(The Center Square) – About two weeks after receiving the proposal, the University of Pennsylvania announced it would not be joining the Trump Administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
Penn was one of nine elite universities initially sent the compact and is among four who have officially rejected its terms, a decision that reflects concerns shared by voices across the political spectrum.
Among them is Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who responded to the announcement on social media Thursday.
“The Trump administration’s dangerous demands would limit freedom of speech, the freedom to learn, and the freedom to engage in constructive debate and dialogue on campuses across the country,” said Shapiro. He added, “Penn has long been a crucial part of the fabric of this Commonwealth and needs no special consideration from the federal government.”
The governor’s criticisms of the proposal were more pointed than Penn’s public response, which “respectfully declined” the president’s offer for funding opportunities tied to compliance with his administration’s political priorities.
“At Penn, we are committed to merit-based achievement and accountability,” wrote the school’s president, Dr. J. Larry Jameson. “The long-standing partnership between American higher education and the federal government has greatly benefited society and our nation. Shared goals and investment in talent and ideas will turn possibility into progress.”
Penn has already made changes to their policies to settle a dispute with the administration over women’s sports. To join the compact would mean further committing to new admissions requirements and ideological standards.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, which includes academic freedom amongst its primary concerns as an organization dedicated to protecting speech, issued a statement in opposition to the compact.
“A government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow,” concludes the statement. “That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy.”
Still others who support Penn’s decision say that the larger issue with the compact is federal funding for higher education in the first place. The Center Square spoke with Dr. Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank.
McCluskey emphasized that because education funding isn’t enumerated in the Constitution, it isn’t within the federal government’s reach. Using federal money to dictate more limits on academic freedom would, for him, be a step in the wrong direction.
“The right way for higher ed to operate is without government funding. That would mean there would be no federal student aid and then very little federal research money,” said McCluskey, though he acknowledged that within the current system, that would be an impossible ask.
“It’s easy to kind of blame the institutions and say, ‘Well, if the institutions don’t like it, they shouldn’t take the money,’” said McCluskey. “But the federal money is so ubiquitous, it is almost impossible to be a viable institution that doesn’t take – especially – the student aid.”
Funding aside, McCluskey had concerns about the implications the compact has for academic freedom.
“What’s particularly concerning about the compact is when it does things like say, ‘Well, you have to have intellectual or ideological balance,” said McCluskey. “Who is going to determine – and how are they going to determine – whether or not your university has sufficient ideological balance? That’s not spelled out anywhere that I’ve seen. And so it’s an open question, and when you start to try and answer it for yourself, it gets pretty concerning.”
McCluskey also pointed out that there are variations within the broader body of the political left and right with a mix of positions on any number of issues. He noted that certain academic fields would lend themselves toward what might be perceived as a “left” or “right” leaning political viewpoint. McCluskey was hesitant to cite specific areas where this would be the case, noting that his own expertise is in the field of education.
One example of how these concerns could play out, however, might be climate science. While most scientists agree that climate change is influenced by humans, skepticism as a political position is almost exclusively seen among conservatives. To create an ideologically “balanced” department studying climate change would be a highly inaccurate representation of the scientific community.
Yet, while the debate as to why schools tend to lean to the left rages on in the U.S., the fact that liberals far outnumber conservatives among college faculty is undisputed. That’s why despite his own reservations about the compact, McCluskey said he understood the underlying reasoning driving it.
McCluskey said that, from what he’s observed, conservative policy analysts largely disagree with the compact, “But I think they are sympathetic to the motivation behind it, which is that higher education has been very hostile to conservatives for a very long time and is happy to take conservatives’ tax money, and they just feel that that’s unjust and that this would be a way to rebalance the scales.”
