The Trump administration is finding that getting some of the country’s most prestigious universities to be more politically diverse is a heavy lift – even when the schools are offered funding priority.
Dartmouth College over the weekend joined the University of Virginia (UVA) in rejecting the Trump administration’s offer of preferential funding in exchange for agreeing to overhaul or abolish departments that oppose conservative ideas and other far-reaching stipulations.
UVA and the Ivy League school in Hanover, New Hampshire, are two of nine schools approached by the administration with the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have also rejected the offer as well as Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.
Only three universities reportedly have yet to decide on the proposal – Vanderbilt University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Texas, Austin.
In a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock wrote, “I do not believe that the involvement of the government through a compact—whether it is a Republican- or Democratic-led White House—is the right way to focus America’s leading colleges and universities on their teaching and research mission.”
Some of the proposal’s stipulations include banning the use of race, sex, and religion in hiring and admissions, freezing tuition rates for five years, capping the undergraduate enrollment of foreign students to 15 percent, and requiring that applicants take the SAT or a similar admission test.
The compact also seeks restore order on campuses plagued by protests and disruptions, particularly common with appearances by conservative speakers and in the anti-Israel demonstrations of late. It states:
Universities shall neither support nor permit a heckler’s veto through, for example, disruptions, violence, intimidation, or vandalism. Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations; (2) allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students or groups of students; or (3) allow obstruction of access to parts of campus based on students’ race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.
In his message to Secretary McMahon, UVA interim president Paul Mahoney wrote that the university agrees “with many of the principles outlined in the Compact,” but “we seek no special treatment in exchange” for improving them, including “a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality, and equal treatment of students.”
The other universities who rejected the compact sited a variety of reasons for not joining into the agreement, among them administrators that said funding should be administered on “scientific merit” and not central approval by the federal government.
The most hyperbolic rejection came from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who threatened to pull state funding from any California university that agreed to the terms of the compact. In his statement he employed all caps, typically used in social media to signify yelling:
The governor wrote, “IF ANY CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY SIGNS THIS RADICAL AGREEMENT, THEY’LL LOSE BILLIONS IN STATE FUNDING — INCLUDING CAL GRANTS — INSTANTLY. CALIFORNIA WILL NOT BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, AND SURRENDER ACADEMIC FREEDOM.”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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