With Deadline Looming 4 of 9 Universities Reject Trumps Pact to Remake Higher Ed
Posted3 months agoActive2 months ago
arstechnica.comOtherstoryHigh profile
heatedmixed
Debate
85/100
Higher EducationTrump AdministrationAcademic Freedom
Key topics
Higher Education
Trump Administration
Academic Freedom
Four out of nine universities have rejected a proposed compact with the Trump administration to reform higher education, sparking debate about academic freedom, federal influence, and institutional autonomy.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
40m
Peak period
51
0-3h
Avg / period
10.4
Comment distribution114 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 114 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 19, 2025 at 11:14 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 19, 2025 at 11:54 AM EDT
40m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
51 comments in 0-3h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 21, 2025 at 2:26 AM EDT
2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45634774Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:48:27 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
They should have noted this in the article we are discussing since it does change the story, as you said.
No response yet (due tomorrow BTW) from: Vanderbilt University of Texas University of Arizona
You bet your behind Greg Abbott (Texas Governor) is doing everything he can to kiss the ring, gut his local university, push UT to joining. But no one could take UT seriously ever again, it'd be a laughingstock joke to accept state control like this.
I first realized this decades ago when I ran into someone socially who started on about how evil the red cross was. I'm like wtf? Then did some research and discovered some fringe belief originating in the Vietnam war. There are thousands of oddball grievances like this.
CNN published articles pushing the narrative that the 50 so called security experts believed Hunter's laptop was fake. It turned out to be true.
CNN also famously had the two reporters standing in the same parking lot pretending to be in different geographic locations. Viewers called out their bullshit when the noticed the exact same traffic driving through the backgrounds of both reporters.
It didn't.
See also, whataboutism
That's a great question.
I wonder, shouldn't Oral Roberts University, Brigham Young University and other, similar institutions be required to be less biased in their ways too?
If not, why not?
One potential reason to select a diverse set would be to point to a few who may be forced to accept by their state governments as examples to paint the refusers in a negative light.
But I think the way the US is set up (districting, gerrymandering, redlined, electoral college, etc) makes it far too easy for fringe beliefs to take over and dictate policy. So having states simply being more independent puts up far more barriers to all of us just losing our freedom.
I live in IL. (Not near Chicago). My kids public school only gets about 15% of its funding from the federal govt. We could just finally stop having our stupid flat income tax and make up the shortfall. It might set back the universal preschool system, perhaps (which would be a tragedy but better than complete destruction).
Meanwhile, schools might not even exist in many other states if federal funding disappeared.
That said, as a fly on the wall, my obvious observation from people at large is a direct correlation between how much power they believe states should have and whether or not they belong to the party in power. So it's definitely worth the exercise of seeing if you'd feel the same way still if your exact clone ran the federal government.
The neverending struggle of course is what does one consider a human right.
I don’t see how we get there, though. I think we may already be too far down the road of centralized power, which is likely to have very bad results for everyone in the end.
Let’s say we get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and research funding at the federal level. What happens next?
The West Coast and North East form compacts, companies, or nonprofits that provide healthcare, retirement and funding for their schools. The south, parts of the Midwest, and the plains fail to do so (at least to the same level) and within a generation we have two separate countries and war.
Or do we? Some states don’t seem to want these things, or at least that’s what their representatives say. So let them experiment. My guess is the loss of benefits will outweigh the meager tax savings, but there may be a couple of states that are fine with the tradeoff. As long as people can move freely, it should be a self-correcting problem.
The problem with centralization is that it creates an all-or-nothing battle for federal control. Right now the people winning that battle don’t seem to share your vision for social programs. Could be an issue, especially with ongoing gerrymandering efforts!
In a big country with strongly polarized political opinions, federalism is the best way to fight this sort of political capture and the associated back-and-forth escalation. As tensions boil over, the only other option that can maintain a semblance of order is brutal repression.
But they won’t be able to. We’ve already seen this attempted (e.g. https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/pressroom/first-in-t... ) and if we went in that direction that’s the kind of thing that would happen.
These coastal states run blowout deficits despite having high taxes on workers and businesses. The companies there might migrate if they could save money on taxes.
>The south, parts of the Midwest, and the plains fail to do so (at least to the same level) and within a generation we have two separate countries and war.
The states are already supposed to be largely sovereign. It is the Federal government asserting authority to tax and regulate everyone that fouls things up. Unfortunately we already have extensive social programs that people have been robbed to pay for, so walking it back would leave too many people everywhere feeling ripped off.
