On Oct. 1, the White House approached the College and eight other universities with a draft of “The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The administration expects the nine universities to respond to the White House with “feedback” by Oct. 20.
The compact — which contains 10 sections — outlines the administration’s priorities for higher education, including caps on international students, institutional neutrality and freezing tuition costs.
Government professor William Wohlforth said the compact identifies “some real issues” in higher education, but that it represents an “unacceptable” and “directive approach” from the federal government toward universities.
He said that, before being approached by the Trump administration, the College had already been “working” to address the issues identified in the compact.
“Look at the institutional neutrality policy and the programming that we did on campus to try to foster a dialogue and diversity and viewpoints,” he said.
Section 1: Equality in Admissions
Section one of the compact would prohibit admissions processes that provide “preferential treatment” to any group. The section describes “discriminatory admissions processes” in college admissions that it alleges “reflect a fundamental misunderstanding” of civil rights laws and the Constitution.
“No factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations … shall be considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions or financial support,” it reads.
Section one also stipulates that applicants must take and submit a “widely-used” standardized test score. Data for admitted and rejected students must be anonymized and publicly reported by “race, national origin and sex.”
The College was the first Ivy League university to reinstate required test-score submission for the Class of 2029.
Section 2: Marketplace of Ideas and Civil Discourse
Section two commits universities who sign the compact to fostering a “vibrant marketplace for ideas” with “no single ideology dominant.”
“Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” it reads.
Government professor Sean Westwood said the section includes some “completely innocuous” and “reasonable” positions, but added that it sets an “impossibly vague” standard.
“It could be interpreted to mean the elimination of entire departments, [or] it could be interpreted to mean hiring more faculty,” Westwood said. “It’s so vague that it would face immense legal scrutiny and would likely not be enforceable.”
Section two also requires universities to adopt policies prohibiting any “incitement to violence,” including “calls for genocide” and “support for … terrorist organizations.”
These requirements cause a “fundamental problem” for free speech on campus, according to Wohlforth.
“Academic freedom doesn’t include calls for murder or genocide,” Wohlforth said. “This document is drafted in a kind of naive way that opens the door for perhaps tendentious interpretations of these things.”
Section 3: Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring
The compact’s third section consists of a single paragraph requiring universities to comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and “other federal employment discrimination statutes.”
The administration’s interpretation of these statutes, as implemented by assistant attorney general for civil rights Harmeet Dhillon ’89, involves rolling back diversity and equity initiatives.
Vice president for equal opportunity, accessibility, and Title IX Sarah Harebo declined to comment on how these statutes will impact the College.
Section 4: Institutional Neutrality
Section four details how universities must employ institutional neutrality. The compact asks universities to employ policies that require “all university employees” to “abstain from actions or speech related to societal and political events.”
On Dec. 10, 2024, the College adopted a policy of institutional restraint. This policy permits departments to make public statements “only on limited issues directly related to their academic expertise,” according to Beilock’s December opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, cited in the compact’s footnotes.
“All university members, including students, faculty and staff, are encouraged to comment on current events in their individual capacities, provided they do not purport to do so on behalf of the university or any of its sub-divisions,” the compact reads.
Section 5: Student Learning
Section five requires signatory universities to abide by “grade integrity.” The section requires that “a grade must not be inflated, or deflated, for any non-academic reason.”
Universities will be required to publish grade distributions and to compare them to peer institutions. Wohlforth said he believes that it is “understandable” that the compact identifies grade inflation as a “problem.”
The New York Times recently reported on “rampant grade inflation” at Harvard, noting that 60% of grades awarded across the university were A’s.
Universities “are truly failing their students and society at large by not actually grading students,” Wohlforth said. “Colleges and universities should band together and try to work together on this problem.”
Section 6: Student Equality
The compact’s sixth section bans “unequal treatment” of students on “the basis of their immutable characteristics,” like race, ethnicity or “religious group.” It requires institutions to maintain definitions of gender “according to reproductive function and biological processes” and enforce single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms for women.
Section 7: Financial Responsibility
Section seven requires signatory universities to freeze tuition costs for the next five years. They are expected to do so by “cutting unnecessary costs,” including “unnecessary administrative staff.”
Universities with an endowment of “over $2 million per undergraduate student” are expected not to charge tuition to students “pursuing hard science programs.” Dartmouth’s current endowment is estimated to be between $1.1 and 1.5 million per undergraduate, according to Inside Higher Ed.
History professor Bethany Moreton pointed to “long campaigns” led by “Democratic leadership in Congress” trying to “make higher education more affordable.”
“If you value education for the sake of the person being educated, then you don’t dictate to that person what subject matter they’re allowed to study,” Moreton said. “A genuinely liberatory notion of education is that it helps people think, it gives people the best lives because we are able to think in an evidenced and informed and reflective way.”
Section seven also commits universities to “make efforts to expand opportunities” to members of the military and veterans.
Section 8: Foreign Entanglements
The beginning of section eight reinforces universities’ requirements to comply with anti-money laundering, Know-Your-Customer and foreign gift disclosure laws from previous legislation. In addition, it limits signatory colleges from taking more than 15% of their undergraduate student body from foreign countries, with a limit of 5% of undergraduates from any given country.
Fourteen percent of the College’s Class of 2028 are international.
The compact argues that “universities that rely on foreign students to fund their institutions risk … reducing spots available to deserving American students and … saturating the campus with noxious … anti-American values, creating serious national security risks.”
Wohlforth — who studies U.S. foreign relations — said he believes that these stipulations “fail to acknowledge” the “different incentives” that an American university may have in wanting to admit international students. These “incentives” include subsidizing tuition for low-income American students with international students who can pay full tuition.
“Some institutions might deliberately have programs with international students that are full paying students in order to subsidize lower-income Americans,” Wohlforth said. “This directive approach just fails to acknowledge perhaps some of the subtleties and different incentives different institutions have.”
Section 9: Exceptions
The penultimate section states that “religious” or “single-sex” institutions may maintain “preferences” for students who align with their values during admission processes, exempting religious institutions from the document’s admissions requirements.
Section 10: Enforcement
Signatory universities are expected to be “directly responsible” for implementing the previous stipulations and other “legal and governmental requirements.” In order to “evaluate” a university’s “performance,” college administrations must conduct an annual, anonymous poll of faculty, staff and students.
Westwood said that universities’ use of surveys to evaluate policy is not “unprecedented,” but that the compact’s standards are “completely unclear.”
“It’s still unclear exactly what’s being measured, how it’s being measured, how it’s being evaluated, what the standards of success [are] and what the standards for failure are,” Westwood said. “At this point it could be really implemented quite well with robust social scientific measurement principles, or not, with capricious intent.”
Adherence to the compact is subject to review by the Department of Justice, section 10 explains. Violations will be sanctioned with a loss of federal funding for “no less than one year.” A subsequent violation will cause a loss of benefits for “no less than two years.”
The threat of losing benefits may be compelling, as most universities rely on federal dollars, according to Westwood. The compact’s introduction notes that the federal government and institutions of higher education have an “extraordinary relationship.”
“Most universities are reliant on federal dollars,” Westwood said. “It’s going to be incumbent upon [universities] to demonstrate the value that we represent to society, to the economy, to our civic culture.”
Tierney Flavin ’28 is a news reporter. She is from Kansas City, Mo. and plans to major in Government and Sociology.
