Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the National Association of Scholars on October 28, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
On October 1, the Trump administration sent a letter to nine American universities offering a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” As of this writing, seven of the nine universities have declined the Compact, and numerous academic associations and individual scholars have objected to it. One university—the University of Texas—has accepted it, and one—Vanderbilt University—has so far declined to take a public position.
I have no doubt that members of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) have a variety of views about the merits of the proposed Compact, and I won’t pretend to speak for the organization as a whole. My own view is that the Compact is a constructive proposal. It isn’t perfect, but most of its provisions would benefit students, higher education, and America. And the less perfect provisions could be worked out.
Rather than move directly to the many strengths and few weaknesses of the Compact, or to the criticisms that have been raised, I will begin with some background.
Background
Donald Trump, circa 2016, was not someone who seemed likely to champion reform in higher education. His closest encounter with educational reform was the founding in 2004 of an unaccredited company that offered courses in real estate, asset management, and wealth creation. It had several names but was generally called Trump University, and it went out of business in 2011. After it closed, it was bedeviled by lawsuits and allegations that it defrauded its students. Trump settled those suits in 2016 for $25 million.
Most of us would never have heard of Trump University had it not been turned into political fodder by his opponents during his first campaign for president. As president of the NAS, I viewed Trump’s coming presidency as a period of possible reprieve from the ever-intensifying politicization of higher education during the Obama years. Perhaps, I thought, we would get a Secretary of Education who would undo the vicious weaponization of Title IX under Obama’s Office for Civil Rights. I saw my own task as President of the NAS as keeping the hope for more extensive reform in higher education alive during what looked like a lull in the ongoing age of educational decline.
And indeed, for the first three years of Trump’s first term, little happened that suggested otherwise. The Black Lives Matter movement gathered momentum on campus. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Nicole Hannah Jones amplified black grievance on and off campus. Climate catastrophists continued to use their professorial perches to escalate their pseudo-science of environmental doom. The rot at the heart of the college curriculum expanded apace.
But in 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term, the campus caught his attention. In May 2020, Secretary of Education DeVos finally issued new standards for Title IX. She had rescinded the Obama rules—the “Dear Colleague” letters—in 2017, but had worked at a glacial pace to replace them. The new rules put a firm foundation under how colleges should handle allegations of sexual assault and harassment, and restored due process for the accused.
She also let stand the Obama-era expansion of Title IX that made sexual assault a form of “sex discrimination.” That is, Obama’s Office for Civil Rights put a criminal act, normally the province of law enforcement, under the purview of the civilians who serve on campus as “Title IX Coordinators.” That makes no real sense. Very few of these coordinators have law enforcement backgrounds or legal training. They are essentially ideologues. The problem remains.
2020 was also the year in which the Trump administration began to notice the subversion of colleges and universities by the Chinese Communist Party, which was deploying large amounts of money as well as organized personnel in their efforts to bend American higher education to its purposes—and finding many college presidents and faculty eager to assist. Trump had Mike Pompeo, as Secretary of State, declare that fifty years of “engagement with China” had failed the American people. Among the steps he took were attempts to restrict visas for Chinese students studying at American universities, the prosecution of American academics who were illicitly working for China, and steps to stop further Chinese infiltration. All of this came to a full stop when President Biden took office. During Biden’s presidency, China effectively had full run of American higher education.
2020 was also the year of the George Floyd riots, bringing to fruition the years of racial grievance mongering that the American left had long been cultivating with the zeal of a Jehovah’s Witness. No sooner were American towns and cities aflame with the Molotov cocktails of social justice warriors than hundreds of American college presidents issued declarations that their institutions had shamefully participated in “systemic racism,” and from this point forward, they would make amends. I wrote individually to several hundred of these presidents who indicted their own institutions, asking if they could name any instances of such “systemic racism.” Only two answered me. Both said they could not. The rest were silent.
By September 2020, Trump had fully recognized the reality that American higher education had become the deep engine of anti-American ideology, abetting the nation’s enemies and betraying many young people into false views of their nation and their cultural inheritance. Trump summoned a response to the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which he called the “1776 Commission.”
