Colleges weigh whether to sign onto Trump plan or forgo federal benefits
A new proposal from the Trump administration would give colleges funding advantages if they adopt conservative priorities.
Updated October 3, 2025 at 9:59 a.m. EDTtoday at 9:59 a.m. EDT
washingtonpost.com
By Susan Svrluga, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel
and Emily Davies
The Trump administration this week offered a select group of universities the opportunity to score priority access for federal funding, prompting an enthusiastic and swift response from a university leader in Texas, who called it “an honor.”
But the other schools that received the 10-page proposal Wednesday night were largely silent Thursday, as they considered the wide-ranging conservative terms that some experts warned would trample on free-speech rights and threaten finances and academic freedom at top universities.
The Washington Post first reported this week that the White House intended to launch a campaign to bring colleges into compliance with Trump’s ideological priorities by offering a competitive advantage to those that sign on.
The document sent to nine schools this week, titled “ Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” asks schools to pledge allegiance to conservative values and policies and appears to be a first step in that campaign. Administration officials said the agreement would compel schools to prioritize American students, education in the hard sciences and a culture that allows for conservative thought.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) threatened Thursday to yank billions of dollars’ worth of funding from any school in the state that signed onto the agreement, writing on social media that the state would not “BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, AND SURRENDER ACADEMIC FREEDOM.”
In a letter to the selected university presidents, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and two White House officials described the effort as one that would help the next generation “grow into resilient, curious, and moral leaders, inspired by American and Western values.”
While administration officials cast the agreement as a means to gain advantages for federal funding, some in higher education said it was unclear whether colleges would be signing up for benefits or risking those they already have.
The introduction to the document says schools are free to develop models and values other than those in the compact, “if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”
A White House official on Thursday said the administration does not plan to limit federal funding solely to schools that sign the compact, “but they would be given priority for grants when possible as well as invitations for White House events and discussions with officials.”
The compact asks schools to pledge allegiance to conservative values and policies in eight enumerated areas, including by promising to:- Prohibit consideration of factors such as gender, race or political views from being considered for admissions, scholarships or programming.
- Freeze tuition for five years; give free tuition to students pursuing “hard science” programs at schools with endowments exceeding $2 million per undergraduate; and refund tuition to undergraduates who drop out during their first term.
- Maintain institutional neutrality at all levels, ensuring university employees abstain from political speech.
- Cap international enrollment at 15 percent of a college’s undergraduate student body, with no more than 5 percent coming from a single country.
- Publicly post average earnings from graduates in every discipline.
McMahon, White House official May Mailman and Vincent Haley, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, sent letters to a list of public and private institutions: Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, MIT, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia.
Two of the schools, Brown and Penn, had previously negotiated agreements with the White House to restore federal funding that the administration had frozen. One, U-Va., had a president resign under pressure from the Trump administration.
Some schools, such as Vanderbilt and Dartmouth, have been outspoken about the need to change aspects of higher education.
But Kevin Eltife, chairman of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, said they were honored that their flagship school had been named “as one of only nine institutions in the U.S. selected by the Trump Administration for potential funding advantages.”
“We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” he said. They have been working closely with state leaders to implement sweeping changes to strengthen higher education in Texas, he said.
A U-Va. spokesman said the school’s interim president created a working group Thursday morning. Brown, Dartmouth and Penn did not respond to requests for comment Thursday. The remaining schools said they were reviewing the document.
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White House officials signaled last week that they intended to launch a campaign to bring colleges into compliance with Trump’s ideological priorities. For months, the Trump administration has been pummeling individual schools with civil rights investigations and freezes of federal research funding, saying universities have not done enough to combat antisemitism. Now it hopes to get buy-in to its “forward-looking vision of higher education” from colleges across the country.
Schools that show “a strong readiness to champion the effort,” officials wrote, will be invited to the White House to be the first to sign on.
If the Justice Department determines that a school that signed onto the compact violated the terms, the school will lose all money advanced by the government that year, the document says.
Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury Secretary and pastpresident of Harvard University, said the administration’s heavy-handed approach will make it harder for the higher education leaders who believe the sector needs reform. Summers has been critical of what he views as an overemphasis on identity politics, an erosion of standards and a narrow-mindedness on college campuses, but government intervention in the form of price controls, evaluation of grading standards and curbing faculty speech is unreasonable, he said.
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“There are very legitimate critiques about elite higher education,” he said, “but in a free society, the government doesn’t get to dictate the policies of an institution, and say that’s going to shape its relationship with that institution.”
Some aspects of the proposal mandate compliance with federal law, which universities would say they already do; some elements are shifts university leaders might agree with. In other cases, agreeing to the compact would mark a dramatic change.
The agreement’s request for universities to freeze tuition and cap international enrollment could hurtrevenue at some schools, said Liz Clark, vice president of policy and research at the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Many institutions are contending with tepid enrollment and increased operational costs fueled by tariffs and other economic conditions.
While only three of the nine schools have endowments at or above $2 million per undergraduate, the compact’s requirement that those schools cover tuition for all students studying “hard science” could have an outsize impact on a place like MIT. The university already provides generous financial aid to students, waiving tuition for students from families earning less than $200,000 a year.
Veena Dubal, general counsel at the American Association of University Professors and a professor of law at the University of California at Irvine, said the compact’s demand for institutional neutrality, which requires university employees to abstain from speaking out about societal or political events, is unconstitutional.
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“It is a breathtaking list of demands,”Dubal said, “There are very many aspects of this compact which essentially read less like a voluntary agreement and more like a demand or a bribe.”
Some observers also take issue with a requirement in the compact that calls on institutions to restructure or eliminate departments deemed to “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
“No self-respecting university could ever accept something like this,” said Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar and former Columbia University president. “Trying to protect conservative ideas against being ‘belittled’ — that’s about as violative of the First Amendment interests as you can get.”
Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said: “While this document purports to advance academic freedom, it actually creates an enormous chilling effect on the dissemination of ideas on our university campuses.”
The compact leaves some unanswered questions, including which benefits the administration has in mind and how some speech-related provisions would be enforced, said Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. But he said the administration is on the right track by focusing on compliance with civil rights requirements and rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion hiring.
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“The administration’s concerns are aligned with those of many Americans, legislators and education leaders,” he said.
Unions that represent university faculty and staff are urging the nine institutions to resist the compact, saying that acquiescing would be a profound betrayal. AAUP President Todd Wolfson said the union will use every remedy available, including legal action, to fight back.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said university leaders who sign onto this agreement could set a dangerous precedent.
“Maybe the leaders of the University of Texas can live with these restrictions, but what about the ones imposed by the next administration?” Jaffer said. “If universities normalize this, there may be no end to federal meddling.”
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