The Trump administration’s new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is a trap.

Presented last week to a group of nine universities that doesn’t yet include Stanford, the compact proposes a list of policy changes the administration hopes universities will agree to in exchange for preferential access to federal grants. Several of the proposed reforms respond to legitimate concerns about higher education and identify real challenges that elite universities have faced in recent years. As White House advisor May Mailman put it, “Our hope is that a lot of schools see that this is highly reasonable.”

However, if you are debating whether the Trump administration’s proposed changes to university policies are reasonable or not, you are missing the point entirely. The compact is a thinly veiled invitation for universities to relinquish their self-governance and replace it with federal oversight, a threat concealed in a Trojan Horse of concerns about rising tuition costs, equality and diversity of ideas. Its effects, should the compact be adopted, will not be limited to implementing an enumerated set of reforms. Whatever your view on the merits of the proposals contained in the document, the compact will not be applied in good faith and will instead be enforced selectively to coerce university action on other core matters. 

Consider, for example, the “Marketplace of Ideas and Civil Discourse” section, which requires universities to provide an environment where a “broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints [are] present and no single ideology [is] dominant, both along political and other relevant lines.”

Who determines how broad the spectrum of ideological viewpoints must be or what constitutes “dominance”? Paradoxically, the same section requiring broad ideological tolerance also declares certain viewpoints off-limits: signatories must prohibit any expression of support for “entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.” The document’s vague language and contradictions provide government officials wide latitude to determine when universities are in or out of compliance, maximizing their leverage.

To understand how the principles in the compact are likely to be applied in practice, look to the Trump administration’s attempt this summer to withhold federal funding from researchers at Harvard. In the resulting suit over the cancelation of Harvard research contracts, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled that the federal government “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

This compact is better understood as an attempt to subordinate some of the country’s most important civil society institutions to the executive branch of the federal government. The “Enforcement” section of the document proposes that signatories will be subject to annual reviews of their compliance, and violations — determined by the Department of Justice (DOJ) — will result in “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation [being] returned to the U.S. government.” Violators would also be required to return any contributions from private donors during the year of violation, should those donors request a refund.

This retroactive clawback provision will place universities permanently in a position of subjugation to the federal government and subject at all times to the risk of budgetary catastrophe should they lose favor with political appointees at DOJ. The terms outlined in the document make it easy for those appointees to construct pre-textual justifications to punish political enemies.

To coax universities into relinquishing their independence, the administration is offering only vague allusions to preferential funding opportunities and other unspecified benefits. But should these cryptic promises be enough of a sweetener for the nine initial universities to sign on, there will be enormous pressure on Stanford’s administration to comply as well. 

Doing so would be a grave mistake.

This compact would fundamentally alter the nature of our institution. Stanford’s founding grant defines the purposes of the University as “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization, teaching the blessings of liberty regulated by law, and inculcating love and reverence for the great principles of government as derived from the inalienable rights of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

When it inevitably comes time for Stanford to choose, we must remember that we owe our loyalty not to any executive branch official but to our own foundational principles.  

We must be ready, when it’s our turn, to walk away. Until then, we call on our leadership to work with leaders of other universities to build a broad and unified opposition to this attack on academic freedom. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is already leading the way.

Our American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter has joined the national AAUP in calling for rejection of the compact. We urge Stanford and the Association of American Universities (AAU) to do the same.

Greg Martin (Ph.D. ‘13) is an associate professor of political economy in the Graduate School of Business. 

This piece is co-signed by the following members of the Stanford Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP):

Emma Brunskill, associate professor of computer science

Christina Krist, associate professor of education

Peter Michelson, professor of physics

Lucy O’Brien, associate professor of molecular and cellular physiology

Julie Parsonnet, professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health

Jessica Riskin, professor of history

Lauren Tompkins, associate professor of physics 

Barbara L. Voss, professor of anthropology

Megan Wachspress, fellow, lecturer in law