Opinion: How should universities respond to the invitation to sign a Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education?

On October 1st, nine schools—including USC—received a letter from the US Secretary of Education inviting them to proactively join the effort to improve “higher education for the betterment of the country.” The letter announces plans to offer a Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, an agreement that universities will be invited to sign. According to the letter:

Compact signatory schools will signal to students, parents, and contributors that learning and equality are university priorities. In addition, the Federal Government would have assurance that signatory schools are complying with civil rights law and pursuing Federal priorities with vigor. This assurance will yield multiple positive benefits for the school, including allowance for increased overhead payments where feasible, substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal partnerships. In short, this Compact will renew and strengthen the vital, mutually beneficial relationship between the U.S. Government and higher education that is essential to our nation’s future and success.

A draft of the Compact, available here, was attached, and the letter requested comments to be sent by October 20:

After receiving feedback, schools that show clear alignment and a strong readiness to champion this effort will be invited to the White House to finalize language and become initial signatories. We are aiming to have a signed agreement by no later than November 21, 2025.

I first learned about the Compact from fiery faculty email exchanges, followed by a communication from governor Newsom threatening to pull state funding from universities that sign the agreement.

USC’s AAUP chapter has already produced a petition, signed by several dozen faculty and staff. The petition solemnly warns that signing the Compact equates to “sacrific[ing] our values,” which “would irreparably damage the fabric of our university far into the future.”

Based on this initial input, I expected the Compact to be a gross infringement on university autonomy. I expected to find an outrageous set of demands, on the level of rounding up all faculty who criticized President Trump on social media and putting them on unpaid leave, instituting a mandatory prayer at the beginning of each class, setting up ICE checkpoints, demanding affirmative action for conservatives, and requesting all prospective hires to sign an anti-Woke pledge. But after reading the actual document, I realized that it is nothing of the sort.

The document, which is only nine pages long, reads more like an aspirational manifesto than concrete policy. It calls on universities to show their willingness to comply with existing non-discrimination laws, such as banning the use of race or sex in admissions and hiring and protecting women sports and spaces (Titles VI, VII, and IX). It also calls on universities to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality and to cultivate open discourse on campus. In addition, it calls for the restoration of academic excellence by strengthening merit-based admissions, using standardized tests, and curbing grade inflation. I found myself in agreement with a good 75% of the Compact, and I cannot wrap my head around why it generated such fierce opposition.

True, not everything in the Compact is acceptable — I find rigid caps on foreign enrollment, political litmus tests for foreign students, and a few other details objectionable. Also, I think the government should made it clear that all universities are invited to sign it, not just the initially selected nine schools. Such objections should be communicated to the government in response to their invitation to provide feedback. If these objections can be negotiated out, universities — including USC —should sign. This will signal to the public their good-faith willingness to reform and right their course. Below I discuss specific sections of the Compact and explain why I think signing it is the right thing to do.

What is in the Compact?

Equality of admissions

On equality of admissions, the Compact says:

[N]o factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations, or proxies for any of those factors shall be considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions or financial support, with due exceptions for institutions that are solely or primarily comprised of students of a specific sex or religious denomination.

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.

Institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, or CLT) or program-specific measures of accomplishment in the case of music, art, and other specialized programs of study. 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.

Yes—we must drop discriminatory practices, which already violate civil right laws, and strengthen merit-based practices. Using standardized tests is a time-tested approach to fair admissions. I would even advocate instituting old-fashioned entrance exams to make sure we admit students who have adequate preparation to succeed in our courses. I would also argue for greater transparency and increased faculty involvement in admissions procedures.

Marketplace of ideas & civil discourse

The Compact states:

Truth-seeking is a core function of institutions of higher education. Fulfilling this mission requires maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas where different views can be explored, debated, and challenged.

Therefore, signatories to this compact commit themselves to fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus. A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines....

Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility. Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views. Universities shall neither support nor permit a heckler’s veto through, for example, disruptions, violence, intimidation, or vandalism. Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations; (2) allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students or groups of students; or (3) allow obstruction of access to parts of campus based on students’ race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations and to swift, serious, and consistent sanctions for those who commit them.

This is an aspirational goal that I fully agree with. Some of the specific proposals are no-brainers (no vandalism, no violence, no disruptions to university operation, no shouting down speakers, accountability for those who disrupt university events). However, as a contract or policy, this section may be too vague, opening the door for potential misuse. For example, how do we define civility and how we are going to enforce it?

Furthermore, the Compact asks signatories to take actions such as “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” This strikes me as overreach and an infringement on academic freedom. True, we do have departments that seem more dedicated to political activism than to serious academic study, but I would like to see universities deal with this problem of their own accord. Instead of calling to abolish problematic units, I would rather see a call to create new units that provide alternative viewpoints.

Another section that raised my concern is:

While universities should protect debate and academic freedom, harassment falls outside permissible bounds. Signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations. All signatories shall adopt policies consistent with all legal requirements, including those of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

As it is worded now, this part might be in conflict with the First Amendment and may open the door to further empowering already-problematic campus bureaucracies. I would like to hear what the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) have to say about it. In short, some refinement is needed in this section.

Nondiscrimination in hiring

A steadfast commitment to rigorous and meritocratic selection based on objective and measurable criteria in the appointment process is pivotal for the University’s sustained excellence. Consistent with the requirements of Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts and other federal employment discrimination statutes, no factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, national origin, disability, or religion shall be considered in any decision related to the appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level, except as described in section 9 or otherwise provided by Title VII or other federal employment discrimination statutes.

Yes! As with admissions, this is simply abiding by the law. We must restore merit-based hiring and root out discriminatory practices, such as DEI.

Institutional neutrality

Signatories shall maintain institutional neutrality at all levels of their administration. This requires policies that 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.

Yes! This is in line with recommendations of major organizational supporters of academic freedom, including FIRE, AFA, and Heterodox Academy (see the Joint Letter on Institutional Neutrality, February 7, 2024). USC already has a good institutional neutrality policy, as noted in the recent FIRE College Rankings report. In my opinion, we could further strengthen it by adopting the Kalven Report.

Student learning

Signatories commit to grade integrity and the use of defensible standards for whether students are achieving their goals, with each grade reflecting the quality, breadth, and depth of the student’s achievement. Signatories acknowledge that a grade must not be inflated, or deflated, for any non-academic reason, but only rigorously reflect the demonstrated mastery of a subject that the grade purports to represent. Signatories will use public accountability mechanisms to demonstrate their commitment to grade integrity, such as publishing grade distribution dashboards with multiyear trendlines, public statements that explain student outcomes and any unusual upward trends, and comparisons with peer institutions.

Yes! Grades have become meaningless. For example, the average GPA of Harvard students is 3.8. USC—at least in the Chemistry Department—is not that bad, but we clearly have had grade inflation (which was escalated by the COVID-19 pandemic). We need to push back against grade inflation and dubious pedagogical innovations, such as micro-assignments, ungrading, contract grading, and self-grading, that have weakened our academic standards. Additionally, transparency in grade trends would help keep universities accountable.

Student equality

As the Compact states:

Student equality includes equality in discipline. Signatories shall maintain clear and consistent disciplinary standards that apply equally to all students, faculty, and staff. These standards should promote fairness, due process, and equal treatment, and should be administered in a manner consistent with institutional policies and applicable law. These standards shall never favor or disfavor any person because of his or her membership in a racial, ethnic, national, or religious group, or a group based on sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Yes! We should treat people as individuals, not as representatives of identity groups, and apply the same standards to everyone. I cannot see how anyone, except for the most radical of DEI adherents, could oppose this.

