Grace Lindsay is an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Data Science at New York University.
Nine universities received an Oct. 1 letter from the Trump administration with an offer: If you agree to a set of policies requested by the government, you will be given preferential treatment for federal funding. Those requested policies ranged from tuition freezes for American students and capping foreign student enrollment to enacting government-given definitions of gender and abolishing any entities that would “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” The response from the academic community to this so-called “compact,” was swift: Petitions, faculty senate resolutions and newspaper op-eds came out against it as a blatant partisan attack on academic freedom and self-governance.
As of Oct. 19, six schools — Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Virginia and Dartmouth College — have formally responded, all declining. The remaining — University of Arizona, Texas A&M University and Vanderbilt University — were told they have until Oct. 20 to decide.
Undeterred, on Oct. 17, the Trump administration formally extended the offer to Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Kansas and Arizona State University and indicated any university that wants to join, can. While a goal of the offer is to pit schools against each other by offering favors to those who comply and retaliation against those who don’t, universities, including NYU, must stand strong in their united stance against it.
First, it is important to note that the offer, as written, is unconstitutional. It proposes violations of the First Amendment and of the separation of powers, by giving the executive branch control over funding that is only allowed by Congress. Even Frederick M. Hess from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, who supports the compact’s aims, described it as “profoundly problematic” and “ungrounded in law,” suggesting that Congress work to further these ideas legally instead. The administration may have forgotten they need to abide by the Constitution, but the rest of us cannot.
Furthermore, in their rejection letters, universities have characterized the compact as violating their principles. MIT’s response states “the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.” Indeed, the compact would force the government to modify well-established merit-based policies for allocating research funding in order to allow for favoritism. It would also seemingly require that universities implement affirmative action-like policies in order to ensure viewpoint diversity “not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school and teaching unit.”
Finally, the compact has been rightly described as extortion, and an extorter is rarely appeased. Any university that agrees to this offer will be signing up for regular “review by the Department of Justice” where violations of the compact’s broad and vague terms can be met with punishment. This opens the door to increasing demands and pressure: Once you tell government members you are willing to jump through hoops for funding, they may find they have more hoops to offer.
An outside observer may think some of the compact’s requests seem reasonable, or even desirable. Parents would probably be happy to hear about tuition freezes, and may support efforts to fight grade inflation, for example. But to think support for any one proposal in the compact should constitute support for the whole is deeply misguided. Any university can enact whatever policies it believes will better its community at any time. And universities can do so without the added legal and reputational risk this compact brings with it.
A unified response from the academic community in opposition to this compact is our safest way of avoiding its negative effects. If the compact is universally rejected, all universities will remain on even playing grounds. And the threats made by the government against those who don’t sign, such as revoking access to student visas or loans, may not come to fruition. If some university leaders do choose to sign the compact, either out of fear or enthusiasm, however, the consequences for the rest may be more severe. But this is where unity within the university matters too. If we as students, faculty and staff, let university leaders know that we support them when they stand on principle, then they will trust us to understand as they navigate the consequences of that stance.
Academia is not alone in facing these decisions. After the Pentagon announced that reporters who wanted to stay in its press pool would have to commit to only reporting information approved by its leadership, all but one news network declined. The consequences were substantial: Reporters had to forfeit their press badges and leave the building. But they did so united both within and across their organizations, knowing that there is no reason to report on the Pentagon if you can’t report the truth. And what is the point of a university if we can’t freely pursue it?
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