Universities' Best Response to Trump's Gleichschaltung Compact for Academic Excellence

Offer him Honorary Doctorates in Lieu of Signing

The Trump Administration is now “inviting” universities, by which I include colleges, to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Signing, universities are told, comes with “multiple positive benefits.” Not signing spells an end to federal funding, which would be financially ruinous for even our most well-endowed universities. Here’s the statement in the Compact’s first paragraph.

Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.

I’ve read the Compact carefully. The following is my opinion only. It reflects the views neither of Boston University nor any other institution of higher eduction. I consulted no one prior to writing the following.

My Personal View

The Compact represents a mortal threat to higher education. Signing the Compact means signing away academic freedom, including the right to decide what academic programs to offer and terminate, what courses to provide, what faculty to hire and retain, and, consequently, what faculty can teach which courses. It also provides the federal government with control over decisions ranging from setting tuition, to allocation of its endowment, to foreign composition of the student body, and to release of private student information.

The Compact is a shakedown. It seeks to fully control our leading universities via extortion. It treats support of higher education as a gift bestowed by politicians rather than government fulfillment of a sacred obligation. Basic research and higher education are vital public goods — vital to economic growth, vital to public health, vital to national defense, and vital to the dissemination of knowledge. Nationalizing higher education, in fact if not in form, will gradually destroy America’s preeminence in higher education.

Let me be specific.

Section 2 of the Compact states:

Therefore, signatories to this compact commit themselves to fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus. A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories 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.

Signatories commit to rigorous, good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff at all levels and to sharing the results of such assessments with the public; and to seek such a broad spectrum of viewpoints not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.

Universities are here to pursue and disseminate knowledge and truth. They are not here to sponsor ideological debates. Ideology references holding fixed ideas. A university’s mission is to question and correct, where appropriate, accepted wisdom, not provide a forum for ideologues to spread their mantras.

Yet, the Compact would judge a university’s compliance based on having a balanced distribution of ideologues. Furthermore, each field, department, school, and teaching units needs to have its own diverse set of ideologues, particularly conservative ideologues, with universities publicly documenting each subgroup’s ideological diversity. Fulfilling this regulation would require hiring faculty based on their political beliefs, not their intellectual achievements. In short, the Compact seeks to politicize universities and, thereby, undermine their core mission. The Compact should instead state that politics and political debate have no fundamental place on campus except as an extra curricular student activity open to all perspectives.

Section 3 of the Compact States:

Consistent with the requirements of Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts and other federal employment discrimination statutes, no factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, national origin, disability, or religion shall be considered in any decision related to the appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level, …

This section recapitulates legislated prohibitions on discriminatory hiring and retention. What it permits, by omission, is discrimination in hiring and retention based on political beliefs. This is consistent with Section 2’s sanctioning of ideologically-based faculty hiring and, indeed, firing faculty who undermine the ideological balance of specific units.

Section 4 of the Compact States:

Signatories shall maintain institutional neutrality at all levels of their administration. This requires policies that all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.

This is on target. Universities are not here to take political positions. Nor are their employees hired to espouse political positions on behalf of their employers. But Section 2 sanctions, indeed, stipulates the hiring of faculty ideologues — in all units — and the university’s documenting the balanced nature of their debates. Perhaps I’m missing something, but particle physicists are not in the business of holding political debates in their seminars.

Section 5 of the Compact States:

Signatories acknowledge that a grade must not be inflated, or deflated, for any non-academic reason, but only rigorously reflect the demonstrated mastery of a subject that the grade purports to represent. Signatories will use public accountability mechanisms to demonstrate their commitment to grade integrity, such as publishing grade distribution dashboards with multiyear trendlines, public statements that explain student outcomes and any unusual upward trends, and comparisons with peer institutions.

This requirement seems reasonable until one realizes that it relinquishes ultimate control over grading to the federal government and some unspecified public accounting mechanism. Is the University of Texas a peer institution with the University of Alabama? Yes, on some criteria. No on others.

Section 7 of the Compact States:

…, signatories to this compact commit to freezing the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.

Universities are private or state-government institutions. The Compact seeks to set price controls on a particular sector of the economy. Imposing price controls requires Congressional approval. The Compact seeks to sidestep Congressional authority by coercing universities into imposing price controls on themselves — or lose federal funding.

Any university with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs (with exceptions, as desired, for families of substantial means).

Congress has the authority to tax, not the Administration. Yet, the Compact imposes an indirect tax on endowments, bypassing Congressional authority by requiring that well-endowed universities pay a “voluntary” tax.

Section 8 of the Compact States:

No more than 15 percent of a university’s undergraduate student population shall be participants in the Student Visa Exchange Program, and no more than 5 percent shall be from any one country. … Signatories pledge to select those foreign students on the basis of demonstrably extraordinary talent, rather than on the basis of financial advantage to the university; to screen out students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values; and to provide instruction in American civics to all foreign students. Universities shall share all known information about foreign students, including discipline records, upon request and as relevant, with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State.

