Rumors of a second Trump administration contract for higher education have been swirling for months. In the past week, the gossip has been loud.
Some background: When the White House released the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” in October, it said it wanted feedback from the nine institutions originally invited to sign. The universities rejected the contract in its original form, but most suggested they were open to further negotiations, leaving the door open for a second iteration of the agreement.
And last week at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education, Nicholas Kent, under secretary of higher education, commented in the following paragraph: “In the past few months, Secretary McMahon and I have participated in intense discussions about the agreement with university leaders and stakeholders in several tables to jointly plan a better future together,” he told a room full of industry leaders.
He said that after boasting about the management’s agreements with Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He called it “flexing the reflexive muscle of common sense.” (Columbia signed an agreement to restore funding for research that administrators shut down in response to anti-Semitism allegations on campus, and the agreement with Penn was a reimposed penalty for allowing a female track and field athlete to compete against other women in 2021 in accordance with then-existing NCAA policies.)
These agreements and structures like the compact, Kent said, “serve as stepping stones to a brighter and brighter future for the institutions and the students they serve.”
Kent has written reforms that will ensure that high quality meets high standards, such as equal treatment in admissions, promoting universities as marketplaces of ideas and places of public discourse, using non-discriminatory hiring procedures, promoting academic rigor, and having predictable pricing models. “All these provisions were designed to provide students with access to quality at affordable costs,” said the undersecretary.
In these deals and original encounters, several themes recur. Among them: new limits on the number of international students, defining men and women by their natural sex, mandatory standardized admissions tests, and regular compliance reports.
All of these conditions will improve the standards and quality of American institutions, the administration claims. In return for their efforts, signatories to the original agreement would receive special treatment in research funding.
In remarks following the undersecretary, Jon Fansmith, ACE’s senior vice president of government relations and national advocacy, reminded the leaders in the room that the White House drove most of the administration’s efforts to reform the sector last year. But, with the upcoming rounds, another war in the Middle East and a host of domestic policy concerns, the president is unlikely to talk about Harvard now, Fansmith said. Instead of taking a break, Fansmith foresees the Department of Education taking steps to change the system. And it will not “target one school at a time, not withhold money from one school at a time, but put things that will affect 4,000 institutions rather than 50 institutions,” he said.
If management intends to secure broad agreement with a second agreement, any incentive will need to be more attractive than the benefits of research funding. But given the management’s track record, the second compact may be a stick and not a carrot. “Compliance is not flexible and doesn’t have consequences,” Kent told ACE leaders. And these administrations have proven particularly adept at obtaining sanctions, which so far have included investigations from the department’s Office of Human Rights and the Department of Justice, freezes on research funding, lawsuits, and grant cancellations.
In rejecting the deal, the institutions emphasized values they shared with the administration—controlling costs and protecting free speech—but ultimately chose to preserve institutional autonomy and academic freedom over gaining a foothold in research funding; to do otherwise would be to abandon scientific validity, others have signed. So if a second contract does come, it will need to show the administration’s priorities enough to read as a success for Kent and other officials, agreeable enough that institutions will actually sign on to it, and broad enough to apply to a diverse set of institutions, not just a select few.
It is a seemingly impossible needle to weave. But if the administration is in charge, the kind of “hard reset” Kent has called for will only be meaningful if higher ed is treated as a partner in the process, not just a target.