But of course it was too late. My own response to what followed during the Biden years was a book, Wrath: America Enraged. I very much doubt that Trump ever saw it, but the book channeled what a great many others were thinking and feeling, and somehow, when Trump returned to the White House, he was on fire with the need to reform American higher education.
Since around 2010, NAS had been raising warning flags for what was happening on campus. We did reports on the radical distortions in undergraduate history. We were the first to call out the rise of Obama civics, christened the “new civics,” which dispensed with teaching the history and mechanics of our self-governing republic with a deep dive into the diversity doctrine, sustainability, and global citizenship. We put a spotlight on China’s “Confucius Institutes.” We uncovered the nonfeasance of the Department of Education, which was responsible for enforcing the nation’s law on foreign donations to American universities, but had let the matter drop for decades on end. We tracked how “social justice” programs had woven a comprehensive web around K-12 and college education.
And we did all this in the hope and expectation that elected officials would see a symphony of problems in need of a reform-minded conductor. Naturally, nothing happened. Naturally, because the American left actively favored what we deplored, and American conservatives generally shrugged off higher education as either an insolvable or an irrelevant problem: insolvable because leftist control was too entrenched to challenge, or irrelevant because college graduates would eventually grow out of their infatuation with Marxist dogma.
Trump in 2025 has reordered these assumptions. He believes real change in higher education is possible, and he understands that the price of allowing generations of young people to be indoctrinated by the radical left is generations of college-educated voters who hate their country and their culture.
Trump’s 2025 Actions
In 2025, President Trump has so far issued 210 Executive Orders. Some fifty of them pertain to higher education, one measure of how seriously he is taking the subject. These include:
- EO 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” issued on January 20, 2025;
- EO 14151, “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,” issued on January 20, 2025;
- EO 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” issued on January 21, 2025;
- EO 14332, “Restoring Oversight of Federal Grantmaking,” issued on August 7.
I won’t take the space here to comb through the 46 others, but I find it hard to identify any of the 50 to which I have a serious objection, and most, like the four cited above, represent huge improvements. Or they would be if they were not stymied by federal courts and if they were zealously implemented by colleges and universities as well as federal agencies.
Of course, Executive Orders are not permanent law. They point to what the law should be, but to gain permanence, they need to be enacted by Congress, and they need to survive judicial scrutiny. So I take the Trump administration’s proliferation of Executive Orders on higher education as a stride in the right direction, but not a secure solution to the underlying problems.
In many of these cases, the Trump administration is lending its support for initiatives the NAS has long advocated. We had no role in drafting the EOs, and we are but one of several organizations that have promoted similar ideas. But we are happy that the administration has seized the initiative.
A Compact Version of the Compact
The most recent of the Executive Orders on higher education was issued in early August. Since then, the primary action taken by the Trump administration has been the letter to nine universities offering the Compact. Objections to the Compact are generically the same as objections to the Executive Orders. The Compact, we are warned, would compromise the autonomy of colleges and universities and infringe on academic freedom. Before I turn to those criticisms, let me offer a list of what the Compact entails.
In Section One, “EQUALITY IN ADMISSIONS,” it specifies: “no factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations, or proxies for any of those factors shall be considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions or financial support, with due exceptions for institutions that are solely or primarily comprised of students of a specific sex or religious denomination.”
To this end, it requires that all admissions be based on “objective criteria published on the University’s website.” And it requires the university to have all applicants take a standardized test such as the SAT.
Section Two, “MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS & CIVIL DISCOURSE,” commits the signing university to “maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas where different views can be explored, debated, and challenged.” It warns against university policies that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” And it demands “the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility.”
The Compact also called for policies that prohibit “incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.”
Section Three, “NONDISCRIMINATION IN FACULTY AND ADMINISTRATIVE HIRING,” demands “a steadfast commitment to rigorous and meritocratic selection based on objective and measurable criteria in the appointment process.”
Section Four, “INSTITUTIONAL NEUTRALITY,” demands that university employees “abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.”
Section Five, “STUDENT LEARNING,” commits universities to “grade integrity,” which includes that grades not be “inflated or deflated for any non-academic reason.” To this end, the universities agree to “public accountability” such as “publishing grade distribution dashboards.”