Here the Compact seeks control over foreign admissions and requires Compact signatories to disclose private information about their foreign students to the authorities. This information would, presumably, include all social media postings. Requiring foreign students to attend American civics classes will be viewed as indoctrination. Such classes and the required divulgence of private information can have but one goal — reducing foreign-student applications.

Other Elements in the Compact

The Compact runs ten pages. It includes this pressing concern — the use of bathrooms. No multi-gender bathrooms are permitted. Your gender designation at birth, no matter its accuracy, will decide your use of the facilities. Gender-only rules also apply to use of locker rooms and participation in women’s sports teams. How this will be supervised isn’t clear. But if a federal inspector — and, yes, they will likely be roving campuses — or a faculty, staff, or student whistleblower reports even a single illegal bathroom visit, the university’s prior two years of federal funding is subject to revocation as are all its private donations.

Although gender discrimination post-college admission is mandated, gender discrimination pre-college admission is prohibited. Institutions of higher learning aren’t allowed to consider gender or other unmentionables, including race, income, religion, location, family educational attainment, institutional legacy, etc., in selecting their classes. Instead, all applicants need to take the SAT or ACT. These scores plus high school GPA scores will provide the only permitted grounds for determining entrance. Again, any violations, real or imagined, conjured by or reported to the authorities can lead to massive financial penalties. Although admission based on “immutable characteristics” is verboten, discrimination based on nationality is compulsory. To repeat, foreign enrollees can’t exceed 15 percent of a university’s (or college’s) entering student class. And no foreign country can account for more than 5 percent of admissions.

Why Not a Compact for Private Equity Firms?

Imagine the federal government sending private-equity firms, whose acquisitions include firms with one or more government contracts, a notice that they would be taxed out of existence if they didn’t a) disproportionately invest in companies run by native-born Americans, b) limit their own and acquisitions’ foreign-born management to 15 percent, c) base their hiring and that of their acquisitions solely on GRE scores and college GPAs, d) forbid water-fountain discussions that wandered into politics or failed to have a conservative discussant, e) invest only in politically neutral or conservative firms, g) produce and publicly disseminate annual Private Equity Compact Excellence compliance reports, f) allocate at least 90 percent of their investment to companies segregating their bathrooms, and … . This would properly be denounced as the death knell of capitalism, a move to CCP-style socialism, left-wing hyper-regulation of business, and more.

I reference private-equity firms because the apparent author of the Compact for Academic Excellence is Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management — a major private-equity firm.

Shades of 1933

In 1933, Adolf Hitler began his campaign to transform German universities into Judenrein institutions run by heel-clicking Nazi directors who ensured the curriculum met ideological standards. In short order, Jewish and “politically unreliable” faculty and students were purged via physical intimidation, dismissals, and imposition of a quota system.

Even Albert Einstein was forced out of the University of Berlin after his scientific books were burned, his bank account was frozen, and he was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Nazi student organizations organized the burning of thousands of books by Jewish and other non-aryan authors. Pure-blood faculty free of political taint were forced to join the National Socialist Lecturers Association and sent to indoctrination camps for retraining.

The Compact for Academic Excellence doesn’t contemplate the use of violence to achieve compliance. But its parallels with Hitler’s university gleichshaltung -synchronization/coordination — program is too close for comfort.

I asked Perplexity:AI this question.

Does the trump administration’s attack on US universities have any parallel in the Nazi’s attack on German universities?

Here’s the answer.

While the Trump administration’s approach involves political and financial pressure aimed at enforcing ideological conformity and restricting certain academic programs, the Nazi regime’s attack was far more extreme, involving violence, state terrorism, and institutionalized ethnic cleansing. However, some scholars and commentators draw parallels in how both administrations sought to control academia in ways that restrict intellectual freedom and impose political orthodoxy, warning that politicizing universities in this manner risks undermining their core academic missions.

How Universities Should Respond to the “Invitation” to Sign the Compact?

President Trump loves to win and uses threats to get what he wants. The Compact represents a huge threat. The question is what does he really want. I doubt its the micromanagement of close to 6000 universities and colleges. What he may want is acceptance and recognition by academia. One deal the academy can strike is to award the President honorary degrees for peacemaking in exchange for his ending the Compact initiative. Harvard, for example, could provide President Trump an honoris causa doctorate for his work on global peace and do so at its next commencement.

Suppose all universities awarded President Trump honorary doctorates for global peacemaking. Further suppose their presidents publicly endorsed his receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace. This would transform something that’s now unimaginable to something that’s likely. And rightfully so. The President is making amazing efforts to end conflicts, major and minor, across the globe and he’s recorded some notable successes with the hope of remarkable successes soon to come.