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Donald Trump’s administration has asked US universities to sign a “compact for academic excellence” in return for access to federal funding in an unprecedented attempt to impose its control on the sector.
The White House sent a document to nine universities calling for commitments to eliminate any discrimination in faculty hiring and student admissions, on pain of losing money for student loans, grants, research funding and tax advantages.
The memo, seen by the Financial Times, demands “institutional neutrality” and a requirement for “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”.
It also proposes tuition fees be frozen for five years and the share of international undergraduate students frozen at 15 per cent as a condition of receiving federal funding. Richer institutions — with endowments worth more than $2mn a student — would be required to offer free tuition to everyone studying “hard sciences”.
The “compact” says: “Academic freedom is not absolute, and universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviours that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.”
A White House official confirmed the details of the pledge. It was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which said it had been sent to Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia.
Universities and academics condemned the proposal. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said: “Any effort to reward or punish institutions based on their adherence to the views of government officials should trouble all Americans.
“Defining what constitutes a vigorous and open-ended intellectual environment is not the role of the federal government, and the implications for free speech and academic freedom are chilling.”
The presidents of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers jointly said: “The Trump administration’s offer to give preferential treatment to colleges and universities that court government favour stinks of favoritism, patronage, and bribery in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda. It is entirely corrupt.”
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, warned any institutions in his state that signed the document would lose state funding.
“President Donald Trump’s so-called proposed ‘compact’ is nothing short of a hostile takeover of America’s universities,” he said. “It would impose strict government-mandated definitions of academic terms, erase diversity, and rip control away from campus leaders to install government-mandated conservative ideology in its place.”