This story is part of our monthly series, Campus Dispatch. Read the rest of the stories in the series here.
The Trump administration is playing a game of carrot-and-stick diplomacy with higher education.
Earlier this year, the administration withheld billions in federal funding and grants from some of the most elite colleges and universities in the United States for allegedly fostering campus cultures rife with antisemitism and left-wing ideologies. Now, the White House is attempting to change its tune by offering universities roles as collaborators in its right-wing agenda.
Nine schools, both public and private, received the so-called Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education on Oct. 1. Among other requests, this wide-ranging Trump administration proposal demands that participating universities cap undergraduate enrollment of international students at 15 percent, platform conservative ideology by reevaluating departments or “institutional units” that are perceived as unfriendly to such beliefs, tamp down grade inflation by following government-dictated standards, and adhere to strict, binary definitions of sex and gender.
The nine universities chosen were Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, Vanderbilt University, the University of Southern California, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The compact states that if these institutions agree to and successfully comply with its terms—a standard that will be evaluated and approved by the Department of Justice on an annual basis—they will receive prioritized “federal benefits,” which include research funding, government contracts, and access to student loans.
‘It is so obviously unlawful’
The compact “is the greatest single incursion into the freedom and autonomy of higher education to ever happen in this country,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a professional association representing about 50,000 university faculty across 500 national chapters.
Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney for LGBTQ+ rights organization Lambda Legal, agrees.
“It is so obviously unlawful, and [the Trump administration] knows that, which is why the only way they can even put it forward is [to] ask universities to do this voluntarily,” Hite said.
Among its many preconditions, the compact asks schools to “commit to defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes.”
It additionally claims that “women’s equality requires single-sex spaces.” In other words, the administration wants universities that join the compact to bar transgender people from the restrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams that align with their gender identity.
“By adopting biological definitions of what a man or a woman is—according to some people in the federal government—universities would be co-signing onto a on a multi-tiered system in which queer and trans students are, yet again, going to be put at the bottom and receive the least amount of protection,” Hite said.
“The compact makes reference to equality many, many times, while simultaneously demanding that universities enforce this fundamentally unequal system on campus,” he added.
The compact has proven to be overwhelmingly unpopular thus far.
Of the nine original recipients, seven schools have rejected the deal in its current form. Only Vanderbilt University and UT Austin have yet to publicly give a definitive answer to whether they will make a deal, though Vanderbilt’s chancellor suggested having hesitations about aspects of the agreement, the New York Times reported on Oct. 20. UT Austin is reportedly in talks with the administration, a White House official told Axios. The Trump administration had initially requested responses by Oct. 20.
MIT was the first to rebuff Trump’s proposed deal.
“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth wrote to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Oct. 10, nine days after receiving the administration’s offer letter.
Other schools subsequently followed suit, including Brown and the University of Pennsylvania. The two Ivy League institutions had previously struck deals with the Trump administration, which restored research funding in exchange for adopting policies including ceasing gender-affirming care for minors at Brown and barring transgender women from women’s sports teams at both.
‘All eyes are on UT Austin’
After MIT’s rejection, Trump extended the opportunity to sign the agreement to all higher education institutions in the U.S. in an Oct. 12 Truth Social post.
For UT Austin, the initial response to the compact has been far more positive. Kevin Eltife, Chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas system, was “honored” that the university was one of the first to be approached by the administration.
“We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” he said in a statement.
But Eltife’s apparent excitement has heightened concerns on some Texas campuses, where state law already requires public universities to abide by a number of stipulations similar to those in the compact.
Texas Senate Bill 17, which prohibits teaching and discussion of diversity, equity, and inclusion on campuses, took effect in January 2024. And in August 2025, the state Senate passed a “bathroom bill” that, starting Dec. 4, will bar transgender and gender nonconforming individuals from using public restrooms that align with their gender identity.
Groups like Texas Students for DEI, a student-led organization that advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion in education, have formed in response to these laws and are now turning their attention to protesting the compact.
