Last week, the White House sent a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” to Penn and eight other universities. This marks phase two in the Trump administration’s war on higher education, following last spring’s assaults against individual institutions, including Penn. If successful, the compact will rob universities of their remaining autonomy and cripple our country’s preeminence in teaching and research. Penn President Larry Jameson should not sign the compact. Penn should rally other universities to do the same.
“American higher education is the envy of the world,” the compact announces, “and represents a key strategic benefit for our Nation.” You would think this means American universities have been largely successful. But no: The compact calls for unprecedented levels of government interference in both state and private universities, even as it requires those universities to extol the virtues of the free market. While the compact identifies a number of serious problems that have plagued higher education for decades — sky-high tuition fees, a deficit of viewpoint diversity (particularly when it comes to the right flank of the political spectrum), and rising grade inflation — it offers neither an analysis of those problems nor practical suggestions for solving them.
In its sweeping assertion of federal power to defund universities that fail or refuse to comply with its dictates, it aims at nothing less than a hostile takeover designed to gut and remake higher education, according to the preferences of President Trump. This is the same Donald Trump who founded a university that lasted six years before succumbing to multiple class-action lawsuits by former students, to whom Trump eventually paid a $25 million fine. The conservative magazine National Review called Trump University “a massive scam.”
The Trump compact’s demands for higher education are dangerously vague and practically invite political abuse. It forbids consideration not only of “sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] religious associations” in admissions and the awarding of financial aid but “proxies for any of those factors.” This could be used to defund schools that favor first-generation college applicants, recipients of Pell grants, applicants who are in the top 10% of their high school graduating class, and those from rural communities.
Under the compact, universities with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student “will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs.” Why should the federal government radically tip the scales when it comes to students’ choice of majors? That doesn’t sound like the “marketplace of ideas” touted by the compact. It further requires “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Why only conservative ideas? And who will decide what qualifies as “belittling” and a “conservative idea”? The federal government, presumably. “Universities shall not permit actions,” the compact reads, “that delay or disrupt class instruction.” Would that apply to the student at Texas A&M University who recently got her instructor fired for raising the topic of gender?
The compact resembles a noose more than a mutual agreement. Universities that sign on will face the potential cancellation of all their federal funding in response to a single violation of terms by a department or faculty member. And that’s the whole point: to hold entire universities hostage, including vast biomedical and other research units, so that the Trump administration can vanquish its prime target, namely, left-leaning faculty in the humanities and social sciences.
Project 2025, the blueprint for the Trump administration’s agenda, explains this maneuver clearly: “Currently, the federal government pays a portion of the overhead expenses associated with university-based research. Known as ‘indirect costs,’ these reimbursements cross-subsidize leftist agendas.” To destroy “leftist agendas,” the Trump administration has already proven willing to starve biomedical research and clean energy technology, as well as change other vital arenas where federal investments help power the American economy and promote Americans’ wellbeing.
In a thriving marketplace of ideas, individual researchers or consortia of laboratories across multiple universities apply for federal funding on a competitive basis. Grants are awarded by peer-review according to the merits of the proposed research. Under the compact, researchers will be excluded from federal grant competitions simply by virtue of being employed at a university that refuses to sign or fails — in the judgment of the government — to fulfill the compact’s vague and expansive requirements. This un-American system will destroy any semblance of meritocracy in the sciences and humanities, which in turn, will ensure that American higher education is no longer “the envy of the world.”
SEE MORE FROM BENJAMIN NATHANS:
No self-respecting university that values its autonomy and the integrity of its teaching and research should sign the compact. Instead, universities should honor the principle of strength in numbers and join forces in their own compact to collectively decline this invitation to their own hanging. Our times demand unusual courage and foresight on the part of university leaders. We must prepare for a period of austerity as the White House continues to illegally cut congressionally mandated funding to higher education.
University presidents who resist the call to submit will need the support of faculty and students until such time as Congress or the courts curb Trump’s usurpation of budgetary power. Alumni will need to generously support universities through a period of significant belt-tightening. The choice is clear: Abandon institutional autonomy in the vain hope of appeasing a president who constantly escalates his demands, or collectively defend the principles of institutional autonomy and unfettered inquiry.
BENJAMIN NATHANS is the Alan Charles Kors Term Associate Professor of History at Penn. His most recent book, “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement,” won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. His email is bnathans@history.upenn.edu.
