary whole-of-government onslaught.
In April, hundreds of college presidents and other officials signed a letter protesting the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference.” In June, two dozen colleges — including most Ivy League schools, several Big Ten colleges and M.I.T. — publicly supported Harvard’s lawsuit against the administration’s halt on research funding.
This month, the rollout of the compact further rattled some university leaders.
Letters inviting colleges to participate were emailed after business hours, with little public explanation. The document includes a set of principles, such as prohibitions on college policies that would “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” but it was framed as a contract with potentially severe consequences.
Adding to the confusion was the decision to include Brown and Penn, whose settlements with the administration are only months old.
But the move provided fodder for critics who said the decision showed that collaboration with the Trump administration was pointless because the White House pressure campaign would never end.
“The debate about whether the Trump administration is negotiating in bad faith, or good faith, is resolved once you see the compact,” said Corey Brettschneider, a political science professor at Brown who has often focused on free speech. “That doesn’t look like an administration that’s really looking out for intellectual inquiry.”
A university official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the White House, described the agreement as impossible to support in its original form, in part because of how vague some of its terms were.
Administration officials have tried to tell campus officials that they are interested in feedback. But higher education leaders have found that hard to square with the Trump administration’s written assertion this month that the compact was already “largely in its final form.”
On Friday, Ms. Huston, the White House spokeswoman, sent a message that seemed intended to reassure them.
“These leaders are working steadfastly to improve higher education and have been invited to the table to share ideas with the administration,” she said, “and we look forward to discussing transparent ways that, together, we will produce future generations of American excellence.”
Alan Blinder contributed reporting.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
The post White House’s Aggressive Tactics Are Complicating Its Education Agenda appeared first on New York Times.