Financial responsibility

Universities have a duty to control their costs, including by eliminating unnecessary administrative staff, reducing tuition burdens, engaging in transparent accounting and regular auditing for misuse of funds, and cutting unnecessary costs. Signatories acknowledge that universities that receive federal funds have a duty to reduce administrative costs as far as reasonably possible and streamline or eliminate academic programs that fail to serve students. Towards this end, signatories to this compact commit to freezing the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.

This is a mixed bag. On the one hand, universities have a responsibility to keep tuition in check. There are many opportunities to reduce tuition, such as making cuts to, or even eliminating, units dedicated to non-academic boutique causes (such as the Culture Team, WorkWell Center, and the Sustainability Hub at USC). And budgets of academic units can be assessed and adjusted based on the unit’s performance. On the other hand, I am opposed to the government imposing rigid rules, such as tuition caps.

I am also in favor of universities committing to cutting administrative costs and reducing the costly bureaucratic burden on faculty. However, to reduce these administrative costs, we need to reduce red tape, bureaucracy, compliance, and regulations, and so as part of the Compact, the government should commit to streamline requirements for compliance with federal regulations and reduce their mandated bureaucratic requirements.

Signatories shall responsibly deploy their endowments to the public good. 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).

As much as I would love to see it, I am not sure if giving free tuition to STEM students is practical; it would create fertile ground for abuse. How would we deal with students who declare an intent to major in STEM and then, after taking two years of general education classes for free, transfer to another major? To boost STEM enrollment, the government could use merit-based fellowships for STEM students or even forgivable student loans for those who actually graduate with a STEM degree and a good GPA.

Foreign entanglements

All universities must comply with anti-money laundering, Know-Your-Customer (“KYC”), and foreign gift disclosure obligations imposed by the federal government and the rules and regulations overseen by the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCen”), the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), and the Department of Education (“ED”). This mandatory compliance is to assist the federal government in detecting, preventing, and eradicating criminal and terrorist financing and activity.

This is also a mixed bag. I am in favor of transparency and curbing foreign influence. Of course we should comply with existing laws and disclose foreign funding, but my concern is that this has already become an additional bureaucratic burden. The compact should include a provision that this disclosure will not increase the compliance bureaucracy further.

Federal permission for foreign student visas is intended to further America’s national interest to the extent the selected foreign students exhibit extraordinary talent that promises to make America stronger and more economically productive, and the selected students are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values, ultimately increasing global understanding and appreciation for the United States and our way of life.

The idea of student visas being conditional on students supporting American values is not acceptable, as it imposes a political litmus test. Even if such screening is defensible from a legal point of view (e.g., why should we allow our enemies to enter the country?), it is not the role of the university to exercise this control, but that of immigration authorities. Instead, universities could commit to introducing courses on civics and American history. Events such as the recent Democracy Day conversation with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hosted by our interim president could help promote these values by education, rather than coercion.

[N]o more than 15 percent of a university’s undergraduate student population shall be participants in the Student Visa Exchange Program, and no more than 5 percent shall be from any one country.

I also oppose rigid caps on foreign student enrollment. Why a 15% cap for every university? At USC, undergraduate fraction of foreign students is 14%, but the total fraction of foreign students is 26%. I could see how such caps may be imposed on public schools, but not on private universities—let the free market of competing educational institutions take care of it. There is nothing wrong, in my opinion, with STEM graduate programs being 80% foreign students—as we know, the pool of qualified and motivated domestic students is quite small. 5% cap also strikes me as silly and potentially having negative effect on populous countries like India.

Foreign students bring much needed talent, benefiting the US. Many foreign students enter American workforce and become permanent residents and eventually citizens, contributing to our excellence. Those that go back to their home countries facilitate collaborations. Well trained and hard-working international students have often a positive influence on the success of their domestic peers.

Enforcement

The leadership of an academic institution is directly responsible for its strategy, success, and adherence to legal and governmental requirements. On an annual basis the university’s President, Provost, and Head of Admissions shall be required to certify the University’s adherence to the principles contained herein.

