“The premise of the document,“ Kornbluth continued, ”is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”
It marks academia’s clearest response yet to a 10-point “compact” from President Trump asking schools to limit enrollment of international students, freeze tuition for US students for five years, hew to certain definitions of gender, and prohibit activities that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
The administration is still awaiting responses before its Oct. 20 deadline from the eight other schools, chosen in part because the Trump administration said it considers them “good actors” in higher education. They include Brown and Dartmouth colleges, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, and the University of Arizona.
MIT faculty are “relieved” by the school’s position, said Ariel White, a political science professor and vice president of MIT’s American Association of University Professors chapter. But they nonetheless expect Trump to retaliate against MIT using similar tactics taken against Harvard University and other elite schools, such as outright ending federal funding for major research.
“This offer looked like an invitation, but it wasn’t,” she said. “It was a ransom note. Now there is some risk that we will face reprisal.”
What form that reprisal could take is not immediately clear. But White House spokesperson Liz Huston said Friday that “any university that refuses this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform higher education isn’t serving students or their parents — they’re bowing to radical, left-wing bureaucrats.”
“The truth is, the best science can’t thrive in institutions that have abandoned merit, free inquiry, and the pursuit of truth,” Huston added. “President Trump encourages universities to join us in restoring academic excellence and commonsense policies.”
MIT’s response comes as more students and scholars, in Cambridge and beyond, are encouraging their leaders to resist Trump’s push to assert control over American higher education.
“This compact tries to treat all institutions like public state universities and have that level of oversight that states may have, but the federal government does not,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
In the last week, faculty and students at MIT flooded school administrators with appeals to reject Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” saying it would betray the institution’s values. And there has been similar activism at other campuses. More than 500 Dartmouth faculty members signed a petition this week urging leadership to reject the offer, and on Thursday, students and faculty at Brown rallied behind the same pitch.
Most schools that received the compact have said little so far, although the chair of the board at the University of Texas said its leaders “enthusiastically look forward” to reviewing the compact; the University of Virginia, meanwhile, created a committee to consider it.
On Friday, Brown president Christina H. Paxson made her first public comment on the compact, in a letter shortly before MIT’s letter came out.
“In this moment, I feel strongly that it is most helpful to hear from members of our community,” Paxson wrote. “We need to decide, as a community, how or whether to respond to the invitation to provide comments.”
She also noted that last spring Brown affirmed “a set of university values” that include upholding academic freedom, openness, and diversity of ideas. Separately, the school reached a $50 million deal with the Trump administration in July to restore its lost research grants.
At Dartmouth, which has kept quiet since a brief statement last week, history professor Bethany Moreton said Friday she hoped the college would follow MIT’s lead.
“MIT has distinguished itself as the first of these institutions to categorically reject an unconstitutional and unlawful attempt at exerting power over higher education,” she said. “It’s heartening that at least one of these campuses has risen to the moment to say no, American higher education is not for sale.”
Meanwhile, Harvard University remains in negotiations over a deal of its own. Citing broad concerns about the climate on campus, the Trump administration has temporarily pulled millions of dollars in research funding from Harvard, threatened the school’s tax-exempt status, and even said it could revoke the university’s accreditation, an independent stamp of approval schools need to receive federal financial aid.
MIT could now face similar threats, said Kelchen, the higher education expert.
“They’ve got resources to withstand for a while, and they have public perception at least within their community on their side. Those are the best possible set of conditions,” he said. “But on the other hand, the federal government can use the hammer of pulling out federal funding.”
That could prove costly for MIT. Last year, it was awarded $648 million for sponsored activities, including research — among the largest amount of federal funding for any university in the country. The potential loss of some of those funds, combined with the newfound 8 percent endowment tax, has MIT bracing for $300 million in budget cuts, the Globe reported. Since January, the university has already frozen some hiring and cut departmental budgets by 5 percent.
It is also challenging some of the federal cuts in court.
In her letter Friday, Kornbluth wrote that MIT already complies with many of the compact’s conditions.
The university “never had legacy preferences in admissions” and instituted the SAT/ACT test score requirement for students after the COVID-19 pandemic — a sign that it “prides itself on rewarding merit.” It already waives tuition for all students whose families earn below $200,000, and MIT’s undergraduate population is roughly 10 percent foreign students, compared to the higher ceiling of 15 percent laid out in the compact.
Kornbluth in her letter Friday said she hopes the long-running, mutually beneficial relationship between MIT and the federal government endures.
“Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America’s research universities and the US government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people,” Kornbluth wrote. “We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.”
Even if the Trump administration makes more demands of MIT, all the targeted colleges must hold out on the offer, said Carla Garcia, a PhD candidate and president of MIT’s Latinx Graduate Student Association.
“While the compact began with this proposal to nine universities, it almost certainly will not end here,” Garcia said at a rally on campus Friday afternoon. “All nine universities must take this critical moment to join MIT and stand united against the compact and refuse to acquiesce or negotiate. It is the only way we get through this.”
Alexa Gagosz and Amanda Gokee of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.