Universities are standing up to Trump

For months, his campaign faced only sporadic resistance. But over the last week, Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and the University of Virginia have all rebuffed the White House’s push to give preferential funding treatment to schools that show fealty to Trump’s agenda.

Brown’s decision, in particular, is a case study of how the White House may have misjudged its own strength and academia’s nerve, especially once one of Trump’s top aides said that the nine schools initially chosen to consider the proposal were “good actors” or could be.

After Trump officials abruptly moved to shut off federal money in April, Brown forged a multimillion-dollar settlement in July. But when the Trump administration returned this month and asked the school to consider its ideology-for-funding compact, it refused to sign.

“The compact itself just so egregiously and blatantly violated our ability to function as the institution that we are right now that it is very easy for people to get fired up about it,” said Raya Gupta, a Brown freshman who helped organize opposition to the proposal on the campus in Providence, Rhode Island.

Previously, Harvard University had been the only school to defy the Trump administration so openly, refusing a list of demands intrusive enough that even some of the university’s critics said the school had no feasible choice but to balk. Harvard sued soon after and won a crucial ruling last month.

The schools that have rejected the government’s compact may very well be risking Washington’s wrath since Trump has proved willing to attack the federal funding of schools that his administration disfavors. But the compact represents both an effort to immunize the administration’s efforts from court challenges and to take its ambitions well beyond a single school.

The demands also reach further, with conditions that include accepting “that academic freedom is not absolute” and pledging to potentially shut down “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

The document also envisions limits on international students, tuition freezes, an embrace of standardized testing and definitions of genders “according to reproductive function and biological processes.”

The administration dangled the possibility of more federal money for schools that signed the deal while warning that they were “free to develop models and values” that diverged from the Trump vision if they chose to “forego federal benefits.”

The administration depicted the proposal’s text as mostly final, but it asked for feedback by next Monday from Brown, Dartmouth College, MIT, the University of Arizona, Penn, Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, Virginia and Vanderbilt University.

While the University of Texas system has expressed support for the compact, others have rejected it or said little in response.

But when the leaders of 10 schools not included in the White House’s solicitation — including Arizona State, Baruch College, Cornell University, Virginia Tech and the College of William & Mary — were asked, at a gathering in New York this week, who among them would sign the compact if asked, no one lifted a hand. (Arizona State, along with the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis, participated in a Friday discussion with Trump officials about the compact, according to two people familiar with the call.)

“There are many colleagues who just think there is no way any president, with the possible exception of red state, public universities, could sign this,” said Michael P. Steinberg, president of Brown’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Indeed, the compact invited questions about whether universities would muster a response besides the caution and conciliation they have often favored during Trump’s presidency. That worry was especially acute at Brown, just months after the university struck a deal with the government in which the school promised policy changes and committed $50 million to workforce programs. In return, Brown saw its research funding restored, and the government closed a series of investigations.

Many on campus had begrudgingly accepted the settlement, but the compact sparked swift alarm.

Dr. Francois I. Luks, a surgeon who is a professor in Brown’s medical school, said he had viewed the July settlement not as “a perfect solution, but it was a reasonable one.” The new proposal, however, was bullying in its approach and “an insidious way of going inch by inch,” he said.

The editorial page board of the campus newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, also saw the July agreement as “a fair deal” that preserved the university’s essential values and revived millions of dollars in research funding.

But it condemned the new proposal as “akin to a protection racket” that was “an extraordinary attempt at a power grab.”

Paul Hudes, a junior who writes for the paper and who dissented from the board’s original stand, said he saw some merit in some of the compact’s provisions, such as a sweeping embrace of standardized testing. He was bothered, though, by the government looking to condition funding on such policies. And he was bothered that months after he finished a course on communist Europe, his own campus was facing state pressure.

“How am I supposed to go learn from this genius professor for a full semester last spring and then come and hear about this deal, which, to me, sounds like exactly the type of stuff that he talked about that was happening in Europe in the early 20th century?” Hudes, the head of the editorial page board, asked incredulously before Brown announced its decision to reject the proposal.

Rosie Shultz, a junior, also worried this week that the government had gone too far.

“They’re trying to harness this moment and say, ‘Look, there’s a problem happening in the higher education sphere. We will work with them to fix it,’” she said outside a residence hall. “And they are trying to add a whole bunch of things on top of that are, frankly, not the same issue.”

The compact did not attract especially vocal defenders on campus. Brown’s Republican Club did not respond to interview requests.

Five days after MIT became the first school to reject the proposal, and as angst mounted on the Brown campus, Christina H. Paxson, Brown’s president, said that her school would not support the compact either. Penn and USC refused the next day. Virginia declined on Friday.

Paxson wrote that she was “concerned that the compact by its nature and by various provisions would restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance, critically compromising our ability to fulfill our mission.”

She added that the university had already embraced some ideas similar to ones in the compact in its July agreement, which explicitly prohibited the government from using the settlement “to dictate Brown’s curriculum or the content of academic speech,” something she said the compact did not seem to recognize.

It is not clear how the Trump administration will proceed if universities continue to reject the proposal. The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this article, though a spokesperson, Liz Huston, warned after Penn’s announcement Thursday that “any higher education institution unwilling to assume accountability and confront these overdue and necessary reforms will find itself without future government and taxpayers support.”

But in higher education, there is talk — and some hope — that perhaps school presidents will err on the side of academic alliances rather than political ones.

“At some point it becomes embarrassing, in a craven way, to make a deal for yourself and abandon those institutions that are standing up for academic freedom,” said Corey Brettschneider, a political science professor at Brown and the author of “The Presidents and the People,” which is about citizens who fought to defend democracy from American presidents who sought to abuse their powers.

Either way, people like Shultz are bracing for Trump to keep his attention on places like Brown until he leaves office.

“This is an administration we’re going to interact with, in some capacity, for the rest of his term,” Shultz said.

That, she argued, was why Brown needed to say no.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.