That is, of course, the irony of the whole situation—it is coming from a Department of Education led by someone who claims to value local control and an end to the federal education bureaucracy but who is instead pushing heavy-handed national restrictions from within the very organization she says should be shuttered. But whatever the approach lacks in basic intellectual consistency, it at least tracks with the views of Vice President JD Vance, himself a Yale graduate, who has in recent years called for conservatives to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
Other forces are fighting back, however. The universities are not generally keen to sell out their institutional values and independence, while states like California have pledged to take action against schools that sign the Trump compact. “If any California university signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding—including Cal grants—instantly,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote after the compact was released. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”
In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced that he supported Penn’s decision and said that he had “engaged closely with university leaders on this.”
Even FIRE, a legal group that has often represented conservatives on college campuses, has issued a statement opposing the compact, saying that “a government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow. That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy.”
But the Trump administration badly wants a win against higher ed. According to The Associated Press, the White House today convened a call with the other schools (University of Arizona, University of Virginia, University of Texas, Dartmouth, and Vanderbilt).