BY SHAWN GILMORE
It’s now been a few weeks since the second Trump administration offered its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” first to nine institutions, then to the rest of us. Containing a range of provisions, the agreement would limit the autonomy of any institution that signed on in exchange for continued access to “benefits,” which include access to student loans, grants, research funding, contacts, visa approvals, and tax status.
Commentators were quick to characterize the heavy-handed nature of the compact. Kevin Carey, writing for The Atlantic, noted that agreeing to the compact “amounts to complete adoption of the MAGA higher-education agenda,” with the offer as “the newest escalation in Trump’s attempt to impose ideological dominance over America’s world-class colleges and universities,” via a “document [that] is breathtaking in its ambition, plainly illegal, and shot through with the tensions that mark Trumpism in its latest form.”
The compact offer came after a series of bruising fights between the Trump administration and high-profile institutions like Harvard, Columbia, Penn, and Brown, who made various agreements to restore their funding throughout the summer. However, this particular offer has floundered (for now), with seven of the initial nine schools formally rejecting the compact. However, one of the nine, the University of Virginia, rejected the compact and then immediately reached an agreement with the Department of Justice that would enact some of the compact’s goals, trading autonomy for funding and closing various investigations.
This federal compact is interesting in contrast to the series of calls for compacts made various academic senates and faculty councils earlier this year. Inaugurated by Rutgers, these various calls for “mutual academic defense compacts” (MADCs) asked university leaders to establish new forms of voluntary association among our institutions via structures of our choosing, the obverse of what the Trump administration offers. As I noted in “Mutual Defense Across Higher Education in the Second Trump Era” for Academe, “The question we must confront is how to fight back against assailants who are primarily interested in destruction and whose methods often involve singling out individual colleges or universities or members of their leadership, picking them off one at a time.”
Across the eighteen schools of the Big 10, fourteen passed a version of a call for a defense compact, including at my own institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Notably, UCLA, also a Big 10 school, did not pass such a call and has spent the last weeks in negotiations with the Trump administration over a massive settlement, appealing to the California Supreme Court to keep the potential agreement secret. Now public, the agreement would entail a nearly $1.2 billion settlement with the federal government to settle various investigations and allow continued access to funding, restricting UCLA’s autonomy while being subject to federal monitoring—so, in effect, the aims of the federal compact, with even more costs and federal control.
I find it ironic that the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” uses similar phrasing to the MADC model—a “compact” that would supposedly align US institutions of higher education with clear values. However, the federal compact coerces and extorts, asserting that “institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits,” while the MADC model allows us to structure our alliances in the manner of our choosing, putting our values and principals at the center to avoid being picked off one at a time.
Shawn Gilmore is a teaching assistant professor in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, vice chair of UIUC’s Senate Executive Committee, and a member of the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance. His email address is sgilmore@illinois.edu.
