Ohio Presidents and Boards of Trustees: REJECT THE COMPACT

Ohio's University Presidents, Trustees

The Trump Administration is moving to consolidate control of universities across the nation by extorting our presidents into pledging allegiance to its agenda through the compact. This “loyalty oath” is nothing but a ransom note, demanding our administrators trade our academic freedom and campus independence for vague federal funding promises.

Ohio students, faculty, and alumni must unite in loud opposition. Our campuses can be beacons of academic freedom, educational affordability, and safety for students, rather than allowing Trump to reduce them to pawns in a partisan agenda to take over our campuses.

Sign the petition urging Ohio’s campus administrators to reject the compact.


To: Ohio's University Presidents, Trustees
From: [Your Name]

Dear Ohio University Presidents and Boards of Trustees:

We, the students of Ohio, call on you to pledge to reject the Trump Administration’s “Loyalty Oath” compact. As Trump has informally widened his demand to all universities, Ohio’s higher education system is now on the line. If adopted, it would force our schools to restrict enrollment for international students, further restrict protests, and demand that our schools pledge ideological loyalty to the Trump administration. It’s up to each campus’s President and Board of Trustees to decide: cower to the partisan extremists vying to capture political control of our campuses, or pledge to stand up for our universities.

In Ohio, we’ve already seen this extremist agenda unfold on our campuses, with our faculty and students experiencing the most significant impact. The “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” Senate Bill 1, gutted our universities, implementing some of the extremist provisions we see in the compact. As a result, our classroom discussions are tense, our classmates fear repression, and our governor is scrambling to find students to fill the beds in our dorms. Our campuses can’t afford another round of extremist overreach.

Rather than preemptively capitulate to a partisan ransom note, our administrators must stand up to the continual attacks on higher education in Ohio and not weaken our campuses further. Tuition is too expensive. Students are struggling to just get by. We condemn any effort by the Presidential administration to pressure our campus leadership into pledging allegiance to Trump’s political agenda in exchange for vague preferential federal funding: freedom and affordability are not an either-or. This deal would sacrifice students’ futures for flimsy authoritarian political favors.

To our knowledge, Ohio universities have not been contacted by the federal government regarding the compact, but every university in the nation has its eyes on this bribe now that MIT bravely rejected it. We encourage our administrators to resist early.

Reject the compact.