Teaching to Regress: On the Compact for Academic Excellence for Universities

On October 1st, 2025, the current administration sent a list of commitments, known as the Compact for Academic Excellence in Education, to nine schools. The Compact represents the administration’s vision for higher education. Three of the Compact’s policy areas invoke “equality” and “merit” while prohibiting any consideration of sex, ethnicity, race, gender identity, or “proxies for any of those factors” in faculty hiring, programming, scholarship, student admissions, or other decisions. At the same time, the Compact mandates that sex alone be treated as the only “immutable” characteristic and requires single-sex facilities, particularly for athletics. Speech is a central component of three other policy areas. The Compact defines “neutrality” from staff and faculty as abstaining “from actions or speech relating to societal and political events” while ensuring conservative viewpoints on campus are afforded protection and insulation from criticism. Visas are to be restricted to students who are “supportive of American or Western values” and limits international student enrollment. While the principles and goals of the Compact are what many schools have said is at odds with their ethos and mission, the administration has offered to broaden access to federal funds, should universities comply. As of October 20th, the deadline for feedback on the proposal, seven out of the nine schools publicly rejected the Compact. Numerous professional organizations working in higher education have written statements in opposition to its terms and faculty across universities and geography have organized to oppose it.

The conflict between higher education and the current administration is a stark reminder of what is at stake for U.S. democracy in this moment. Universities are one of the places where people learn how to be engaged civic actors – citizens, in the broadest sense of the term. The purpose of the Compact is to remake university communities in the image of the MAGA movement: obedient, culturally monolithic, inward-looking, patriarchal, and illiberal. Compliance will bring increased federal funding. As is a common pattern among antidemocratic regimes, the administration invites the universities to participate in their own undoing, betraying their mission and their community, hoping that the universities will fall in line, like the prominent law firms who brokered deals with the administration, and intending to punish those that do not.

Second, the principles of the Compact position dissent and protest as antithetical to university life. During the Vietnam Era, some universities sought ways to create greater public space and opportunity for debate in a period of tremendous upheaval and social change. But today, universities have sought to contain and punish students participating in mass movements against long-standing U.S. policies, expelling students and firing faculty whose views do not align with the administration’s. This is no strategy to build opposition to a growing transnational antidemocratic movement.

Organizers working to build a strategy in this moment should consider the following narratives:

1. Say Education Is a Public Good: Much of the criticism against the Compact has focused on its vague ideas of civility and debate, implying conservative students are in need of the protected status it forbids for other identity groups. Second, faculty organizers have framed their opposition in terms of “academic independence,” maintaining that universities should be forums for public debate. The Compact demands that both public and private institutions freeze their tuition for five years, while making expanded access to federal funding contingent on compliance.

The administration’s attacks on higher education create an opportunity for universities to bring truly democratic values to the public conversation: 1) education is a public good; 2) when we have more of the public represented in universities, the quality and breadth of the public good that emerges from universities increases, as evidenced by the U.S.’s historic role in inviting the best scholars and students from around the world to learn and teach; 3) the terms of the Compact, which rewards and punishes universities according to who it deems deserving of education access, is fundamentally anti-American. 

2. Organize Everywhere: The key to fighting antidemocratic movements is to build democratic infrastructure – to organize everywhere. Organizing everywhere means engaging in civic participation and governance within all the institutions we belong to – co-ops, churches, unions, universities, and more. Universities are unique because they are one of the few spaces where intergenerational, multiracial, multireligious, etc., groups of people live, teach, learn, and grow, often with people they may never have met otherwise. Universities expose their communities to ways of living and thinking that they may not experience at other points in life and can be powerful incubators for democracy – or its opposite.

3. The Case of Trans Rights: A wedge issue is often defined as an issue that can create divisions within a constituency that is otherwise aligned on core issues. The term often connotes an issue that are understood to be secondary or particular to certain communities, rather than one that can affect everyone.

In recent years, across the political spectrum, trans issues have been described as a “wedge issue,” resulting in a narrative shift to the right. What some have described somewhat derisively as “bathroom bills” are really about trans people’s access to public space. But access is no small thing. The alternative of access to public space is removal, or exile, from public space. The criminalization of healthcare providers and parents seeking support for trans youth is linked to the criminalization of abortion. Both are attacks on bodily autonomy and the authority of scientific and medical knowledge.

This particular “wedge issue,” a term that connotes a peripheral status, is central to core policies of the Compact. Significantly, one university who rejected the Compact outright conceded in the summer to adhere to its transphobic policy, leaving an unhelpful and ambiguous policy in place for students and faculty on its campus. Now, like previous antidemocratic regimes that have targeted sexual and gender minorities, the administration is pushing to label trans people as “domestic extremists.” For universities who have aligned themselves with the administration’s transphobic policies, even as they reject other policies on the grounds of “freedom of expression” and “independence,” will they also permit security personnel to apprehend trans students, as they did other minority groups?

When a minority is attacked and their needs, rights, experiences are framed as so outside of the “majority” or a “danger” to others’ lives, policies that infringe on everyone’s freedoms become possible, even desirable. Recognizing that a “wedge issue” can quickly become a Trojan horse for bad policies and harmful narratives is critical.

Every public or civic space can give us opportunities to participate in a democratic and inclusive vision for society, but only if we take up that space as organizers and narrators. If we cede public space to antidemocratic movements because they have targeted particular communities that we may view as “outside” ourselves, we must remember we also forfeit our own freedoms – and futures.