There is NOTHING special about the coastal states that guarantees them supremacy in any area of production. They have lots of people and inertia. Whatever they can do, other states can do also (and probably already are). It's an elitist attitude of the residents of those states that makes them think they're better than the "flyover" states.
The reality is California gives much, much more to the federal government than it takes. The same is not true for a lot of other states.
Because of high salaries and population, the people of the state of California pay more in federal income taxes than the state receives as federal subsidies.
Perhaps same end result, but the framing is important. California isn't some saint who donates money to the govt.
To my original point, most people and businesses are not flocking to California to be taxed to hell for some welfare programs or whatever. Businesses would move in a heartbeat away from that overtaxed and overregulated state if they could. But since most taxes are federal and can't be avoided by moving to the Midwest or something, they might as well pay a little more to be in a marginally better or more prestigious location.
No state pays more to the Federal government than it gets. States don't pay federal taxes, but receive federal funds.
And Sir Peter Medawar agrees[0]:
[0] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1064507Gerrymandering gives power to who the state legislators want. Federal and many state judges are appointed and serve for life. What good is states rights if your state passes a popular law and some federal judge or activist judge shoots it down because of who passed it?
A big reason we even have to discuss this at all is because Washington clearly doesn't represent regular Americans' best interests or desires.
Why? More lines means more opportunity for fuckery.
Better: multi-member districts. You get better proportionality. And you reduce the number of lines that can be drawn.
1.Equality in admissions- with certain exceptions, universities have to publish and commit to objective criteria for accepting new students.
2.Marketplace of ideas and civil discourse - a bit vague, but basically calling for non violent exchanges of opinions and ideas, specifically not discriminating against conservatives, who frankly are a significant minority at universities.
3.Nondiscrimination in faculty and administrative hiring
4.Institutional neutrality - frankly i'm not sure what that's supposed to mean
5.Student learning -Signatories must make certain “grade integrity” commitments, including neither “inflat[ing]” nor “deflat[ing]” grades for any “non-academic reason.”
6.Student equality -Signatories must treat students “as individuals and not on the basis of their immutable characteristics, with due exceptions for sex-based privacy, safety, and fairness”
7.Financial responsibility - a raft of ideas aimed at protecting students
8. More restrictions on foreign student admissions etc.
9.enforcement
[1]i got all my information from this article:https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/10/white-h...
The only unnecessary part is explicitly calling out conservative opinions, some of which will have no place in some university subjects, e.g. a geology student insisting the Earth is 6000 years old.
The entire no kings protest is exactly about that - executive overreach overriding will of the people and causing irresponsible harm.
When executive demands something of private citizens and private entities, it means they are bossing over said people/entities. Nobody elected the executive to boss over people. When Congress attempts to set these same regulations, these entities get a chance to reach out to their reps and ask for changes. When Congress sets regulations, power is dispersed among 400+ reps.
You are thinking about the outcome of the regulations feeling the same. "No kings" are demanding that the means to setting rules be distributed among reps - when the rulemaking is distributed, you'll find that the rules demanded will change - because most people don't want these exact rules as they stand. And they don't want to submit to a fickle corrupt executive who will change these rules selectively on a dime on a random Friday.
IMHO it's much simpler than that. Congress has the power of the purse -- that is to say that Congress decides what funds are disbursed by the Federal government.
While there is a small measure of flexibility for the Executive on when and/or how those funds are disbursed, the Constitution vests budgetary power (i.e., who gets funded, how much to they get, and for what purpose) in Congress and not the Executive.
The same goes for tariffs too.
Congress is not doing their job. Not only in the sense that they've abandoned the "power of the purse" to the Executive, but also in that legislators, for the most part, represent their big donors rather than their constituents.
Which isn't new, although it's pretty stark right now. With the dysfunction so high that the government is currently unfunded.
Even more, the House won't even gavel into session, as they'd then have to swear in a newly elected member of Congress which would give members just enough votes to passing a motion to publish information (The so-called "Epstein Files") widely believed to be bad news for the President as well as others in the power structure.
The Senate isn't negotiating, nor is the House drafting actual budget bill(s) which is one of their primary responsibilities.
So yes. If there's an issue with Federal research funding, it's Congress that needs to fix it. What the Executive is trying to do is not part of the powers given to them by the Constitution (you know, the *supreme law of the land) and, as such, isn't lawful.
