Editor’s Note:The following is an excerpt of an article originally published by the National Association of Scholars on October 21, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
What is the National Association of Scholars (NAS)?
One answer was provided in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. An article by Lisa Straganian mentions “draft legislation promulgated by the National Association of Scholars, a billionaire-funded right-wing think tank.” The title of that article is “Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot.”
That is not the best answer, but it is worth pondering.
President Trump has so far issued 210 Executive Orders, 54 memoranda, and 100 proclamations. Of the Executive Orders (EO), nearly a quarter, some fifty of them, directly bear on higher education. These range from EO 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” issued on January 20, to EO 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” issued January 21, to EO 14332, “Restoring Oversight of Federal Grantmaking,” issued on August 7. Since early August, none of the new Executive Orders have been directly concerned with higher education. This does not, of course, mean that the White House has decided that it is done with the topic of reforming our colleges.
We need only think of the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the White House offered to nine universities on October 1. Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Arizona, University of Pennsylvania, USC, UT Austin, University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt were given a choice between being rewarded with favorable government treatment if they adopted some strenuous changes in policy or standing in opposition to the White House agenda.
Seven of the nine that were invited to sign have said no: Brown, MIT, Penn, USC, Virginia, and now Arizona and Dartmouth. Only Texas has said yes. Vanderbilt is pondering.
The policy changes included equality in admissions, i.e., the elimination of discrimination on the basis of race or sex; required use of standardized tests such as the SAT for admissions; commitment to a “broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff;” commitment to civil debate; prohibition of “incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide;” and “impartial” enforcement of all rights and restrictions.
One might think that the contemporary university that typically speaks loudly about academic freedom and fairness would find such stipulations to be anodyne. Many are already established laws.
But other provisions on the proposed Compact struck a nerve. The universities were asked to freeze tuition for the next five years, eliminate “unnecessary administrative staff, ” engage in “transparent accounting, ” and reduce “administrative costs.” They were also asked to post statistics about the “average earnings of graduates in each academic program” and “refund tuition to students who drop out during” their first semester.
These proved hard to swallow for our esteemed academic administrators. The Compact has many other provisions, and to cite them all would take us down a long road. (I will soon post another essay in which I take a close look at the Compact.)
But NAS has a definite interest in two provisions. The Compact calls for anti-money laundering rules that include strict disclosure of foreign gifts and KYC rules—that is, “Know Your Customer” rules—intended to end the use of cut-outs and intermediaries that some universities employ to disguise the true source of gifts from foreign entities.
The Compact also commits those who sign it to a ceiling of 15 percent of undergraduate students on foreign visas and no more than 5 percent from any one country.
NAS has been the nation’s leading advocate for the disclosure of foreign gifts to American universities. We were the first to blow the whistle on the use of cut-outs to disguise the source of funds. And we have also strongly cautioned legislators on higher education’s excessive reliance on international students. That reliance has made some colleges and universities eager to bend their curricula to favor the views of the home countries of the students—especially China. It has made American universities timid in addressing issues such as China’s aggressive and militaristic policies towards Taiwan and the Philippines. It has made American universities silent about the imposition of authoritarian control of Hong Kong. It has rendered universities mute on the brutalization of the Uyghur minority, China’s use of slave labor, the persecution of Christians and followers of Falun Gong practitioners, and the horrific practice of harvesting organs from living prisoners.
Instead, American higher education has treated China with kid gloves even as that nation’s agents have stolen billions of dollars of sensitive American research and technology, and intimidated overseas Chinese students reluctant to assist with illicit state activities…
Read the remainder of the article here, and follow the National Association of Scholars on X.
Image by Michael on Adobe; Asset ID#: 292215337
