The Trump administration is offering nine prominent U.S. universities preferential access to federal funds if they pledge to take a series of steps that align with the Republican administration’s goals of eliminating what it sees as liberal influence on academia.
The 10-point memo calls on colleges to agree to freeze tuition for five years, cap the enrollment of international students to 15% of undergraduate student body, commit to strict definitions of gender and other steps.
The memo was sent to officials at Vanderbilt University, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Texas, University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly about the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
An MIT spokesperson confirmed to GBH News that it had received the memo from the Trump administration.
“To advance the national interest arising out of this unique relationship, this Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education represents the priorities of the U.S. government in its engagements with universities that benefit from the relationship,” the administration says in the lengthy memo, obtained by The Associated Press.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, is advising college leaders not to sign it.
“This is an invitation to allow the federal government to intrude on some of the basic things in higher education — who we teach, who teaches, what we teach. Institutional autonomy is at risk here,” he told GBH News.
Michel DeGraff, an MIT linguistics professor who is now classified as “faculty at large,” said this is a spectacular escalation of the campus culture wars. DeGraff and the university are being sued for DeGraff’s alleged harassment of a Jewish student.
“Already in Spring 2024, my own course proposal on language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation in Haiti, Palestine and Israel was censored by MIT Linguistics, the very department that Noam Chomsky made famous,” he wrote in an email to GBH News. “This targeting of professors and students who dare speak truth to power is nothing new from my perspective. My hope now is that this spectacular escalation will push more faculty, especially tenured faculty, to join the fight against this rising fascism before it’s too late.”