After massive, sustained resistance from a broad coalition of AAUP members and other higher education workers, students, and alumni, the Trump administration’s initial push for a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” has flopped. The agreement, which promised preferential treatment to institutions that aligned themselves with Trump’s far-right agenda, was rejected by seven of the nine colleges and universities that were invited to sign on. The other two universities did not respond publicly.
Students and higher education workers began organizing at each of the nine targeted schools—Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University—immediately after the compact offer was announced, holding protests and teach-ins on each campus.
The University of Virginia rejected the compact just hours after more than a thousand students, faculty members, and staff marched to Interim President Paul Mahoney’s office urging him to turn down the offer. After multiple protests by the student-led Brown Rise Up, Brown President Christina Paxson similarly turned down the compact. Dartmouth, MIT, Penn, Arizona, and USC also rejected the compact.
The chair of the UT board of regents initially reacted with enthusiasm after being invited to join the compact, but the UT system allowed Trump’s deadline to pass and has remained silent in the face of mounting public pressure from students and faculty. “This is a victory for UT Austin faculty and students and proves that organizing and collective pressure are crucial and more important than ever,” said UT Austin AAUP President Karma Chávez.
“We must hold the line in the face of these attacks,” said AAUP President Todd Wolfson. “The compact is not the last tactic we’ll see in the attacks on higher ed, but we can draw courage from this victory and continue fighting for our vision of what higher education should be: a tuition-free, debt-free, economic and innovative engine of our economy that is welcoming to all.”