The University of Virginia and Dartmouth College have become the latest higher education institutions to publicly reject the Trump administration’s Compact on Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Now, only three of the nine federal agencies that originally submitted the document have yet to announce whether they will sign on.
UVA announced Friday that it opposed special funding benefits that had not yet been disclosed in exchange for signing the agreement. The announcement came on the day of demonstrations on campus urging university leaders not to sign it. Dartmouth released its response Saturday morning. Although the two universities met with White House officials on the deal on Friday, it was rejected both times.
“As I said on the call, I do not believe that government involvement through compacts — whether in a Republican or Democratic-led White House — is the right way to keep America’s leading colleges and universities focused on their teaching and research missions,” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock wrote in a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, which the president also shared with her community.
“Our universities have a responsibility to develop their own academic and institutional policies, guided by our mission and values, commitment to free speech, and legal obligations,” Belloc wrote. “Being true to this responsibility will help American higher education build bipartisan public trust and continue to maintain its position as the envy of the world.”
Belloc has not been an outspoken opponent of Trump. Speaking at a Heterodox Institute conference in June, she said: “Just because the government proposes something that we are all opposed to, thinking that it inherently means it is wrong is a real problem.” But she also said at the time, “We shouldn’t let the government tell us what to do.”
“The integrity of scientific and other scholarly work requires performance-based evaluation of research and scholarship,” University of Virginia interim president Paul Mahoney wrote in a letter sent to McMahon on Friday. “Contractual arrangements that base evaluation on anything other than performance will undermine the integrity of important, sometimes life-saving research and further erode confidence in American higher education.”
The compact requires universities to agree to overhaul or abolish departments that “deliberately punish, demean or even provoke violence against conservative ideas,” but does not further define what those terms mean. Among other things, it requires universities to commit to not treating transgender women as women; to reject foreign applicants who “demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values”; and to freeze “effective tuition fees charged to U.S. students for the next five years.”
The White House said that in exchange for these agreements, signatories would “receive [funding] Prioritize whenever possible and invite collaboration with the White House. But the administration has not yet disclosed how much additional funding colleges will be eligible for, and the nine-page agreement does not detail potential benefits. The agreement, along with a statement from the White House on Thursday, could also be interpreted as threatening colleges to lose their current federal funding if they don’t sign on.
Mahoney told McMahon that his university agrees to “many of the principles outlined in the compact, including a fair and equitable admissions process, an affordable and academically rigorous education, a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality and equal treatment of students, faculty and staff in all aspects of university operations.”
“In fact, the University of Virginia is a leader in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them. We do not seek special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of these fundamental goals,” Mahoney wrote.
The decisions make the University of Virginia the fifth of nine institutions to initially publicly reject the deal, and Dartmouth the sixth. UVA was also the first public university and the first Southern institution to refuse. On Oct. 10, MIT was the first of nine universities to reject, followed by Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.
The University of Virginia rejected the agreement after the Trump administration successfully forced its then-President James Ryan to step down in June. The Justice Department asked him to step down. UVA’s Board of Trustees voted in March to dissolve the university’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, but multiple conservative alumni groups and legal entities have complained about Ryan’s failure to eliminate DEI from every corner of campus.
A coalition of groups opposed to the compact, including the UVA chapter of the American Association of University Professors, praised the rejection in a press release Friday.
“Today’s events demonstrate the power of collective organization and action to defeat tyranny,” the statement said. “We hope to serve as an example to other public universities that have received ‘compacts’ – The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arizona – to have the courage and clarity not to give in.”
A group of University of Virginia faculty members overwhelmingly urged university leaders to reject the agreement. Hundreds of demonstrators attended an anti-Covenant rally on the UVA campus in Charlottesville on Friday. Keville now reported.
In addition to Arizona State and the University of Texas at Austin, Vanderbilt has not disclosed its decision. But after MIT announced its rejection of the agreement, Trump offered it to all U.S. colleges and universities for signature.
White House officials met with some universities on Friday about the proposal. wall street journal UVA, Dartmouth, Arizona State, the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt University were reportedly invited, along with Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis, which were not among the original nine.
In a statement, White House spokesperson Liz Houston compared the agreement to the efforts of former presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who, she said, “called on our universities to do more to serve the country.”
“President Trump is calling on universities to do their part to return America to the economic and diplomatic success it once was: a full-employment nation, with pioneering innovations that changed the world, and a commitment to merit and hard work as ingredients for success,” she said, adding that the administration held “productive conference calls” with several universities.
A White House official said the University of Virginia and seven other invited universities participated in the call.
“They now hold the baton to consider, discuss and propose meaningful reforms, both in their form and implementation, to ensure that college campuses serve as laboratories of American greatness,” Houston said.
