The Compact

According to media reports, the federal government has sent nine research universities a memorandum of understanding and promised significant benefits—including preferential access to grants and federal student loans—to those who sign it. The title of the document is Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education and the recipients are reported to be MIT, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, USC, and the flagship public universities of Texas, Arizona, and Virginia.

Why were these particular institutions selected? According to White House advisor May Mailman, it was because they are current or potential “good actors” led by “a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education.”¹ This framing suggests that the nine recipients of the letter are lucky to have been selected, and at least one governing board chair concurs. But others may not feel as fortunate. Receiving the document but declining to sign it may leave them worse off than if they had never received it in the first place.²

In some respects, the compact resembles documents emerging from negotiated settlements with Columbia and Brown (and echoed in a presidential memorandum).³ But there are also some new elements and some refinements of earlier demands. It is an uneasy mix of reasonable directives (such as grade integrity and tuition refunds for those who don’t complete their first semester of study) interspersed with requirements that would involve extraordinary invasions of privacy. For example, the memo calls for administrators to ensure the presence of a “broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints… not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.” I don’t see how this can be achieved without requiring current and potential faculty across the board to disclose privately held ideological leanings that have nothing to do with the performance of their duties.

That said, I think that most Americans have consistently underestimated the power of the federal government to impose its will and the range of weapons at its disposal. This particular compact may end up being rejected or substantially revised, but it contains a couple of elements that are quite likely to be implemented at scale. One is a limit on foreign student enrollment, capped at 15 percent with no more than 5 percent from any given country. And the other is a strong preference, including tuition waivers in some cases, for students “pursuing hard science programs.”

There is some tension between these two objectives. The two largest source countries for foreign students in the United States are India and China, jointly responsible for more than half of total international enrollments. The most popular fields of specialization for these students are computer science and engineering, with mathematics and the physical and life sciences close behind. Foreign students spend tens of billions of dollars annually while engaged in programs of study, and all their expenditures—from tuition to rent and groceries—are American exports. Without these, our trade deficit would be even larger.

One can certainly make arguments for limiting the presence of foreign students at American universities, even from perspectives that are not closely aligned with the current administration. These arguments ought to be taken seriously. But so must the fact that there is a price to be paid for significantly limiting foreign student enrollment. If these applicants are denied access to American universities, they will hardly sit still. There are a number of institutions worldwide that would gladly compete for them, and then compete for the faculty they seek to learn from and work with. And if the students cannot move to the schools, the schools will move to the students. My own alma mater, for example, has set up shop in Delhi.

There are elements in the compact with which many university leaders will agree. For instance, Dartmouth and MIT have both reinstated the requirement that standardized test scores be submitted with each application. Harvard has adopted a robust version of institutional neutrality that is binding on subdivisions. And long before the current administration took office, Stanford made clear that it would not tolerate a heckler’s veto when controversial speakers are hosted on campus. But even if they agree with some of the demands in the compact, my guess is that most university leaders will see the exercise itself as an unacceptable intrusion into their autonomy and an illegal attempt to favor some institutions over others in the allocation of congressionally appropriated funds.

How, then, should they respond? One possibility is to issue a compact of their own, not with federal authorities but with the American public at large. At the moment, the recovery of trust and confidence in these institutions is a more urgent priority than preferential access to taxpayer dollars. The case must be made that heavy-handed intrusions into the internal governance of universities could lead to a chain of faculty and student movements that will transform the landscape of American higher education, and further threaten our increasingly precarious position atop the global higher education hierarchy.

I’ll close with a more personal thought. The compact demands of universities that they screen out applicants who demonstrate hostility to American values. This is reasonable on its face, but requires some agreement on the content of these values. What appeals to me most about American traditions is the creedal nature of national identity, the Declaration’s insistence on universal equality, and the rights enumerated in our Constitution. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I consider innovation, productivity growth, and sustained material prosperity to be downstream of free expression. I have argued against censorship (and self-censorship) in academic settings on multiple occasions. But many of these values remain deeply contested. If I find the detention and attempted deportation of a foreign student for a lawful speech act abhorrent, does that signal fidelity to American values or a betrayal of them? The answer to such questions will determine which path we take at this hinge point in American history.

University of Texas at Austin (source)

1. In fact, an opinion piece by Dartmouth president Sian Beilock (who previously led Barnard College) is approvingly cited in a footnote.

2. Public universities under pressure from state legislatures could well sign the compact or something resembling it. The most likely to do so would be the University of Texas at Austin, which is alone among the three in facing a state government trifecta.

3. As in the settlements and earlier proclamations, the compact prohibits universities from considering such factors as sex, ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity in admissions or hiring decisions, mandates the publication of anonymized data on quantitative measures of accomplishment, requires students to be classified based on “reproductive function and biological processes” in determining access to single-sex spaces and participation in sports, calls for the transformation or abolition of “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” and demands responses to “disruptions, violence, intimidation, or vandalism” with “lawful force if necessary” and “swift, serious, and consistent sanctions.” The term “badge of inferiority” is used without irony to characterize preferential treatment in admissions. Recall that the phrase was made famous by its use in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, where the majority argued that “the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority” was a fallacy, and that any such reading of the segregation law at issue arose “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”