About 150 protesters gathered Oct. 13 to urge the University of Texas not to accept the Trump’s administration’s compact that would provide more federal funding if UT agreed to concessions on viewpoint diversity, student admissions, faculty hiring and binary gender definitions, among others.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
In the 1957 U.S. Supreme Court case that affirmed academic freedom as a First Amendment right, Chief Justice Earl Warren likened the restriction of it to a straitjacket imposed upon an unwilling faculty by an outside force. Such an act would “imperil the future of our Nation,” Warren wrote.
Nearly 70 years later, the University of Texas appears on the verge of putting that straitjacket on itself if it signs the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The proposed agreement, from the U.S. Department of Education, offers preferential federal funding in exchange for concessions on viewpoint diversity, student admissions, faculty hiring and binary gender definitions, among others.
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While none of the other eight universities that initially received the compact agreed to sign it, UT is still considering the deal. The Trump administration later extended the offer to other colleges, and this week, New College of Florida became the first taker.
Despite some good ideas, such as a 5-year freeze on tuition, much in the compact is unconstitutional and untethered to reason. Further, it puts UT’s top state and national rankings at risk by ceding academic freedom in exchange for federal dollars. If the Board of Regents wants to keep landing dozens of academic programs in top 10 spots, it should protect the scholarly independence that fosters such achievements and reject this deal.
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A majority of Americans — including Republicans — believe the federal government should not interfere with universities’ admissions, hiring, curriculum and research decisions for good reason: Professors and researchers are the experts in their fields and should have the freedom to pursue knowledge for the advancement of truth, not a political agenda. This is what fosters innovation. Countries with greater academic freedom consistently see stronger economies and more patents, evidence that free inquiry drives real-world progress.
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The American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers aptly describe Trump’s compact as a “clumsy attempt at thought policing” that “sets us backward toward an era of less innovation, fewer cures for diseases, and a shrinking economy.”
The Orwellian document binds signatories to inherently contradictory agreements such as protecting academic freedom by recognizing that “academic freedom is not absolute.” It obligates them to maintain a “broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints” on campus by “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
Such terms are paradoxical, logic holds. Eugene Volokh, a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, says the compact crosses a constitutional line.
Volokh — whose renowned legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy describes itself as “generally libertarian, conservative, centrist, or some mixture of these” — told us that while the federal government can dictate how grants are spent, it cannot levy institution-wide conditions in exchange for federal dollars.
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“The government is saying essentially all these funds that we give you for a wide range of purposes … will be subject to this condition, and that is unconstitutional,” he said.
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Universities should aspire to foster viewpoint diversity, but that range of perspectives does not come from the top down. Rather, it is built up from a foundation of the entire spectrum of ideas being discussed by students and faculty in the classroom.
The compact aims to mandate this spectrum “not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit” of UT. This, as Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom said, is “patently absurd.”
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In fact, injecting political viewpoints not based on scientific research, such as the compact’s requirement to interpret “‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes,” will throw a wrench in decades of empirical study.
Karma Chavez, president of the AAUP’s UT chapter, told us that this binary definition of gender “will require units from the hard sciences to the social sciences to the humanities to adopt views that are contrary to the best knowledge in their fields.”
That, of course, appears to be the point. For all its gilded language about protecting viewpoint diversity, Trump’s compact is clearly meant to install homogenized, dogmatic ideas of what American thought should be in the very places where disagreement should be the norm.
Conservative ideas aren’t so fragile as to require special government safeguards on campus. They are surely strong enough to hold their own in the marketplace of ideas. There should be just as much room on the university campus for the pro-Palestinian protester as there is for the Charlie Kirk follower.
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Texas seemed to be on the right track in 2019, when Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law protecting “free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberations by students” at state universities. But Abbott and lawmakers clawed back those protections this year after Republican lawmakers didn’t like what pro-Palestinian protesters had to say. And now, even without Trump’s compact, UT and other public universities face an alarming injection of politics into their academic mission, from state laws banning DEI programs and curbing faculty senates to Abbott demanding the firing last month of a Texas A&M professor over a gender identity lesson. That prompted UT to review all gender studies courses.
All of which stifles the welcoming climate of rigorous inquiry and debate that Texas’ flagship university should foster.
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Chairman Kevin Eltife wrote this month that the Abbott-appointed Board of Regents was “honored” to be offered Trump’s compact. We can only hope that enthusiasm has cooled, given the passage of the initial Oct. 20 deadline without a deal.
UT is a top-tier university, an engine of innovation and investment and a source of generational pride — none of which should be traded for extra federal funding.