President Donald Trump has offered nine top universities a deal tying federal funding to advancing conservative ideas and restructuring campus policies.
The White House proposal, called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” sets out 10 conditions. Universities that agree would receive expanded federal grants, but only if they comply with measures such as raising the profile of conservative voices, eliminating academic departments deemed hostile to conservative thought, banning race and sex as factors in admissions and hiring, freezing tuition for five years, and capping international undergraduate enrollment at 15%.
The compact warns that schools declining the terms must forgo all federal funding. Universities targeted include Harvard, MIT, Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown, and the University of Virginia. Harvard is the only institution to sue the administration over related measures.
Critics say the plan weaponizes taxpayer money to influence free speech. “This is a weapon to exert command and control,” said Harvard professor Cornell William Brooks. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, called the implications “horrifying,” adding that defining open intellectual environments should not be the government’s role.
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