Posted on 10/21/2025 12:21:13 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Team Trump sent several leading U.S. universities a proposed one-sided deal. They’re balking at the offer, and it’s worth understanding why.
Donald Trump and his administration have spent much of the year targeting American higher education in a multifaceted campaign, but the story took an unexpected turn earlier this month when the Republican White House unveiled a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
The document, sent to nine leading U.S. universities, offered the schools a deal of sorts. The institutions would become eligible for preferential treatment in the distribution of federal grants, but in exchange for this special status, the universities would have to give Team Trump greater control over everything from admissions to tuition, faculty to speech codes.
It’s not working: Last week, five giants in higher education — Brown University, M.I.T., the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and the University of Virginia — all effectively told the White House, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
The New York Times reported on one especially interesting element of the larger story:
Brown’s decision, in particular, is a case study of how the White House may have misjudged its own strength and academia’s nerve, especially once one of Mr. Trump’s top aides said that the nine schools initially chosen to consider the proposal were ‘good actors,’ or could be. After Trump officials abruptly moved to shut off federal money in April, Brown forged a multimillion-dollar settlement in July. But when the Trump administration returned this month and asked the school to consider its ideology-for-funding compact, it refused to sign.
In other words, earlier this year, Brown was one of the many universities that came under fire from Team Trump. A few months later, the school grudgingly struck deal with the administration.
At the time, Brown administrators probably thought...
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
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No big deal. If you don’t like the deal, reject it and fund things yourself out of your endowment or tuition.
Sadly, “academic freedom” has become the freedom to impose racial quotas, deny any conservative faculty hires, declare favored classes who are pampered with lower standards and allowed to bully the non-favored, excuse - even encourage - violence toward them, and generally ignore the strictures of civil law. That’s a pretty sweet deal when you can get others, including the victims, to pay for it all.
They figure they’ll outlast Trump.
If a professor can bring in $50 million in grant money, paying them $900,000/yr is a bargain. Indeed, most grants pay the profs salary for the duration of the grant. Very few well-known profs are actually teaching. Almost all of them are doing grant projects which, supposedly, augers well for the institution’s reputation but with very little benefit to the students.
No soup for you!
Because their faculties and admins are hotbeds of third-party-payer first-among-equals communist elitism?
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