This appeals to a dangerous view of morality where some entities/people are good/bad intrinsically and all their actions are good/bad by definition.
Hell, this is the whole logic of the American Republic - no kings - since 1776.
You just described a meta standard for standards. Now, is that meta standard an objectively reasonable standard?
"Reasonable" is a distributed discovery process. A unitary order can never be "reasonable".
If they were to come from Congress, they'd never pass as they stand because these entities would demand their elected reps don't let this pass
That's preposterous. It's obscenely disingenuous to now pretend that DEI was about class and economic status. Are women just poorer? Are Asians just richer? Please.
That's illegal[0]. If this is going on, then enlighten us or the EEOC.
> You just moved the goalposts to include things that nobody can argue against
What? You said: "disingenuous to now pretend that DEI was about class and economic status" when it clearly is about those things. Again, please show one example of a program that you think isn't doing that. I understand that you think DEI is a sinister initiative, but bickering over a conservative boogeyman is unproductive.
0: https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices
I'm not arguing against history, you are arguing against reality.
University of Pennsylvania, which I picked because it was the literal first university mentioned in the article in the OP:
https://www.ese.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/ESE-Sta...
And I quote:
>We face many challenges as a community, including entrenched bias, both conscious and unconscious; self-reinforcing cycles of preferential treatment towards people with particular characteristics; limited awareness of the impediments faced by our colleagues that stem from racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia
It goes on to talk about actions taken to deal with this:
>We will provide resources - including time, materials, financial support, and facilities - to promote education about diversity, equity, and inclusion within our department and to support our engagement on these themes with external communities
>An atmosphere of trust and accountability is a prerequisite for complete and honest reporting. Discrimination in academic settings can be subtle and complex, and it is not always recognized immediately. Even when racism, gender discrimination, and harassment are overt, victims can have a legitimate perception of powerlessness to address it.
There's LITERALLY not a single one mention of wealth, or money, or class in the entire document. There is about bias, about race, about sex. It ends with this:
>We ask that all community members pledge: >● To seek out knowledge on the forms, causes, and impacts of bias
>● To acknowledge that we are all susceptible to bias, and to strive to be anti-discriminatory with respect to race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, national origin, religion, disability, socioeconomic status, citizenship, and cultural background
>● To engage constructively and respectfully with people of varied backgrounds and perspectives
>● To prioritize empathy and consideration, and to avoid making assumptions or judgements
>● To be alert for instances of injustice or discrimination, and to intercede by speaking out against injustice
Pray tell, what part of all of this is supposed to be about dealing with wealth disparities? And again, how can you possibly argue about wealth disparities in terms of gender for college-aged people? It's insane.
Within living memory absolutely 100%.
Wealthier families have male children at such a disparate rate that they warp the statistics or something?
> Signatories must commit to “defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes.”
Which is not exactly ideological neutral.
We certainly don't issue degrees based only on what expertise they identify as. We don't allow them in office based on whether they identify as President or Principal. We should likewise not use their feelings or unsubstantiated beliefs to determine if they're a man or a woman when biology has the answer almost every time. Intersex, the exceptions, we'll handle on a case by case basis.
So you agree there are seven human sexes?
Outside of medicine? What different treatment does “biology” merit?
If your point is that the standards are not neutral, I guess on at least this point I have to agree. If your point is that the status quo is neutral, I disagree.
True, it was less pressure and more subtle than Trump's pressure. And it was in the direction that the universities were more willing to move in, due to the personnel of universities leaning left. But was it really "the universities themselves decide"? I'm not sure that it was.
But I will agree to this at least: Left to themselves, the universities were not likely to wind up where Trump is trying to push them to be.
Cite any pressure from the federal government.
You're engaging in a version of BSABSVR argumentation.
Basically, this is the government having a direct hand in dictating what the schools that receive government funding can say and do, full stop.
Further, this is a potential violation of the current administrations desire to eradicate DEI as this compact literally promotes DEI. So it's an odd request.
It's also a massive violation of the freedom of speech.
> Signatories shall maintain institutional neutrality at all levels of their administration. This requires policies 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.
So, no one employed by the university can speak about societal or political events unless it has a direct impact on the university. Imagine not being able to talk about modern events in the classroom? I was doing this in high school in the 90s in Missouri!
And now the administration wants to take that away.
There are many reasons this is bad. But predominantly it's this: I get to decide what any of this means. So you have to defend this from MY POV, because this establishes me as the ultimate arbiter here.
