MIT says it 'cannot support' Trump admin's proposal to reshape higher ed
The proposal asks that colleges eliminate consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions, maintain current tuition levels, limit international enrollment, require standardized test scores, and address grade inflation.
It also proposes that conservative speech must be protected and tolerated.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge is the first college to have rejected the Trump administration’s proposal titled the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which was sent to nine universities on Oct. 1, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The compact outlines a series of proposed reforms for universities, including eliminating the use of race, sex, or ideology in admissions and hiring; requiring standardized test scores; maintaining tuition levels for five years; capping international enrollment at 15%; addressing grade inflation; and ensuring institutional neutrality on political issues.
It also calls for protections of free expression, public reporting on academic and financial data, and annual certification of compliance, with penalties for violations. Together, the measures aim to promote transparency, accountability, and viewpoint diversity across higher education.
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In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the proposal as sent to USC specifically asks signatories to transform or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
The proposal seeks to cultivate a “vibrant marketplace of ideas” that encompasses a “broad spectrum of viewpoints” with no “single ideology dominant.”
Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, responded to the proposal by saying MIT “cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education” in a statement that was published online. A spokesperson for MIT refused to give Campus Reform additional commentary on the matter.
Kornbluth said the proposal “includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”
Marc Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Management who was involved in the formulation of the compact, explained in The New York Times that the proposal does not seek to dismantle or attack higher education, but rather to amend and rebuild it.
Rowan explains the critical problems inherent within our contemporary higher education system.
These issues include, but are not limited to, “outrageous costs and prolonged indebtedness for students; poor outcomes, with too many students left unable to find meaningful work after graduating; some talented domestic students and scholars have been crowded out of enrollment and employment opportunities by international students; and a high degree of uniformity of thought among faculty members and administrators.”
Rowan also seeks to offer some contextualizing information about the proposal and its reception.
”For more than 20 years, government mandates on a host of issues — including diversity, discrimination and student discipline — have been welcomed on college campuses because they fit within the prevailing partisan ethos,” Rowan said. “But this government mandate, intended to promote excellence in core academic pursuits and to protect free speech, is being met with prophesies [sic] of doom.”
Campus Reform has previously reported on the continual use of the word “attack” to describe the Trump administration’s attempts to reform higher education’s recurrent problems, which include a complete lack of political diversity among faculty on campus.
The colleges that received the proposal were the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Texas, University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University.
A White House adviser said the White House believes the schools could be “good actors,” as they each have a president or board committed to higher-quality education.
Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor who has compared the rise of Hitler to the rise of Trump, has defended the Trump administration’s proposal as an entry point into forging a national coalition of higher education institutions that can “secure a good, mission-aligned agreement” with the federal government.
”I think my colleagues have rushed to judgment and are missing an extraordinary opportunity to do the right thing — in fact, two right things,” Allen wrote. “The compact introduces a chance to establish a much-needed fresh relationship between America and higher education. It also offers an opportunity to pivot away from executive branch overreach and restore legislative supremacy.”
Officials from the Trump administration signaled a willingness to negotiate aspects of the compact and requested feedback by Oct. 20.
In 2020, Students for Academic Freedom, a project founded by conservative activist David Horowitz to investigate political bias in higher education, conducted the Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges and Universities study. The report claims that among these schools, the overall ratio of Democrats to Republicans among faculty members is more than 10-to-1 (1,397 Democrats vs. 134 Republicans).
At MIT specifically, the authors report 17 registered Democrats and 0 registered Republicans in the sampled academic departments.
Against that backdrop, the proposal is an opportunity to open constructive dialogue on restoring accountability and genuine intellectual diversity in higher education.
