If the University of Virginia agrees to the terms dictated by a memo sent last Wednesday by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, then this essay you are reading could cost the university all of its federal support—research funds, financial aid, everything.
“Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” states the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that McMahon sent to Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia.
I am purposefully “belittling” a “conservative idea.” Or maybe I am not. I’m not really sure what the legal threshold of “belittling” is, and while I have a pretty good idea which ideas should be considered “conservative” (I studied American conservatism in graduate school with one of the premier historians of the subject), I am pretty sure McMahon does not.
So let’s run this “belittlement” experiment: The policies and goals of the “compact” McMahon proposed to nine university presidents is silly. It’s written by a team of people who have no idea how higher education is run or funded. It’s a petty effort at federal, centralized control of a collection of private and state-run institutions.
OK. So that’s belittlement, almost certainly. But is the idea of tight federal control of private and state institutions “conservative”? Not by most notions of American conservatism, which have traditionally deferred to private actors and toward a model of federalism that vests more authority in state and local governance than in the national bureaucracy.
It’s important to note that this intervention into higher education is unlike the previous mob-like extortion moves on Columbia, Harvard, the University of California, and (again) my own University of Virginia. In those, the Trump administration told these universities they had to make specific changes in how they do their work or who runs the university under the threat of losing substantial research funding—regardless of the public value of that research.
This “compact” is more like an invitation to borrow money from the mob, with substantial control and future penalties assured. If any university agrees to this proposal, it will be under federal control and subject to some unpredictable, arbitrary, extreme penalties.
But let’s assume that “conservatism” now means “things President Donald Trump and his Cabinet want to do.” Then imagine that the University of Virginia, my employer, signed on to this statement, as McMahon has requested.
If I am considered a representative of the Department of Media Studies, or as head of the Center for Media and Citizenship, then either or both of those must be eliminated for facilitating my public statements belittling a “conservative idea.”
If, as the text of the compact reads, the Department of Justice—without any clear due process or standards—determines that the university “willfully or negligently violated this agreement” by retaining my academic department or center, it “shall lose access to the benefits of this agreement for a period of no less than 1 year.” Those “benefits” include some vague promise of more federal support. The letter and text of the “compact” do not list or outline specifically what such benefits might be.
If the Justice Department determines that signatory universities fail to live up to the compact by, for example, tolerating faculty such as myself writing articles such as this, for two years in a row “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation shall be returned to the U.S. government.”
So, yeah. If I keep writing what I’m writing and teaching as I teach and supporting students as I have been supporting them, then there is a very good chance that the University of Virginia—if it signs on—would have to fire me or face the complete elimination of federal support and thus have to shut its doors and turn off the lights.
It gets worse. Right after the sentence banning the “belittlement” of “conservative ideas,” the document proclaims, “Given the importance of academic freedom to the marketplace of ideas, signatories shall adopt a policy protecting academic freedom in classrooms, teaching, research, and scholarship.”
Yes, that sentence directly contradicts the previous one. You are not misreading it. This document is that stupid. Whoops. That’s more belittlement.
Now, those who work at the Department of Education should probably know that every major, nonreligious, and state college and university in the United States has had policies protecting academic freedom since the 1950s, when state and federal leaders frequently purged faculties of professors who studied or proclaimed positions that ran counter to the mainstream values of the time. Academic freedom policies came from faculties, not the government. Governments are the enemies of academic freedom, not their protectors. This current administration is the greatest threat to academic freedom and scientific research since the ebb of McCarthyism. And this compact is just more evidence that it wants to dictate what we teach, what we research, what drugs we develop, and how we express ourselves.
However, the document is chock full of reasonable-sounding proclamations, all of which are already embedded in academic governance and culture.
“Signatories commit to rigorous, good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff at all levels and to sharing the results of such assessments with the public; and to seek such a broad spectrum of viewpoints not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit,” the document reads. Now, that sounds pretty good. And it is. It is, in fact, what every major university strives for and mostly achieves.
The trick here is that McMahon does not actually care about intellectual diversity. If she did, she would see that every department is loaded full of ornery, argumentative, eccentric voices trained in different methods of research, pursuing vastly different subjects, and often battling out their differences ad nauseam. That’s the boring, ugly truth about intellectual diversity at universities. We are so intellectually diverse we put ourselves to sleep.
What McMahon means to say, along with too many pundits who can’t be bothered to do any research or reporting, is that she wants political diversity—as if truth and knowledge map along the twenty-first-century American partisan spectrum. I’ve never understood why it mattered whether a calculus or Spanish professor votes for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. But apparently it matters to some people. Anyone who pays attention to how and what we teach would not bother with such trivialities. Standard U.S. politics hardly ever enters most classrooms. We are too busy for all that. Or maybe we are just too disengaged for that. Either way, it’s not really a problem.