* Why me? Because it's whoever is in charge at the time, which means you need to be able to defend the merits of this when it doesn't necessarily fit your wants or needs. Which means me.
This is the original compact https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/1...
1 The Compact explicitly makes federal funding conditional on compliance, meaning that universities must either align with federal definitions of “excellence” and “neutrality” or lose access to research grants, contracts, student loans, and tax exemptions. In practice, this could establish a centralized federal control mechanism over university policies effectively nationalizing large portions of higher education decision-making without direct legislation.
Sections 2 and 4 (“Marketplace of Ideas” and “Institutional Neutrality”) appear to promote pluralism, but they impose mandatory structural changes to ensure “no single ideology dominant”. This could require ideological balancing in faculty hiring, curricula, and departmental governance. The threat of Department of Justice enforcement transforms “neutrality” into a federally monitored ideological litmus test, likely constraining academic freedom more than protecting it.
Section 6 defines “male,” “female,” “woman,” and “man” strictly by biological function and requires single-sex spaces to be maintained on that basis. This departs from current federal civil rights interpretations under Title IX and would effectively prohibit recognition of gender identity in campus policy rolling back existing protections for transgender and nonbinary students.
By forbidding universities from commenting institutionally on “societal and political events” unless directly related to operations, the Compact silences institutional voices on issues like racial justice, climate change, or foreign policy—even if faculty consensus supports public engagement. The “marketplace of ideas” clause simultaneously allows punishment of university employees or centers deemed “dominant” in ideology, directly threatening critical studies programs (e.g., gender studies, ethnic studies).
Section 8 introduces anti-money-laundering and KYC requirements typically reserved for banks, applied here to universities. It also mandates information sharing with DHS and the State Department and caps foreign student enrollment at 15%, with a 5% per-country limit. Combined with civics instruction requirements for foreigners, this moves higher education toward national security oversight and ideological vetting creating a form of state-managed educational nationalism.
The enforcement section deputizes the Department of Justice to investigate compliance and allows it to reclaim all federal funds and even PRIVATE contributions during a violation year. This mechanism represents an extraordinary form of financial coercion that could bankrupt noncompliant universities, effectively forcing universal submission or privatization.
I do agree however that if i was a university i wouldn't sign it without first amending 4 and 9.
Which is exactly how this Administration will interpret it.
> The universities are not owed anything by the federal government.
1. It's in the interests of US citizens -- who the gov represents -- to fund research at universities. It's a large part of what's made the US the superpower it is today.
> If they want money, i think it's resonable for the government to make some demands in exchange. They don't have to but it's not outrageous.
2. You clearly haven't lived in a country where universities are controlled by the government. Spend a decade in China and we'll talk about how you feel about it then.
And before you say "it isn't control!" -- it is because the entire university research system has become dependent on taxpayer funding (see also 1).
What the Feds are doing here is just a hop skip and a jump from forcing universities to hire young Earth creationists alongside archaeologists, climate change deniers alongside climate scientists, etc.
Universities and the research they do must inform politics, but the reverse risks destroying the research enterprise all together.
But surely it also can't be the case that colleges demand what are basically declarations of political allegiance in the form of DEI statements, institutional trust is nosediving and ideological capture is to blame in large part. I hope this push from the administration fails, but I also hope something changes because otherwise the result is going to be worse than if universities actually submitted to these demands.
Most universities have moved away from those.
Whatever the mechanism, they remain echo chambers and continue to present, as the only truth, systems of thought that diverge from objective reality and that poison the public discourse.
Is straining to carry the rest of this sentence. I responded to an assertion that a policy by certain limited universities was attempted and deemed unfit by the natural process was still active. This is how institutions grow and evolve.
> echo chambers
Publish your papers, rebut the research. This is actively happening every day in every field of science. It is happening in everything from gender studies to particle physics.
> poison the public discourse
What on Earth are you talking about. What public discourse are you frequenting which is driven primarily by this boogeyman of the university system rather than the attention driven rat race of national fear politics.
Because while I agree that
>The pursuit of truth is difficult and has its pitfalls but it naturally leads to the dominance of certain viewpoints
I'm certain that demanding essays from which you could perfectly predict voting patterns is not the mark of viewpoints that prioritize the pursuit of truth.
Regardless governments must let the natural academic process handle these institutional issues.
