Like many students, I felt a surge of Penn pride when Penn President Larry Jameson announced the rejection of the White House’s “Compact for Academic Excellence.” After the University’s embarrassing show of acquiescence this summer — when Penn complied with the Department of Education’s new Title IX demands — Penn being among the first universities to take a stand against the most blatant executive overreach felt like principle had been restored.
However, while universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University offered unapologetic disavowals of compromising their autonomy in admissions, campus discourse, and values surrounding student identity and belonging, Penn took a more careful posture by offering the White House a litany of feedback “highlighting areas of existing alignment.” The letter in response to the compact reads less like a staunch defense of academic freedom and more like a polite peer review of the Education Department’s encroachment.
On the surface, we should be glad that our University leadership, entrusted with a $25 billion endowment and the well-being of more than 20,000 students, opts for diplomacy over hostility. But Penn won’t find a seat at the table that President Donald Trump’s White House built for humiliation, not negotiation. Trump and his lieutenants understand that breaking public trust in universities pays dividends for decades. Agreeing to a compromise with Penn would only legitimize the kind of elite institution that threatens Trump’s vision for a government with minimal oversight and maximal loyalty. The goal wasn’t simply to shape higher education in the image of the right; it was to make elite universities outright despised.
The most visible means of accomplishing this has been through a campaign to delegitimize the institution’s scientific research into climate change and vaccines, casting them as factories of “liberal indoctrination.” But the longer, more effective play has been more subtle: to make universities discredit themselves. Trump and his allies have learned that you don’t need to shut down an institution you can hollow out from within. The project is to turn universities against their own elitism and insularity, to let them equivocate when moral clarity is needed, and to confuse diplomacy for virtue.
It works because institutions like Penn are built to negotiate. They rely on slow consensus building and the comforts of committee governance. They speak the language of “dialogue” and “engagement” even when the other side is acting in bad faith. That is the contradiction of Penn’s elite bureaucracy: It preaches moral courage but practically commits to caution, celebrating inclusion but fearing the conflict necessary to maintain it. Trumpism weaponizes that instinct by forcing schools to defend their hypocrisy instead of their rhetorical convictions.
So far, Penn has obliged.
Throughout the Amy Wax controversy, the University hesitated between moral clarity and bureaucratic caution, unable to decide between firing Wax for prejudice or taking an absolutist stand behind the principle of free speech and tenure. When transgender athletes like Lia Thomas became national targets, the University hid behind compliance instead of pursuing a winnable legal battle. Time and time again, when Trump’s White House overstepped, the University mistook civility for wisdom — ceding political ground to an adversary, not a partner.
Still, Penn’s sometimes frustrating procedural culture is worth defending: Elite universities remain one of the few places where truth is thought of as a public good, not a partisan one. To defend Penn’s elite system is not to defend privilege, but to demonstrate the idea that insulated deliberation, when bound by ethics, helps serve everyone. The alternative, Trump’s vision, is where knowledge itself becomes political property. What is reassuring is Penn has sought to fight back: Unprecedented spending to lobby Congress and amicus briefs filed to protect research funding signal that University leadership is aware of the threat to higher education that the Trump White House poses.
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In caving to the Trump administration, Penn betrays its motto
The problem isn’t an unwillingness to fight, but rather a misunderstanding about how to overcome. Penn’s leadership assumes this is a policy disagreement to settle rather than a legitimacy conflict to be won. Elite universities are not accustomed to thinking in these existential terms. Penn and peer institutions have enjoyed decades of friendly relations with the federal government. Their instinct is to manage, not mobilize. But this moment demands a different posture; the object cannot merely be to “ride out” this president. For once this presidency is up, the next populist will seek to further exploit the cracks Trump exposed.
That is why Penn must follow from Trump’s own playbook and turn it against him, to learn the “art of no deal.” The task is not to negotiate better, but to stop negotiating altogether on questions that concede the premise of federal say over academic life. Every round of dialogue and every “stakeholder conversation” grants legitimacy to a government that seeks not compromise but capitulation. The University’s responsibility is to end the charade and to reject the framing.
Diplomacy is possible, but only from a position of strength. Penn might seek an alliance with other universities to engage with the Education Department in solidarity instead of responding in isolation. But by now it should be clear: Penn must recognize that the dialogue itself has become the weapon. Trump cannot be negotiated with. And if Penn keeps mailing conciliatory letters to Washington, it will learn that what it called dialogue was simply participation in its own undoing.
SOHUM SHETH is a College first year from Jacksonville, Fla. studying philosophy, politics, and economics. His email is sheth0@sas.upenn.edu.
