BURSTThe Trump administration is urging a group of nine universities to sign a 10-point compact that would have sweeping implications on campus in exchange for a funding advantage in federal grants.
The 10-point memo, titled the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” aims to make broad changes to a school's culture, hiring and admissions processes and foreign student enrollment.
Among the demands are reforms to the way race or ethnicity are used in admission and hiring practices, institutional neutrality, student grading and demanding that transgender women be excluded from women's locker rooms and sports teams.
The compact calls for a “vibrant marketplace of ideas” and for schools to revise “government structures” or other systems that the White House says stifle free speech. It says colleges must protect speech and not permit a heckler’s veto on campus, such as disruptions, vandalism or violence.
The Trump administration also wants schools to freeze their effective tuition rates for five years, post the earnings of students who graduated with certain majors and expand opportunities for service members.
For schools with an over $2 billion endowment, the compact says they will not charge undergraduates going into hard sciences.
The Trump administration also wants a commitment schools will not have more than a 15 percent foreign student population and that no specific country will have more than 5 percent of their total student body.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a letter attached to the memo that schools that agree to the compact will get “multiple positive benefits” such as “substantial and meaningful federal grants,” The Wall Street Journal, who first broke the news of the memo, reported.
May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House, told the Journal that more universities will receive the memo but they started with the nine chosen schools due to the administration seeing them as “highly reasonable” institutions.
The nine were: Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia, a White House official said.
“They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education,” Mailman said.
Schools that don’t sign the compact will still be eligible for grants but won’t get priority or possible White House invitations for events, she added.
President Trump has made reforming higher education a top priority of his second term and has repeatedly tried to use financial incentives or punishments to try to get colleges to fall in line.
In recent months, the courts have ordered the White House to restore federal funding that it has pulled from institutions including Harvard University and the University of California.