Section Six, “STUDENT EQUALITY,” specifies that students “be treated as individuals and not on the basis of their immutable characteristics, with due exceptions for sex-based privacy, safety, and fairness.” This includes “clear and consistent disciplinary standards that apply equally to all students, faculty, and staff.”
Section Seven,” FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY,” says that “Universities have a duty to control their costs.” This entails “eliminating unnecessary administrative staff” and having “transparent accounting.”
Notably, the Compact calls for “freezing the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years. It also specifies that universities “post statistics about average earnings from graduates in each academic program,” and that they “refund tuition to students who drop out during the first academic term of their undergraduate studies.”
Another item under this heading specifies that, “Any university with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs.”
And lastly, the signatory universities must accept “full transfer credits from the Joint Service Transcript of military service members and veterans enrolling in undergraduate and graduate programs.”
Section Eight, “FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS,” commits universities to “anti-money laundering, Know-Your-Customer (“KYC”), and foreign gift disclosure obligations imposed by the federal government.”
It also requires, “no more than 15 percent of a university’s undergraduate student population shall be participants in the Student Visa Exchange Program, and no more than 5 percent shall be from any one country.”
Section Nine, “EXCEPTIONS,” allows that “a religious institution may maintain preferences for religious affiliation or belief in hiring and admissions, a single-sex institution may maintain sex-based preferences, and any institution may maintain preferences in admissions for American citizens.”
Section Ten, “ENFORCEMENT,” says that, “On an annual basis the university’s President, Provost, and Head of Admissions shall be required to certify the University’s adherence to the principles contained herein.” It also requires an annual poll of faculty, students, and staff to register their views on the university’s “performance against this compact.”
The Compact runs nine pages and is easily readable. I think I have captured all the main provisions, but of course, there is more detail.
My Assessment
I find most of the Compact to be principled, constructive, and easily implemented by any university that acts in good faith. Some of it is a restatement of existing law, such as the prohibitions on racial and sexual preferences in admissions and hiring. The demand for a true “Marketplace of Ideas” would be a welcome correction to a university that is frozen into progressive ideology. One of the specifications under “Financial Responsibility” might prove hard to swallow for universities used to hefty annual increases in tuition. The section of “Foreign Entanglements” provides a desperately needed corrective to the dependence on foreign students and foreign funds that has turned much of American higher education against the interests of American students and America itself.
The section that I find doubtful is “Institutional Neutrality,” and my doubt is that such a thing is possible. The doctrine of institutional neutrality has surged in popularity in the last few years. I have written a critique of it elsewhere, but the simple point to make is that such neutrality is impossible to maintain, and the pretense breeds dishonesty and deceit. It is better to embrace a culture of vigorous debate on campus than to attempt to avoid official opinions.
But that said, I wouldn’t throw out the Compact for having a single provision that I think is unworkable. Oddly enough, this is one of the few provisions that critics of the Compact seem to find acceptable.
By putting this Compact forward at this moment, the Trump administration has struck a major blow against the suffocating political orthodoxy of the higher education establishment. The universities may well reject the Compact, but that puts them in the position of publicly upholding policies that most Americans reject. Rejecting the Compact will only accelerate the decline of American higher education in public esteem.
The Critics
California Governor Gavin Newsom threatens to pull all state funding from any university in his state that signs the Compact. Three dozen higher education associations are “deeply concerned that the compact’s prescriptions threaten to undermine the very qualities that make our system exceptional,” (Quoted in Higher Ed Dive). Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, calls the Compact “Extortion, plain and simple.” Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute called the Compact “Profoundly problematic.” Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, says that “Federal funding for universities should never depend on a loyalty oath.” Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, said that the compact “is like trying to fix a watch with a hammer—ill-conceived and counterproductive.” Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, rejected the Compact, saying, “I am concerned that the compact by its nature and by various provisions would restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance.” Akan S, Blinder, professor of economics at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, says that “The Trump compact would make America mediocre again.”
