NYU senior leadership should unequivocally reject the “Compact of Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the Trump administration’s Department of Education has pressured all U.S. universities to sign. The compact is extortionary, repressive and unconstitutional. It has been rightly compared to a “loyalty oath,” conditioning federal funding for universities on the latter accepting a wide-ranging set of intentionally vague, ideological mandates. The compact states that “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.” In other words, universities can have autonomy or they can have federal funding, but they cannot have both. As a faculty member at NYU and the acting president of NYU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, I call upon President Linda Mills and NYU’s board of trustees to reject Trump’s compact in its entirety. I urge my colleagues and students to join me in doing so. A university that signs on to the compact will effectively destroy institutional independence and academic freedom on its own campus before the ink dries.
The values that the Trump compact seeks to foist upon universities are repressive and discriminatory. The compact proposes to control political viewpoints “within every field, department, school and teaching unit.” It imposes vague “conditions of civility” on campuses and requires that “signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent” disruptions of those conditions. In a throwback to the “Red Scare,” the compact mandates that “signatories…screen out [international] students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies or its values.” It also attempts to enforce transphobic and misogynistic policies by requiring institutions “to commit to defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes. Perversely, the compact offers this right-wing, grab-bag of bigotry and unlawful overreach in the name of equality and nondiscrimination in education, invoking the Civil Rights Acts to do so. But it is beyond question that the authors of the compact have nothing but sneering contempt for both education and civil rights. One would be hard pressed to find a document more opposed to the letter of civil rights law or the spirit of the civil rights movement in recent memory. In the terms of U.S. civil rights history, the compact’s authors are squarely on the side of the attack dog, not the demonstrator.
The compact is flagrantly unconstitutional. As AAUP General Counsel Veena Dubal and legal scholar Genevieve Lakier have written, by conditioning funding on ideological compliance, “the compact violates core principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech — principles that are not only central to U.S. higher education but also strongly protected by the First Amendment.” Moreover, they write, the compact not only contravenes the U.S. Constitution but would require signatories to do so as well. It is a liability nightmare, strong-arming schools into violating the rights of their own students and faculty in order to access federal benefits. Legal scholars at the Knight First Amendment Institute have written that acceding to the compact’s demands would strangle academic freedom.
The compact’s mandates are fundamentally incompatible with the very notion of an independent university where students and faculty pursue learning in an environment free from coercion, censorship and prejudice. It is resentment towards the very idea of such independence — elusive as it may in reality be — that so clearly drives the continued right-wing onslaught against institutions of higher education. Contemporary U.S. authoritarianism seeks to extinguish the democratic power that is generated through scientific, political and cultural education. It cannot tolerate independent processes of review and fact finding that yield truths it deems politically inconvenient. It wants to seize control of the way future generations of students are taught to think, question, dissent and experiment.
NYU leadership must not only decline Trump’s unconstitutional offer, but should publicly and vocally oppose it. In the face of the all-out war against universities unfolding over the last nine months, our institutions need leaders who are capable of articulating their commitments to academic freedom and other core principles of higher education. There is nothing rhetorical or trivial about reasserting these commitments during a moment of deepening existential crisis for our entire sector. The effect of NYU taking a strong, public stand for higher education right now would be catalyzing for other institutions. On the other hand, absent a reassertion of such values, how are we — the faculty, students and staff of NYU — to know where our institutional leadership stands?
Unfortunately, what we have had from the NYU administration instead are conflict avoidance and muted complicity dressed up as a winning strategy. The effects of this nonconfrontational stance have been corrosive. Over the past nine months, NYU’s administration has quietly deleted webpages related to diversity, equity, and inclusion; it has closed down public spaces on campus, stifling protest at the moment when it is most urgently needed; it has encouraged researchers to remove targeted words from grant proposals; it has rapidly expanded its disciplinary apparatus in order to further chill dissenting speech about Palestine.
It would be naïve to consider this intensification of censorship a positive development that has somehow protected us from further violence and extortion. To the contrary, our administration has taken it upon itself to do some of Trump’s work pro bono in the name of pragmatism and Compliance — the compliance of the deer with the headlights. Many of the effects of this censorship could be reversed if our leadership would reassert its substantive commitments to higher education and take action, including legal action, to defend them. This is why it is necessary for faculty, staff and students to call upon administrators to issue a forceful repudiation of the compact and its attempt to break down the university.
However, successful organizing against the compact will take more than rejecting its extortion and pressuring administrators to take a stand. It will also involve a campaign against the trustee class whose predatory vision for higher education is reflected in the compact. For example, Marc Rowan, the billionaire CEO of private equity behemoth Apollo Global Management and a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, co-authored and has publicly promoted the compact. Setting his sights on universities’ “archaic governance structures that make self-reform all but impossible,” Rowan has asserted that “course correction” can only come from opening up schools to a right-wing federal takeover. Rowan dishonestly accuses universities of being broken, while he himself wields the wrecking ball. His goals are to pillage, extract, and undermine, all easily discernible despite the compact’s empty rhetoric of reform.
Cynical confident men like Rowan sit on boards of trustees at universities across the country, where for years they have steadily consolidated institutional control and eroded the distinction between legitimate academic institutions and predatory for-profit enterprises, such as the University of Phoenix, which Rowan’s Apollo owns. They see the lawlessness and extremism of the Trump administration as an opportunity to finish the job. University administrators are surely under internal pressure from such trustees to incorporate the compact’s proposals, even if they do not explicitly capitulate to its coercive demands. But we must not let them. It is our obligation to move our administration to take a more courageous stance.
Across the country, students and faculty have been mobilizing against the compact. Faculty senates at many schools, including UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and several SUNY and CUNY campuses have proactively rejected it. Nearly all of the nine universities initially pressured to sign have done so as well. The AAUP, including our chapter, has successfully opposed the Trump administration in the courts. All across NYU, students and colleagues have been undeterred in their organizing. NYU leadership should follow the example of their courage and tell the Trump administration and grifters like Rowan to keep their hands off higher education.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Zachary Samalin at [email protected].