OSU, Choose Integrity — Reject the Trump Compact
OSU President Ted Carter, Provost Ravi Bellamkonda, & Chair of Trustees John Zeiger
Independent, self-governing universities are essential to our democracy. Since coming to power this year, the Trump administration has attempted to inappropriately and unconstitutionally interfere in the operations of our universities at multiple levels. Most recently, it has offered a compact to university leaders that involves preferential consideration for federal grants, based not on merit but on ideological fealty, to nine institutions across the country. You can read the compact text here. Given the refusal of most of these institutions to the conditions in the compact, the Trump Administration is now offering the "deal" to any university. The compact violates the first amendment by forcing universities to surrender their academic freedom in exchange for federal grant funds. The American public broadly supports the independence of higher education and views the Compact as harmful overreach that should be rejected. We need to let our university leadership know that we want them to defend free speech and academic freedom against these attacks, which will only weaken our standing in science, technology, healthcare, innovation, and the arts and will not secure the institution's financial stability. Sign this petition calling on The Ohio State University's president, provost, and board of trustees chair to reject the Trump compact.
To:
OSU President Ted Carter, Provost Ravi Bellamkonda, & Chair of Trustees John Zeiger
From:
[Your Name]
We, the signers of this petition, call on you, President Ted Carter, Provost Ravi Bellamkonda, and Board of Trustees Chair John Zeiger, to categorically reject the Compact for Excellence in Higher Education, as seven of the nine universities initially invited to sign have already done. As we have seen from cases involving other universities, a backroom deal with the Trump administration simply emboldens the administration to come back for more. We call on university leadership to pursue other measures to combat possible funding restrictions, like collaborating with like-minded institutions to pursue legal remedies to restore unconstitutionally withheld funds. Decisions about hiring, tuition, admissions, grades, and discipline are made at OSU in accordance with principles of shared governance that are essential to the independent culture of higher education in the United States. The Ohio State University should never cede its self-determination. We urge you to stand with our sister institutions and the American public to insist that political meddling in higher education cease. At OSU, we already operate at the highest levels of rigor, excellence, and integrity. Signing onto a corrupt compact agreement would leave a lasting stain on the university’s reputation and standing in Ohio and beyond.
The Compact represents the latest example of political interference in higher education. It wrongly describes efforts to improve diversity at our campuses as discriminatory, supporting a broader attempt to dismantle the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It demands the reintroduction of standardized testing as part of the admissions process and limits international admissions. It reinstantiates the rigid binaries of sex and gender that neither science nor our institution supports. It requires universities to cap tuition for five years, diminishing financial autonomy and overriding Ohio's own laws. These stipulations constitute an assault on academic freedom. Paradoxically, the Compact calls for the university to ensure intellectual diversity. Given the recent unconstitutional actions of the federal government to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizen students and faculty for their pro-Palestinian speech, this call to protect “a vibrant marketplace of ideas” rings hollow. Instead, the Compact functions as a thinly veiled loyalty oath to the current administration and its ideologies.