Earlier this month, the Trump administration made nine elite universities an offer they couldn't refuse: bring in more conservatives while “closing institutional units that purposefully punish, denigrate, and even incite violence” to conservative ideas, give up control over admissions and hiring decisions, agree to “biological” definitions of sex and gender, not raise tuition for five years, student protests oppress and remain institutionally 'neutral' with regard to current events. Doing this will ensure you are not cut off from “federal benefits” such as research funding, student loans, federal contracts, and even immigration visas for students and teachers. Instead, you can obtain “substantial and meaningful federal subsidies.”
But the universities Are to refuse. As the original Oct. 20 deadline approaches, four of the nine universities — the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, University of Southern California and MIT — that received the federal “pact” have announced they will not sign it.
In addition, the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, today issued a statement calling for a complete repeal of the pact.
The pact would “impose unprecedented litmus tests on colleges and universities as a condition for receiving ill-defined 'federal benefits' related to funding and grants,” the statement says, adding that “it provides nothing less than government control over a university's basic and necessary freedoms — the freedoms to decide who we teach, what we teach, and who teaches… The pact is exactly the kind excessive federal overreach and regulation, at the expense of the state. and local ownership and control, which this government says it opposes.”