But i still think its possible for academics to get into echo chambers. They are human just like the rest of us. Especially in fields not easily subject to direct experimental verification. I think its important not to put researchers on a pedestal as if they are above folly. (After all, the saying "science advanced one funeral at a time" didn't come from nowhere)
This is known in the scientific, philosophical, and research communities. It is a reality that is only solved by the slow inexorable application of the scientific process and exchange of ideas, not by outside political influence.
We should never put researchers on pedestals, but the process of science is the most prized accomplishment of humanity. It is a farcical weaponization of the slow and often backtracking nature of science by the anti-intellectuals of the world which we are witnessing now. Not a real crisis
It's actually somewhat hard to say what did change. Einstein, for instance, went to his grave rejecting the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics simply because he felt, solely due to his own personal biases, that the world must be deterministic and rational. His famous quotes like 'spooky action at a distance' or 'god doesn't play dice' were essentially sardonic mocking of the Copenhagen Interpretation, the interpretation we hold to be most accurate to this very day. That's not exactly the behavior of some guy able to step outside the normal ideological biases and bounds that constrains us all, to say the least.
But nonetheless something did change. And similarly, in modern times I think it's very arguable that science has again regressed. Trust in science and scientists isn't declining because of Facebook or Trump or whatever. It's declining because politics and science have once again become deeply intertwined - like they have been for about 99.99% of humanity's entire history, the overwhelming majority of which we achieved essentially 0 from a scientific perspective.
Something physicists are still trying to do to this day. Science is never done. There is no "final" theory.
And I'm not using this to argue that Einstein was somehow flawed. Rather I'm using it to argue that he was a human, and we all behave the same way. Putting scientists, or even science, on a pedestal is turning it into a cargo cult. Einstein's success was not driven by any systematically replicable method or anything of the sort. Rather he was an extremely intelligent human who happened to have biases for ideas that turned out to be completely correct in one dimension, and [probably] completely wrong in another.
This is also why increasing the number of physicists by 100x won't increase the rate of advances in physics by 100x, or even remotely close. There's even an argument it could viably reduce it by some sort of Malthusian crowding effect. Everybody scrapping for limited publication and attention pushes science more and more towards high brow click bait and vast sums of plausible sounding noise (which is easier than ever in modern times due to LLMs) can make it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640321
----
"We have become Antipodean in our scientific expectations. You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly BELIEVE [emphasis original], but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find. Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one."
Einstein, 1944
----
He rejected it based on his instincts. He felt it was wrong. Einstein in general poses a major problem to many of those of a certain mindset of what drives success in science and academia, because he was arguably the greatest scientist to have ever lived, yet he was no less possessed of the demons of bias, prejudice, and 'feels' than anyone else - if anything he seems to have suffered them perhaps even more greatly than average. As you can see in his own words, not only did he reject it - but he actively mocked the entire idea, repeatedly.
There's no nuance to be had there. The only issue is that Einstein's behavior, character, and even history largely contradicts the idealized view of science and scientists that many like to try to imagine, or push, now a days. It also again largely contradicts the ideal that science, in and of itself, is what drove such rapid progress. I think the truth is that we don't know what drove such rapid progress, but we can use people like Einstein (and many other great scientists it turns out...) to falsify most hypotheses.
It sadly does not mean that universities are laser-focused on seeking truth, and are free from ideological biases, often very obvious. Regarding truth, one of the leading theories in humanities is that of Michel Foucault, which states that there cannot be any objective truth, and what is considered true is determined by power structures.
I'm glad to see though that the four universities are making a stand, and value independence above whatever "federal benefits" the administration may offer. It's sad that these are only 4 out of 9.
What do you mean by laser focused? Do you have specific policies to address this? If not then this is a natural part of the unfocused nature of knowledge work, and the natural weakness of human organizations.
University research and knowledge work in general is backtracking search, not gradient descent in a friendly loss landscape.
I mean that universities, like any large organizations, are very not free from internal politics and peer pressure. Also, like any large group of people, they are subject to irrational but powerful phenomena like the intellectual fashion, or religious zeal (which does not take an established religion). These all are impediments on the way of truth-seeking, but are inevitable due to human nature.
you're missing the point.
Universities are free to have their own ideological biases. Some will certainly be biased in one direction. Others in another. Students aren't forced to go to a given university -- there any many to choose from.
But when the gov forces its ideological biases on Universities, then it begins to remove choice for students. It might start with only a dozen, but if successful, it will push on others, until it becomes the de-facto requirement to get government funding.
That is totalitarianism.
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
20 more comments available on Hacker News