As with many things Trump, the administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” provoked accusations of authoritarian takeover of vital American institutions. And, as with many things Trump, the administration’s compact overreached in pursuit of a worthy goal, giving critics ammunition to oppose urgently needed reform.
On Oct. 1, the Trump administration sent the compact to nine universities – the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas Austin, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia. (Subsequently the administration opened the deal to all higher-education institutions.) The White House offered signatories to the compact preferential treatment in the allocation of federal funds. By the administration’s late-October deadline for responding, UT Austin and Vanderbilt had expressed interest. The other seven initial recipients rejected the compact, primarily on the grounds that the government’s terms would erode the academic freedom to which they solemnly profess devotion.
The Trump administration and America’s universities each give the other cause for skepticism. Universities’ generally poor record of protecting, much less fostering, the robust exchange of ideas belies their professions of devotion to academic freedom. At the same time, though aimed at protecting campus free speech, the Trump compact assigns the federal government responsibility to supervise the expression of ideas in higher education.
The compact asks universities to comply with ten priorities for achieving academic excellence. First, universities must end discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex, or any group membership, and instead admit students and provide financial aid based on individual merit. Second, universities must foster free speech. Third, universities must end discrimination in hiring and appoint faculty members based on individual merit. Fourth, universities and their various divisions must maintain institutional neutrality on political issues that do not directly affect university governance and educational mission. Fifth, universities must fight grade inflation. Sixth, universities must treat individuals equally “with due exceptions for sex-based privacy, safety, and fairness.” Seventh, universities must control their skyrocketing costs and cease to saddle students with ruinous debt. Eighth, universities must comply with federal laws that govern foreign donations; they must also limit enrollment of foreign students both to exclude those with “anti-American values” and to preserve space for Americans. Ninth, universities must honor Title VII exemptions based on religion, national origin, or sex, though religiously affiliated and single-sex universities may maintain their orientations. Tenth, to preserve favored status, universities must certify annually to the Department of Justice’s satisfaction their adherence to the compact’s priorities.
Several of these priorities represent sound standards and goals for America’s institutions of higher education. Others are problematic. A small group of politically diverse scholars, including Princeton’s Robert P. George, criticized the compact for, among other things, its “demands that universities and colleges eschew foreign students with ‘anti-American values’ and that they impose a politically determined diversity within departments and other institutional units.”
The compact’s requirement concerning universities’ treatment of conservative ideas generated particular controversy. In pursuit of “[a] vibrant marketplace of ideas,” the compact states, “Signatories must commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
With this formulation, the Trump administration made two mistakes. One was to insist that universities cease to “belittle” conservative ideas. That ominous directive empowers government officials to penalize criticism of conservative ideas, whether they deem the criticism counterproductive, wrongheaded, or distasteful. The other mistake was to single out conservative ideas for special protection. No unit of a university should purposefully punish or spark violence against ideas – conservative or otherwise.
A larger problem with the compact concerns its omissions. Fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas is an important step. However, the compact offers nothing practical to encourage universities to teach students the principles of liberty of thought and discussion, and to model them in their classrooms and scholarship. And the compact does not address the imperative to replace the rudderless, politicized, and arcane curricula that dominate at American universities with curricula that furnish students’ minds with a solid introduction to American political ideas and institutions; the history, seminal ideas, and great debates of Western civilization; and the principal features of other civilizations. Even if it were adopted in its fullness, the Trump administration compact would leave liberal education in America in a sorry state of disrepair.
The administration’s chief tactical blunder consisted in seeking agreement to a formal compact subject to annual review by the Department of Justice. This inevitably raised hackles among university administrators and faculty, and predictably provoked substantial concerns about government exceeding its legitimate powers and presuming an expertise that it lacks. The compact would invite abuse, moreover, even if Trump administration figures were pure as the winter’s first snow and could be counted on to exercise impeccable judgment in evaluating universities’ conduct. When electoral fortunes change, progressives could easily exploit the federal government’s new authorities to coerce universities to promulgate left-wing orthodoxy.
While government needs no special arrangements or policy innovations to strictly enforce civil-rights law on campus, focusing on incentives would significantly improve on a compact’s ability to accomplish the laudable goal of directing taxpayer dollars to universities whose scholarship and teaching advance the public interest.
Instead of asking universities to sign an intrusive deal that further entangles the federal government in regulating higher education, the Trump administration should open a competitive application process for grants, as Washington already does especially in the natural sciences. Instead of threatening to withhold federal funds for violation of a multi-pronged agreement that requires federal oversight of academic units and university governance, the administration should award federal funds to colleges and universities that agree to implement specific programs and initiatives. And instead of setting aside questions of teaching and the curriculum, the Trump administration should direct funds to universities that offer compelling concrete proposals for teaching to all students the principles and practice of free speech, and for instituting mandatory core courses on America, the West, and other nations and civilizations.
For example, the administration could award grants to universities that incorporate a substantial unit on free speech in freshman orientation. It could allocate funds to universities that make completion of an online course on liberty of thought and discussion – emphasizing not only the benefits of expressing one’s opinion but also those of listening to others express theirs – a graduation requirement. It could provide financial support for universities that host regular debates featuring speakers on the different sides of major issues. And the government could support the establishment of annual university-wide lectures on free speech. Lectures could deal with the challenges of free speech from many angles: politics, society, law, economics, commerce, morality, religion, and more. Visiting campus for a full week, lecturers would supplement their keynote address by meeting with students and faculty over meals and around the seminar table.
To enable students to take advantage of liberty of thought and discussion and to prepare them for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, universities also must competently furnish their minds. Accordingly, the Trump administration should offer incentives to universities to reform their curricula in the spirit of traditional liberal education.
The administration could incentivize universities to require a few basic classes in America, the West, and non-Western civilizations. This, and other initiatives that involve depoliticizing the curriculum and reorienting it around the fundamentals, will require universities – not government – to search for suitable faculty. That’s because most professors these days have missed out on an education that would have equipped them to responsibly provide essential elements of a liberal education.
More ambitiously, the administration could also incentivize the creation of schools of civic thought. These perform the vital function that history, political science, and philosophy departments have largely abandoned: teaching the historical, political, and philosophical dimensions of citizenship. Such schools have been launched at several public universities including Arizona State University, UT Austin, and the University of Florida and have generated interest at elite private universities including Johns Hopkins University, Harvard, and Stanford. Yale created a Center for Civic Thought.
More ambitiously still, the administration could add incentives to establish schools of general education, a version of which Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed into law in March. Specializing in traditional liberal education, schools of general education report directly to the university president; this minimizes the inevitable opposition to reform stemming from faculty who came of age amid, and benefit from, the long-malfunctioning status quo. Schools of general education would offer a demanding core curriculum and a broad array of classes in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to educating undergraduate majors, they would design and teach mandatory basic courses for all students on America’s founding principles and constitutional traditions, the West, and other civilizations.
Far better than a compact, direct incentives for teaching free speech and restructuring the curriculum – along with rigorous enforcement of civil-rights law – would enable the Trump administration to advance the urgently needed reform of American higher education.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter. His new book is “Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America.”
0 Comments