Nearly two weeks ago, Marc Rowan — the Wharton School Board of Advisors chair and CEO of Apollo Global Management — wrote an essay in The New York Times claiming that countless faculty, administrators, and others, presumably at Penn, believe academia “has lost its way.” He claimed the Trump administration’s so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” offers a solution. In reality, the compact does nothing to address the problems in academia that Rowan highlights and is nothing more than an attempt to force Penn and others to bend a knee to the Trump administration’s broader attack on higher education.
Though arguments against the compact already abound, the Penn community has voiced its opposition, and the compact (in its current form) has been rejected by Penn. We, writing on behalf of the Executive Committee of the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors, feel that Rowan’s attempt to use a national platform to speak in the name of this community while spreading false and misleading statements must be vigorously rebutted.
To establish his case that higher education is broken and can only be fixed by Donald Trump’s compact, Rowan makes four central assertions: the costs of higher education are excessive; college graduates struggle to find work; international students take jobs from domestic students; and there is too much uniformity of thought on campus, which creates a hostile environment for students with minority views.
Before addressing the main assertions, it is worth noting that Rowan acknowledges that it is not the place of the federal government to use political power to force ideology onto colleges and universities. His response is that reform by other means will be difficult. This argument, that convenience justifies force, is sadly a recurring theme of the second Trump administration and wholly inappropriate in a country that — historically, at least — prides itself on rejecting authoritarianism. Rowan, by his own admission openly aligned with Trump, is in a position of power that leads him to regard fundamental rights of faculty, staff, and students as a mere inconvenience. But this does not change the fact that the Constitution of the United States clearly prohibits him from stripping away our rights by political force, even if it would be easy for him to do so.
Regarding the cost of tuition, we have no disagreement with Rowan’s premise, only with his conclusion. Indeed, the costs of higher education are truly staggering. At Penn, for example, the total cost of attendance has risen by 38% in the past decade alone, while the median wage in the United States grew by only about 10%. As faculty, we stand with students in demanding that University leaders address this issue. The compact does no such thing, however. What it does do is require universities to cut revenue streams and place themselves in greater financial precarity rather than less. In exchange for weakening their financial positions, signers of the compact receive only unspecified, unenforceable promises of funding priority.
As to the difficulty faced by students in finding work after graduation, this is another real challenge for which the compact offers no solution. The job market for our graduates is being gravely wounded by the Trump administration’s economic policies and geopolitical instability. No amount of thought-policing can create the jobs that graduating students need. Addressing the growing employment crisis requires the federal government to work with employers to incentivize and facilitate the creation of missing jobs. What we have instead is the administration using the erosion of employment prospects of college graduates as a cover for its authoritarian measures.
Rowan’s claim that hordes of undeserving international students are taking jobs from domestic applicants is both inaccurate and xenophobic. International students and scholars make valuable contributions to our communities and the economy. Even if those are ignored, driving international students away would have little impact on employment prospects for domestic students: Only about one out of every 50 college degrees is awarded to an international student who goes on to long-term employment in the United States. During the final year of the Biden administration, for example, 11 out of 12 months saw roughly as many or more new jobs added each month as are filled by all graduating international students in an entire year. If the Trump administration were able to match its predecessor’s level of job growth, there would be more than enough jobs for everyone, regardless of national origin.
Rowan’s final claims of excessive uniformity of thought are similarly misleading. No reasonable person could argue that university presidents sending police in riot gear to arrest student protesters or unilaterally imposing historic restrictions on free expression are a sign of excessive ideological conformity between administrators, faculty, staff, and students. The compact seeks to impose even more draconian speech restrictions by, for example, “abolishing institutional units” that so much as joke about Rowan’s political beliefs. And yes, the “free marketplace of ideas” touted by the compact is, in fact, state-controlled: It is specifically designed to favor the “conservative ideas” of Rowan and his allies while allowing the government to continue targeting progressive ones.
The compact that Rowan has been so centrally involved in authoring is, sadly, just the continuation of a yearslong effort to undermine academic freedom and silence critics. It characterizes efforts to dismantle racism as discriminatory, a continuation of other efforts to undermine the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It makes other demands about admissions, like requiring the use of standardized tests and limiting the admission of international students, that directly flout the shared governance rights of faculty. It institutes definitions of sex and gender that are incompatible with science, personal liberty, and Penn’s values, undermining research and violating academic freedom and free speech. All institutions must follow the examples of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, and now Penn, to reject the compact and any thinly veiled repackaging of it in the future.
Toward the end of his essay, Rowan asks, “[W]ho speaks for a university in the first place?“ A thought-provoking question, to be sure, but one that rings hollow coming from Rowan. He himself speaks in the name of an undisclosed throng, presumably the Penn community, to advocate for unprecedented restrictions on our public speech — ones that our community clearly opposes. He concludes by claiming, “With these reforms, America’s institutions of higher education can return to their proper mission.” It seems that Rowan understands the mission of higher education to be to kneel to the political whims of the Trump administration and wealthy donors. We forcefully disagree.
AAUP-PENN is a campus advocacy group for faculty. Jessa Lingel, Lorena Grundy, and Philip Gressman are the president, vice president, and communication secretary, respectively, of AAUP-Penn. The group’s email is aaup.penn@gmail.com.