I could easily multiply these quotations. That portion of the media that reports on higher education has been filled with denunciations of the Compact over the last month, with only a handful of writers defending it. I will single out only one of the condemnations, which I find the most substantive of the lot. Writing under the headline, “Our Politics Differ, But We Agree: Trump’s ‘Compact’ Violates Academic Freedom,” Professors Robert George, Tom Ginsburg, Robert Post, David Rabban, Jeannie Suk Gersen, and Keith Whittington inveighed in the sub-head “Using federal funding to dictate who colleges admit and what faculty can say crosses a dangerous line.”
Perhaps the headline and the sub-head were added by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which published the statement, but they capture the gist of it. The writers collectively declare “certain aspects of the compact violate core principle of academic freedom.” The questions are “Which principles?” and Which aspects of the Compact?”
Their answers to the first question, the principle they cite, are:
- “The liberty of faculty within the bounds of professional competence to teach and to research as they choose”;
- “The conviction that colleges need to be sites of continuous debate and disagreement”;
- “An acceptable range of discussion must be made on the basis of academic criteria, not on the basis of political ideology”;
- “No ideas, and certainly no political ideologies, should be immune from critique”; and
- “Faculty should be able to engage as individual citizens in extramural speech.”
The answers to the second question, the parts of the Compact that supposedly violate those principles, are:
- “The demand of the compact that ‘conservative ideas’ be free from belittlement”;
- “The requirement of the compact that universities and colleges censor students and faculty who voice support for ‘entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations’”;
- “Overly intrusive regulation of constitutionally protected speech”; and
- “Financial incentives to break these contractual agreements.”
My main response to this is, “Is this all they’ve got?” And the answer to that is yes. The ditheriest defenders of the academic status quo have huddled and reached the consensus that the great dangers of Trump’s proposed Compact are that faculty and students might be hindered in the campus sport of persecuting conservatives under the cover of “free speech,” the high-minded defense of speakers who advocate terrorism, and the interference with faculty contracts that protect the license of faculty members to speak as they wish no matter the interests of the students or the institution.
Let me grant that these are valid concerns. If I had drafted the Compact, I would not have singled out “conservatives” by name. It would have been sufficient to apply the principle of tolerance to the political views of all parties. But it is, after all, conservatives who suffer the lion’s share of this abuse on today’s campus, and it makes some sense to underline their vulnerability. The line about terrorism refers to Section Two of the Compact, which prohibits “incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.” I would venture that the vast majority of Americans would prefer a university that upholds this prohibition, and it is shocking that this is one of the places where prominent critics of the Compact choose to take a stand.
If the principle of academic freedom requires turning a blind eye to advocacy of terrorism, so much the worse for academic freedom. At that stage, it becomes a self-refuting doctrine. Academic freedom makes sense only in a context of civilized order.
As for constitutionally protected speech, the Compact does not and cannot override the U.S. Constitution.
And the last point about “faculty contracts,” I would say that if those contracts really stand in the way of the many reforms laid out in the Compact, they are part of the problem that has put American higher education on its current troubled path. Perhaps it is time for colleges and universities to get serious about education rather than pampering faculty members who prioritize their privileged exemptions from their responsibilities to their students and to the pursuit of truth.
If the dangers to “institutional autonomy” and “academic freedom” presented by the Compact come down to these demurs, I’d say there is nothing much to worry about. In truth, I suspect there are other complaints that lie behind these and that signers of “Our Politics Differ, But We Agree” are too circumspect to say. Their deeper concerns, I imagine, are their aversion to President Trump and their fear that public disaffection with contemporary American higher education will lead to a loss of status and power for faculty members.
If I imagine that correctly, I would say that is a valid fear. It is also where all this is heading for the benefit of the American people for generations to come. The Compact, paradoxically, could save American higher education from impending disasters. The demographic decline that is emptying classrooms, closing small colleges, and forcing larger universities to shed programs and faculty is not about to let up. The loss of public confidence in higher education, and especially the falling status of the college degree in the marketplace, is accelerating. The public disdain for an institution more interested in alienating than educating has intensified. The rise of artificial intelligence has further eroded the value of most college degrees and seems poised to go further.
If I were still a university professor, I might share the apprehensions that have led to the chorus of complaints about Trump’s proposed Compact. But as someone who has safely reached the shore, I am more concerned about sending out the rescue boats. That is really what the Compact is.
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