The Compact to Destroy Academic Freedom

The Trump administration is now expanding its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” by offering it to all colleges, hoping to find college administrators gullible enough to sign a contract that threatens to destroy academic freedom as we know it.

The many flaws of the compact have been explained by numerous commenters.

The purpose of the compact is to legalize the illegal. What the Trump regime is proposing in its demands is both grotesquely illegal and unconstitutional, so they want to strengthen their position by convincing some suckers to sign a contract allowing these illegal things. By turning an unconstitutional action into a contractual obligation, the Trump administration wants to give the right-wing Supreme Court an excuse for looking the other way when confronted with obvious violations of legal procedures.

This is pure political bribery. Obey the Trump regime, and you get money flowing to you.

The problem is that political bribery is illegal. Any college that signs this agreement and takes this illicit money will be vulnerable to retaliation.

It’s not enough to sign the compact: You have to enforce it against your own students, faculty and staff. And colleges would no longer have the power to enforce their own rules. The university would have to obey the Trump regime’s orders in every case or face severe consequences.

The key rule of the compact is that if any university receiving government funds is deemed to have violated any of its strictures, “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation shall be returned to the U.S. government.” In this arrangement, the money paid by the government for contracts is no longer deemed a payment, but a loan “advanced” by the government that can be seized back at the whim of Trump officials.

These rules are horrifying for any college where academic freedom is essential. But it’s important to see that any private corporation would be deemed incompetent and negligent if it considered signing a contract with the government this terrible.

Imagine if Boeing was offered a compact to build $30 billion worth of planes for the federal government, and it included a provision that Boeing would have to build the planes but return the money if the government decided that Boeing had violated any nondiscrimination rules, an environmental regulation or any other law, or had allowed any employees to belittle conservatives.

Boeing would be insane to sign such a contract, because there would be no way for Boeing to prevent one of its employees from criticizing Trump, and no assurance that even the most repressive measures in response would satisfy the Trump regime and protect the company from having all its money taken away.

California governor Gavin Newsom has threatened to cut off state funds to any California college that signs the compact. This is a bad solution to a worse problem; we should reject the whole noxious industry of government officials threatening to withhold funding to colleges as a tool to manipulate them, even when Democratic governors do it to oppose the Trump regime’s abuses. Instead, we need to persuade colleges to reject this terrible deal; any college president who signs this compact deserves to be immediately fired for gross incompetence and financial mismanagement.

Any college that signs the compact is not only abandoning academic freedom and endangering its own access to funds, but it’s also betraying all of academia. Colleges would be embracing a system of political patronage rather than academic merit in funding of higher education. The whole concept of being given special access to funds is predicated on denying funding to more meritorious grants due to the favoritism of the Trump administration toward particular universities.

We’re no longer in the realm of colleges negotiating to get access to the allocated funds they legally are entitled to; instead, colleges that sign the compact are seeking to profit from the other universities that have enough integrity to refuse to bow down before Trump.

Billionaire Marc Rowan, who helped to write a draft of the compact, defended it in The New York Times with some obvious falsehoods: “The compact does require schools not to punish, intimidate or incite violence against conservative ideas. Those are not speech restrictions. They are restrictions on the suppression of speech.” But the compact requires schools to take action against anyone “belittling” conservative views. That is a pure speech restriction that aims to suppress speech, not to protect it.

According to Rowan, “No school will be forced to adhere to the compact’s principles of fairness, civility, neutrality and transparency. If schools do not want to be accountable to these requirements, they need not accept federal funding.”

But banning federal funding is itself a violation of free speech, because it deprives students of the opportunity to study at a university of their choice, and it prevents faculty from getting essential funding to conduct their research. Universities are corporations with vast research enterprises that serve the public by providing high-quality work at a low price for the government.

If Trump can order universities to silence speech and obey his commands by withholding funds, then he can do the same to private corporations by compelling them to fire anyone who belittles a conservative or face the loss of all federal contracts. And he can do the same to every federal, state and local government employee—and then every recipient of Social Security and Medicare—by making the same threats to cut off funding. There’s no reason why an unprincipled dictator and his obedient political hacks can’t apply the “need not accept federal funding” arguments to any person who disobeys.

The fight against Trump’s totalitarian compact isn’t just a fight for the autonomy and freedom and preservation of American universities; it’s also a fight for the liberties of every American against a repressive government that thinks it can use the power of the purse to force political obedience.