Dartmouth is among the nine campuses “invited” last week to preview the Trump administration’s latest protection racket: The federal government has promised that colleges that sign the compact will receive “preferential treatment” for federal funds, most of which the government is already required by law to provide to universities. In response, College President Sian Leah Beilock has promised us that she will “always defend our fierce independence.” While heartening, her message did not pledge to reject the compact. This pledge is what we are asking for now, urgently. At stake is open-ended federal control over the form and content of higher education, expressed in nakedly ideological terms.
The compact in its current draft leaves no doubt that the goal is to turn universities into enforcers of the administration’s partisan ideological agenda. It requires signatories, for example, to commit to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” The compact further demands that signatories demonstrate “a broad spectrum of viewpoints … within every field, department, school and teaching unit.”
If “viewpoint diversity” actually meant “intellectual pluralism,” this could be a laudatory goal. Healthy institutions encourage breadth within the parameters of scholarly verification — which is why you will not see earth sciences hiring a representative of the Flat Earth Society nor a history department considering applicants who deny the Holocaust. A range of viewpoints is valued in scholarship to the extent that it aids in the search for truth.
When educational institutions are commanded to demonstrate “viewpoint diversity,” however, they are on the receiving end of a well-funded conservative campaign going back many years. The “Viewpoint Diversity Index,” for example, is maintained by the Christian right’s legal support organization Alliance Defending Freedom, funded by the DeVos, Green, Bradley and Koch family foundations, among others. ADF provided the critical legal support behind such landmark Supreme Court decisions as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Their religious worldview is decidedly opposed to intellectual pluralism. Similarly, the spokespeople for “viewpoint diversity” often derive financial support from those with an existential stake in complete viewpoint relativism, such as the climate science deniers of the fossil fuel industries.
In the compact’s vision, this mandatory partisanship in the classroom is to be paired with studied silence as an institution. In a section that footnotes an article by President Beilock specifically, the compact demands that “that all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.” As the past few months have demonstrated, this self-censorship of “institutional neutrality” can be used to avoid the moral responsibility of defending civil society and the rule of law. What would meet the bar of “direct impact” if nothing this year has qualified?
Elsewhere the compact enjoins signatories to limit international students to those who support “Western values” and to “screen out students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.” Leaving aside the administration’s own difficulty identifying U.S. allies, this section will likely require colleges to treat any criticism of Israel as a national security threat. Its sections on “incitement to violence” and “terrorist organizations” are ominous coming from an administration that has used those terms to describe photographing masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, expressing opposition to fascism or protesting the war on Gaza.
None of this should surprise us. The New York Times reports that the compact draws heavily from a document authored by the billionaire CEO of Apollo Global Management, Marc Rowan, who donated $1 million to Trump’s 2020 campaign. University of Pennsylvania faculty glossed Rowan’s efforts to circumvent the university’s governance structures and dictate his own preferences as “a hostile Republican takeover” with the ultimate goal of turning the Ivy League university into “something like the [for-profit diploma mill] University of Phoenix.”
Rowan’s plans may now go national, if the targeted schools bow to oligarchic pressure — and we fear this process may well be underway already. We should remember that last spring President Beilock refused to join hundreds of college presidents on the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ letter.
It is time for Dartmouth to get on the right side of history. Thousands of students, staff, faculty and alumni have signed petitions in the last few days calling on universities to reject Trump’s unconstitutional plan of control and extortion. We invite Dartmouth’s leaders to join us.
Bethany Moreton is a professor of History at the College. Pamela Voekel is an associate professor of History and LALACS at the College. Molly Geidel is a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the College. Opinion columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