The university annually shall conduct, or hire an external party to conduct, an independent, good faith, empirically rigorous, and anonymous poll of its faculty, students, and staff, providing them the opportunity to evaluate the university’s performance against this compact. The results of such surveys shall be made public and available on the university’s website.

I like the idea of outside evaluations and surveys, because universities have been slow to reform and have been brazenly defying civil rights law (more on this below). However, I am concerned that these evaluators could become ideologically corrupted, as our accreditation boards have. We do not want to replace progressive DEI by conservative DEI. Some guardrails are needed to prevent this.

Why a Compact is needed

A reasonable person may ask why such a pledge is necessary. Shouldn’t universities be doing all these things on their own? Why should the government invite them to publicly commit to such principles and practices? Does signing such a government-issued pledge undermine the autonomy of the university?

I believe that today such a pledge is needed—because our universities have failed their mission of truth-seeking and education in multiple ways—and they have been reluctant to reform on their own. As I wrote in these pages earlier:

The public’s trust in higher education and scientific institutions is at a historic low. American universities have been leaders in advancing science, fostering innovation, and educating the next generation. Our universities hold enormous intellectual capital. Yet in recent years, they have drifted off course. They have allowed their mission of truth-seeking to be compromised by political advocacy. They have permitted identity politics to subjugate meritocracy.

They have allowed disciplines with little intellectual merit to take root on campus. They have allowed bureaucracies to grow to gargantuan proportions and have allowed bureaucrats to control scholars. They have allowed ideology to suppress the spirit of open inquiry and intellectual curiosity. Bean-counting and political activism have been given precedence over creativity and innovation; indoctrination has eclipsed education. All this has led to a breach of their social contract with the American public. This crisis has created fertile ground for the governmental overreach, interruption of science funding, and encroachment on academic freedom that we are witnessing today.

Universities have for years brazenly violated the core principles of the American liberal order by allowing DEI bureaucracies to interfere with hiring, by participating in openly discriminatory programs (such as, for example, NIH FIRST, which we highlighted here), and by employing unfair admissions practices. Following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision (“Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC”) banning affirmative action, a survey revealed that only 17% of university presidents supported the decision. Many university leaders, in fact, publicly denounced the decision and broadcast their intent to continue “to do the work” (see here and here).

DEI administrators and university legal teams circulated memos instructing hiring committees on tricks they can use to continue to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation. After the January 2025 executive orders banning DEI in universities receiving federal funding, many universities erased all mention of DEI from their websites, but retained their DEI staff and continued their DEI programs by simply renaming them (for local examples, see here and here). Many openly discriminatory programs have continued to operate (as documented here and here). A recent lawsuit filed by a California wunderkind who could not gain admission despite his stellar resume suggests that anti-Asian bias in admissions continues.

In the context of free speech, FIRE’s recent college free-speech rankings paint a bleak picture, with over half of rated schools receiving a grade of “F.” Even the top-ranked school got only a “B–.” FIRE surveys show that 7 in 10 students on U.S. campuses consider it acceptable to shout down a speaker whose ideas the do not like, and 3 in 10 believe that using violence to prevent speech is justified. Clearly, our universities are not marketplaces of ideas. They have failed to foster a culture of free speech. They have failed to protect the academic freedom of their faculty, as a plethora of cases on the webpages of FIRE and the AFA show.

Our universities have become ideologically skewed, with some departments having become pure ideological echo chambers. The result, as shown by a recent study of 27 million syllabi, is that contentious topics such as racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught from a uniformly one-sided perspective by “professors [who] generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies.”

While some departments have become too ideologically homogeneous, others have become intellectual wastelands, as evidenced by seminars on erotic vomiting sponsored by MIT, the invention of a feminist witch studies field by professors at UCSB, and the hiring of a drag queen named “LaWhore Vagistan” as a visiting professor at Harvard. For more examples, readers can consult the magazine Babbling Beaver which, though ostensibly satirical, has devastatingly documented the decline of the School of Humanities at MIT.

