The Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education seeks unambiguously to predicate federal funding for higher education on direct state control of teaching, curriculum, admissions, and internal institutional governance. In its stated aims and in its specific provisions, it represents a wholesale abrogation of the most fundamental principles of academic freedom. At its core, academic freedom is the idea that in order for educational institutions to produce knowledge and train their students to the highest standards, they must operate in conditions of full intellectual autonomy.  

An exercise in political cynicism, the compact is designed to create the very conditions of ideological monoculture and political fealty that it claims to oppose. In their joint statement for AAUP and AFT, Todd Wolfson and Randi Weingarten justly observe that the compact “would reward campuses that toe the party line and punish those that cherish their independence. In doing so, it would commit the very viewpoint discrimination it claims to redress.”

The AAUP and AFT have called on the governing boards and the presidents of the nine universities that have been offered this compact to stand firmly and categorically against it in the collective interest of their students, their faculty, and the public. We are heartened that MIT, Brown, and Dartmouth have taken the lead in rejecting this compact. As of today, the Trump administration has opened the compact to “any institution.” It is therefore vital that every institution of higher learning stand together to protect one another by jointly refusing the imposition of a loyalty oath to the reigning political party.

Add your name to our public petition below and call on university leaders to oppose these compacts.