Autumn Lauener, a Texas Students for DEI organizer who earned their master’s degree in social work from UT Austin in spring 2025, worries that schools in the University of Texas system will preemptively comply with the federal government’s requests, despite their legal precarity.
On Sept. 25, the Texas Tech university system’s chancellor, Tedd Mitchell, sent a letter instructing all Texas Tech schools to comply with a Trump executive order that asserts the validity of only two genders. Mitchell’s memo told the presidents of all five Texas Tech institutions to review and adjust course material and curricula.
Trans and nonbinary Texas Tech students and alumni have been left feeling frustrated and hopeless, News From the States reported.
“Students are terrified to reach out to faculty, [and] faculty are terrified to support students,” Lauener said.
(Read more: Colleges End Trans-Friendly Housing Policies Amid Federal Anti-DEI Push)
UT Austin is similarly reevaluating the classes and services it offers.
In compliance with SB 17, the university replaced its Gender and Sexuality Center with The Women’s Community Center in January 2024. It announced in September 2025 that University Health Services would cease offering hormone replacement therapy to students starting Jan. 1 2026, and revealed a plan to audit all gender studies courses.
“All eyes are on UT Austin, because if they fall, the rest of the system will quickly fall,” Alex De Jesus, a fellow lead student organizer at Texas Students for DEI and current master’s student at the University of Texas at Dallas, said.
Austin is a relatively flush branch of the state’s publicly funded higher education system. Dallas, De Jesus said, is “desperate for any kind of funding.”
“If UT Austin accepts this compact,” he added, “we will soon probably preemptively comply.”
Compact ups White House attack against queer and trans students
These actions don’t only harm queer and trans students and faculty, Wolfson, president of the AAUP, said.
“If [schools] aren’t up to the standards of [the Trump administration’s] dogma of how badly to treat LGBTQ+ students, you’re going to lose your funding,” he explained, “so it’s like you’re incentivized to make [a campus] an unwelcoming space.”
The compact also demonstrates a desire “to erase our knowledge base on these questions and issues from a social, cultural, political, psychological, and health standpoint,” he said.
Lauener believes they have already experienced a version of this censorship. While completing a fellowship focused on disabilities at UT Health during their master’s program, they were prohibited from using words commonly associated with what they were studying, like “intersectionality” or “neurodiversity.”
The word “disability” itself has been removed from government memos and websites as part of an initiative the Trump administration has undertaken to limit or cease the usage of words and terms it considers “woke.”
If UT Austin does comply with the compact, Lauener and De Jesus both said that Texas Students for DEI is ready to fight back. The group will remind Texas universities that striking this deal would risk violating state or federal laws.
“Parts of the compact that seem unconstitutional or troublesome to implement, those can at least be used as a leverage right now and to remind universities, ‘Hey, if you comply [with] this, you’re being held liable for unconstitutional orders,’” De Jesus said.
For example, the agreement demands that universities place conditions on where and how protests occur. UT students recently won an injunction against Texas SB 2972, which restricted protest conditions on UT campuses between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. The compact could be at odds with that ruling.
Wolfson’s organization is also prepared to resist with legal action.
“I believe that we will have strong grounds to sue any university potentially that signs on to this compact for undermining the First Amendment rights and constitutional rights of our members on that campus,” he said. “Any university that accepts the compact must be made into a pariah in the academic community.”
Hite, of Lambda Legal, was unable to speculate on future litigation. But he said the organization is ready and willing to get involved if necessary.
Wolfson described the compact and its underlying message as “despicable hypocrisy.”
“The argument [the Trump administration] makes time and again about DEI is that it takes away meritocracy … But then the compact itself does the exact same thing, because it says, ‘If you do conform to our belief around gender, your research on cancer is more likely to be funded,’” he said. “That is actually the definition of undermining the meritocracy of our research on cancer through an ideological litmus test.”
Lauener agrees.
“It feels so contradictory in a lot of ways, for people who are all about [being] hands off … to try to control [higher education] so intensely because they don’t like the product that’s being produced,” they said.
“That just really hits hard—it’s so deeply ideological in nature,” Lauener added. “It’s not about freedom of speech or freedom of expression … it’s [about] control.”