It’s been a month since the Trump administration offered nine universities its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which promised “multiple positive benefits” for adhering to the compact’s ten conditions. Since then, seven of the nine universities have rejected the compact outright, while two institutions remain noncommittal. 

With the offer now broadly open to any institution, there has been more resistance than enthusiasm. Leaders of the nation's top universities seem, on the whole, uninterested, with wide-spread concern over academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Although several universities are engaging in "conversations" with the Trump administration, New College of Florida and Valley Forge Military College are the only institutions to say publicly that they are eager to sign.

Last week, we brought together HxA members Anna Krylov (Chemistry, University of Southern California), Tom Ginsburg (International Law, University of Chicago), and Jon Zimmerman (Education, University of Pennsylvania) to discuss how we got to the compact — and what comes next.

With regard to the need for Trump’s compact, Ginsburg lauded the historical impact of the U.S. university system, saying “We always have had a compact. It's an 80 year bargain since Vannevar Bush,” referencing the birth of federally funded academic research in the 1940s. ”The federal government will provide massive amounts of research money,” Ginsburg explained, “give overall direction, and universities will compete in order to do that research. And that's been utterly successful.”

But, the next era of higher education’s relationship with the federal government may very well already be here. Krylov argued that “the issues articulated in the compact [show] this erosion of academic excellence… and that's a big problem that we need to address through educational reform.” 

Zimmerman urged self-reflection within the academy, noting that “I think we have to be honest about the ways that we have failed to abide by many of the valid principles that are expressed, however ham-handedly in the compact.  … I would argue that we have not been nearly vigilant enough in abiding by those ideals.”

According to a variety of public polling since July, Americans are indeed largely unhappy with the current state of higher education and agree that reforms are needed — most notably with keeping our universities focused on their core mission of education and getting out of the business of politics.

“In the modern university, we haven't put nearly enough premium on teaching as professionals,“ Zimmerman argued. 

Ginsburg also explained how the loss of public trust in higher education is clearly reflected in the record lows in the polls. “We have the legitimacy we've built up from decades and decades of discovery, and we just have allowed little bits of that capital to be drawn down… and we have to think about how to rebuild that,” he said. “That gets back to the compact mission, and it's going to require a lot of minds to figure out how we build that trust and capital legitimacy.” 

Both university leaders and the panelists convened last week seem to be in general agreement that the issue with the compact (and Trump’s engagement with universities more broadly since returning to office in January) is not so much with its aspirational goals as it is with the method proposed for achieving them. 

The panelists seem to be in agreement with the university leaders who rejected the compact in appreciating the goals stated in the compact, while expressing concern about the Trump Administration’s strategy to achieve said goals.   

“Universities do need a lot of reform,” said Ginsburg, “but the question of how to do it, I just have to draw the line [at] government control.”

Americans broadly seem to be siding with the academy on this issue. Nationally representative polling shared exclusively by The Chronicle of Higher Education last week shows that 62% of Americans say colleges shouldn’t align their policies with the Trump administration’s goals in exchange for preferential funding; even among conservatives, half say colleges shouldn’t agree to the compact.

Krylov hopes that the compact will “inspire our universities to come out with our own compact and act on it.” She continued, “I think that would be a really big step towards restoring trust of the American public in higher education without entering into this binding and agreements that would be violating freedom of university autonomy and maybe even academic freedom of the faculty.”

Ginsburg noted that the compact could be a potential motivating force for internal reform, adding that we now need to be “empowering those inside universities who have been pushing for reform, empowering the few administrators in our country with a lot of spine who want to shift things in a new direction. And that would be the best possible outcome of it.”

“I don't think this is the end of the story,” he predicted.