The University of Pennsylvania announced this week they will not sign the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Interim president J. Larry Jameson stated that Penn has provided “focused feedback” outlining areas of alignment and “substantive concerns.”
The compact offers funding advantages in exchange for policy changes that align with the administration’s priorities. Those conditions include a five-year tuition freeze for U.S. students, caps on international undergraduate enrollment, reinstating standardized testing in admissions, bans on the use of race and sex in hiring and admissions, adoption of a binary definition of gender for facilities and athletics, and restructuring or eliminating units viewed as hostile to conservative ideas.
Other invited universities reportedly included Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California (USC), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia (UVA). The University of Texas said it was “honored” to receive the offer, though the school has not committed to it. The Trump administration reportedly sent the compact to all higher education institutions after MIT turned it down.
Brown University reached a similar decision one day earlier. In a public letter to federal officials, President Christina H. Paxson said the compact’s provisions would restrict academic freedom and undermine university governance. She pointed to Brown’s recent federal settlement as advancing some high-level principles without conceding government authority over curriculum or academic speech.
The compact is part of a broader push by the administration to assert greater federal oversight of higher education. The University of Pennsylvania’s decision reaffirms a central principle of higher education: the pursuit of knowledge should remain independent of political influence. It also underscores the tension between government oversight and university autonomy, and signals the belief that research priorities and campus governance should be under the independent purview of universities rather than political actors.