White House Offers Grants for Universities' Conservative Compact

The Trump White House sent a 10‑page “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” to nine universities — Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, Penn, USC, MIT, UT Austin, Arizona, Brown and UVA — offering priority federal grants, White House access and other benefits in exchange for adopting administration priorities on admissions, hiring, campus speech, athletics, student discipline, affordability and foreign student limits. The compact’s requirements include banning consideration of race, sex and other demographic traits in admissions and hiring, requiring SAT/ACT testing, capping international undergraduates at 15% (no more than 5% from any single country), freezing tuition for five years, curbing grade inflation and posting graduate earnings. It directs schools to accept the government’s definition of gender for bathrooms, locker rooms and women’s sports (effectively excluding transgender women), to protect conservative speech and to revise or eliminate academic units the administration says punish conservative viewpoints. The memo explicitly says institutions may pursue alternative models only if they forgo federal benefits, tying compliance to access to federal funding. Initial reactions were mixed: some officials (notably UT System leaders) said they would review the proposal, while critics and rights advocates say the compact would coerce campuses, threaten academic freedom and chill expression.