Add to the above, the erosion of academic standards, grade inflation, bureaucratic bloat, and unchecked tuition costs—it becomes indisputable that universities have failed their mission in multiple ways. Hence, asking universities to show their honest intent to reform is justified and timely.

The key question, then, is whether the Compact is the right way forward. Aside from the concerns about specific points in the Compact I have already discussed, I have three general concerns.

First, I do not like the idea of only select universities being given the offer to sign—the invitation should be extended to everyone. Second, I would like to see organizations such as FIRE, the AFA, the Heterodox Academy, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters be involved in shaping the Compact, and universities play a greater role. Ideally, I would like to see a consensus on the principles articulated in the Compact emerge among university leadership and the broader academic community, but this might be unrealistic, given the problems of ideological capture described above.

Third, incentivizing signatories with “increased overhead payments where feasible, substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal partnerships” is wrong—research funding should not be used as either a carrot or a stick. While essentially the same thing was done by using DEI mandates as a prerequisite for federal funding by the Biden administration, and by the decades-old practice of holding universities hostage to Title VI and Title IX (see here for a brief account), past misdeeds are not an excuse for new misdeeds.

To sum up, the essential ideas articulated in the Compact are excellent. The Compact is an opportunity for universities to signal good will, to reform, and to right their course, and to recommit to their mission of research and education. It is an opportunity to win back public trust. However, the process should be improved—by making clear that the offer is open to all universities, by allotting more time for finalizing the content of such a historic document, and by inviting the broader community of universities and organizations championing academic freedom to participate in this process.

USC and other universities should welcome this invitation and begin with negotiations, addressing the problematic issues highlighted above. My recommendation is to seek input from FIRE and AFA on how to refine the Compact and assure that it does not lead to infringement of academic freedom or freedom of speech. Perhaps USC leadership can discuss the Compact with other universities and come back with a unified proposal to make the Compact best serve the purpose of correcting the course of academe.

It is time to take bold action to restore the excellence of American universities.

Postscript

On October 7, the USC Faculty Senate met to discuss the Compact. Although I did not attend the meeting, several of my colleagues who did reported on it. The meeting, held on Zoom, was well attended (it reached maximum capacity of 500 attendees). Many faculty and staff delivered fiery and emotional denunciations of the Compact, largely echoing the content of this petition. About three-quarters of the speakers were from the arts schools, the humanities, and social work.

According to my colleagues, with the exception of President Kim, not a single rational voice was heard. I am told that the LA Times article, “USC Faculty Members Denounce Trump Compact that Would Shift University to the Right,” presented an accurate account of the meeting. What the article failed to say, however, is that the attendees were only 7% of USC’s 6,779 faculty. As is often the case, the loudest voices do not represent the majority.

The meeting—as well as the USC AAUP petition (signed predominantly by representatives of the humanities and professional schools, with very little representation of STEM faculty) speaks volumes about the internal problems of our university—radicalization, partisanship, and ideological capture of some of our departments.

The LA Times article tendentiously states, “The compact demands rightward campus policy shifts in exchange for priority federal funding access.” If academic excellence, merit-based hiring and admissions, equal treatment of individuals, and a culture of free speech are considered to be right-wing policies, then perhaps it is time for the academia to move rightward.

Articles discussing the Compact

• White House Asks Colleges to Sign Sweeping Agreement to Get Funding Advantage (Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2025; archived version here)

• Trump’s Proposed ‘Compact’ Asks Colleges to Show They’re ‘Pursuing Federal Priorities’ (Francie Diep and Eric Kelderman, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 2, 2025)

• USC Faculty Members Denounce Trump Compact that would Shift University to the Right (Daniel Miller, LA Times, October 7, 2025; archived version here)

• The University of Southern California Should Embrace Trump’s Compact (James Moore, Minding the Campus, October 7, 2025)

• Comment on the LA Times article by Daniel Druhora (to be published)