In Trump’s War With Colleges, No School Gets to Be Switzerland
The administration’s “compact” for preferential funding targets fence-sitters, putting pressure on schools that thought they could stay above the fray.
Illustration: Chau Luong for Bloomberg
Donald Trump has made elite US colleges a primary target of his second-term agenda. In less than a year, the president has frozen billions of dollars in federal research funding, threatened international student enrollment and launched dozens of investigations into DEI initiatives he considers discriminatory.
If those measures were the stick, then the carrot is the administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, unveiled on Oct. 1. The White House proposal promises colleges preferential status in federal funding decisions if they commit to a raft of policy changes, including ending race- and gender-based preferences in admissions and hiring; promoting conservative “viewpoint diversity” on campus; restricting access to gender-specific programs and facilities based on sex assigned at birth; capping international enrollment at 15%; and freezing tuition for domestic students.