Still, I happen to know of no Marxist professors in the University of Virginia Department of Economics. Like most such departments, it’s overwhelmingly populated by those who embrace econometric analysis and model building in the neoclassical tradition. I know of no Marxists in either of the two business schools, either. I know of none in the public policy school.
If the university signs this compact, would it have to hire a slew of extreme left-wing scholars to “balance” out those four influential units of the university? I would hope not. Marxist theory has little to offer those fields of knowledge (fighting words for some, I know, but it’s true).
But maybe someday the Biology Department would have to hire a biblical creationist to “balance” out all the real scientists. Or the Astronomy Department would have to better represent the voices of the millions of Americans who believe the Earth is flat and no human has ever walked on the moon. Don’t laugh. Not so long ago, no one took anti-vaccination cranks seriously. Now look at us.
Still, because the Economics Department is embedded in neoclassical ideology and because it’s rigorously empirical, my colleagues in that department are more than happy to teach students and proclaim publicly that Trump’s tariffs are terrible for the global and U.S. economies.
They would be glad to explain to anyone who would listen that the Great Depression was deepened, if not caused, by high tariffs that stifled the abilities of various countries to leverage their advantages and let goods, labor, capital, and ideas flow freely. In the nineteenth century, people called that position liberalism. We more recently call it neoliberalism.
Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of twentieth-century conservatism, hated protectionism and fought for free trade. Since Reagan’s time, it’s rare to find an academic economist who would argue for high tariffs or other forms of protectionist policy. There is a reason for that: Empirically, Reagan was right about tariffs. He trusted the economists who had run the numbers and debated it all out over 40 years.
So does the University of Virginia Economics Department “belittle” a “conservative idea” now that the right wing of the American political spectrum opposes free trade and rejects solid economic analysis? Well, I suppose that if it does, then Reagan did as well. Thus all universities that sign on to the compact would be in serious danger just by having economists on staff who are honest and open about the established principles of the field.
This essay and most of what my colleagues and I write for the public would also be dangerous if not forbidden under this compact. It states, “All university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.”
I could no longer write publicly or do interviews about copyright law, social media policy, and media ownership. Maybe that’s no big loss to society. But when my colleagues in the medical or nursing schools may not do public service work encouraging the HPV vaccine or sickle-cell anemia research, then we do suffer greatly.
When I teach, I look out over a field of young faces filled with curiosity, all with different skills, interests, and potential contributions to the university community and society. That is the value of true diversity. Every ecologist and economist will tell you that monocultures are paths to misery and demise. That’s why admissions offices take seriously when an applicant has a talent for playing trombone, dancing ballet, writing poetry, coding software, or hitting a slider. Holistic admissions has given the university and the country a panoply of excellent and energetic leaders and creators.
Under this compact, talent diversity would end. “University admissions decisions shall be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the University’s website and available to all prospective applicants and members of the public,” it states. “Universities shall publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin, and sex.”
Grades and SAT scores would dictate admissions. Not only would this favor applicants from wealthier families and school districts (and we all know what that would mean), it would squeeze out any other factor, such as interest, ambition, grit, or wisdom. I wonder if the enthusiasm for this compact from the University of Texas (my alma mater) would wane once the Board of Regents realizes that it would end football recruiting as we know it.
Other provisions of this compact would rig admissions against the empirical standards it seems to guarantee. Signatory universities would have to cap admission of foreign students at 15 percent of undergraduates, regardless of how those applicants score. And by enforcing archaic and unscientific definitions of gender, universities would exclude excellent students who might otherwise thrive but for a federally enforced culture of discrimination, cruelty, and the constant threat of harassment, humiliation, and violence.
Despite defunding vast areas of scientific research and continually deriding the work of scientists, the Trump administration, through this document, seems to hate students of art, music, and history even more. “Any university with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs (with exceptions, as desired, for families of substantial means),” the compact reads. That cost would be made up by those pursuing degrees in French, just like the degree McMahon earned from East Carolina University.
The incoherence and contradictions of this compact reveal just how little thought goes into Trump policies, even those that affect millions of people and billions of dollars. There was no accompanying or supporting study offering data analysis and conflicting perspectives on how to address the very real challenges to American higher education and how it succeeds and fails. That would require effort. It would demand patience. It would examine complex causes and effects. It would delve into history. It would trust expertise.
It would require … all the things the great American university system demands of its scholars and students. Any university leader who signs on to this compact would betray everything good and solid about the university and would do deep and permanent harm to the United States and the world.
