The proposed federal compact on higher education should be rejected as an inappropriate federal intrusion into institutional autonomy. But rejecting a flawed solution doesn’t make the underlying problems disappear. Most of the plan’s provisions address real problems in higher education and should be adopted — with the exception of those that threaten the existence of academic departments, those that police an individual's gender, and those that restrict or penalize foreign students. But they should be implemented through voluntary institutional reform, not federal mandate.
A recent faculty op-ed opposing the compact raises important concerns about government overreach, yet its reasoning contains gaps that deserve examination — not because the authors are wrong to oppose the compact, but because as professors we have a special obligation to make arguments that withstand scrutiny.
The authors compare demands for viewpoint diversity to hiring flat-earthers or Holocaust deniers. I can understand the point they’re making: we shouldn’t compromise scholarly standards for the sake of false balance. But this analogy sidesteps the actual concern.
The issue isn’t about empirical facts — the Earth’s shape, historical events — but about questions in fields where legitimate scholarly disagreement exists. When faculty political identification skews heavily in one direction — as multiple studies document in the humanities and social sciences — it’s worth asking whether we’re getting the full range of perspectives on genuinely contestable questions. This doesn’t require abandoning methodological rigor: It means recognizing that political homogeneity might narrow the questions we ask and the content we teach our students.
We would never hire flat-earthers — that’s obviously absurd, and science settles such questions definitively. If significant ideological homogeneity exists in a field — which the data suggests it does — then the real question is whether we’re fostering genuine debate on questions science cannot settle: What explains persistent disparities in economic outcomes? How should we balance individual liberty against collective welfare? Should healthcare be treated as a market good or a human right? How do we weigh environmental protection against economic development? When is military intervention justified? These are questions where reasonable, informed scholars disagree — and where ideological homogeneity most risks narrowing inquiry.
The provision against belittling conservatives is troubling. If that sentence were excised, however, the remainder of this section would be consistent with intellectual pluralism.
The authors worry that neutrality means “studied silence” that prevents universities from defending “civil society and rule of law,” in what seems to me to be a criticism of Dartmouth’s approach to institutional neutrality through its institutional restraint policy. I see it differently.
We are professors, not activists. Our primary obligation is to teach students how to think, not what to think. When the institution takes a political position of any kind, it signals to students which views are acceptable and which are not. It transforms the classroom from a space of open inquiry into a space where certain conclusions are institutionally endorsed before discussion even begins. Students who hold different views — or who are still forming their views — reasonably perceive that their intellectual exploration is constrained by institutional orthodoxy.
Academic freedom flourishes when universities remain forums for debate rather than participants in it. The moment an institution or department declares an official position on a contested political question, it has compromised the intellectual space within which genuine inquiry occurs.
When we blur the line between educator and activist, we undermine the trust that makes education possible. Our job is to equip students with the tools to reach their own informed conclusions, not to recruit them to ours. Institutional neutrality doesn’t weaken our ability to defend civil society — it strengthens it by producing graduates who can think critically and independently, rather than graduates who have learned which opinions their institution expects them to hold.
The compact’s language here is vague. What “capacity as university representatives” means needs clearer definition. But this vagueness is an argument for better drafting, not for abandoning neutrality as a principle.
The op-ed also notes that viewpoint diversity initiatives receive support from conservative donors like the DeVos and Koch families. This is accurate, but it’s unclear why that is a problem. An idea’s funding source doesn’t determine its validity. The characterization of Marc Rowan as a billionaire attempting a corporate takeover of universities is probably how his involvement looks to faculty who oppose his influence. But this framing — however sincerely felt — substitutes characterization for analysis.
What’s notably absent from the op-ed is engagement with the specific incidents that prompted calls for reform from the Trump administration: Jewish students facing open harassment on campus; students at Columbia destroying property during protests; demonstrators violating time, place and manner restrictions at schools like Columbia and UCLA; widespread self-censorship reported by students across the political spectrum; excluding voices from the right in classrooms and departments; and mandatory diversity statements that function as ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring.
Refusing to engage with the problems sidesteps the real question: whether universities have responded effectively to these concerns and what we should learn going forward.
The best case against the compact doesn’t require minimizing the problems it attempts to address or relying on logical fallacies. Instead, the best case against the compact is that universities can and should solve these problems themselves, through internal reform rather than external compulsion. This is something we are already doing: committing to institutional restraint, creating programs focused on dialogue, and valuing intellectual diversity among students and faculty.
Still, there is more we can do. This path is harder than either accepting federal mandates or denying problems exist. It requires acknowledging difficult truths, having uncomfortable conversations and making genuine changes to practice and culture. But it’s the path that preserves both academic freedom and institutional credibility.
We can oppose the compact on principled grounds while honestly reckoning with what prompted it. We can defend university autonomy while admitting we haven’t always used that autonomy wisely. We can reject federal overreach while embracing necessary self-reform.
The compact as written deserves rejection. But so does complacency about the conditions that made it politically viable.
Sean Westwood is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
