It’s called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — i.e., Donald Trump’s effort to restore America’s institutions of higher education that have become awash in radical leftist ideology to the point of being little more than woke indoctrination centers.
Evidence of this reality is seen in the widespread embrace and promulgation of critical race theory that infuses the Marxist-rooted “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ethic into nearly every discipline on campuses.
This has produced a growing animus against Western culture, with faculty, staff, and, in turn, students decrying America’s founding principles and values as racist and bigoted. This explains why, on campuses such as Columbia University, blatant anti-Semitism is allowed to go nearly unchecked by school administrators.
While the Trump administration has taken a stick to institutions of higher education, such as Columbia, Harvard, and Brown, this latest plan is more of a carrot approach.
It offers universities that voluntarily sign onto the program preferential treatment, including significant federal grants. The primary objective is to secure the support of universities for the Trump administration’s positive restorative goals.
The program has been initially offered to the following nine schools: MIT, Brown, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, the University of Virginia, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Southern California.
These schools were chosen by May Mailman, the White House’s senior adviser for special projects, based on the view of their being “good actors” who will work with the administration and offer valuable feedback and suggestions.
The program presents a 10-point plan that highlights two primary issues the Trump administration aims to address: the lack of ideological diversity and high tuition costs.
Regarding ideological diversity, the plan requires schools to end all race- and sex-based preference policies for student admissions and faculty and staff hiring, eliminate all departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” and require an SAT or similar test for all applicants.
For tackling costs, the plan would have schools freeze tuition costs for five years, provide a full tuition refund to any student who drops out during the first semester, give tuition waivers for students majoring in “hard sciences,” provide post-graduate earnings by degree program, and cap the number of international students at 15% of the student body.
Essentially, the Trump administration’s goal is to restore America’s institutions of higher education to being balanced centers of learning. As Mailman explains, “Our hope is that a lot of schools see that this is highly reasonable.”
Predictably, objections have been raised. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents over 1,500 college presidents, called the plan “horrifying” for free speech. “Who decides if the intellectual environment is vigorous and open-ended?” he worried. “This is not something the federal government should be involved in and adjudicating.”
However, the federal government has long been involved in higher education. Title IX is a perfect example of federal government involvement. If an institution is content to take federal dollars, the federal government will, in turn, have cause to demand certain action from those schools. Once again, the program being offered by the Trump administration is voluntary. Those schools that do choose to join will be required to meet the administration’s prescribed guidelines, which include an independent audit to ensure goals are being met. If the school fails to meet the program’s requirements, it will have to return the federal funding it received.
Far from being a sky-is-falling federal infringement on schools’ free speech, it indeed offers the opposite. The plan aims to ensure that freedom of speech is upheld, particularly regarding conservative viewpoints.
