Donald Trump will not back down despite a refusal from most universities to sign up to his ¡°compact¡±, with experts warning that a ¡°fear of breaking ranks¡± will not hold forever.

The White House¡¯s list of demands ¨C including freezing tuition fees, capping international students and protecting ¡°conservative ideas¡± ¨C was sent to a select group of nine universities a few weeks?ago,

But seven of the original cohort publicly rejected the deal outright before the 20 October deadline and no institutions have yet agreed to it ¨C??higher education.

Above the continued access to federal funding and preferential tax treatment which would come with signing the deal, Iwan Morgan, emeritus professor in the Institute of the Americas at UCL, said most universities?will prioritise the ¡°genuine issues of academic freedom at stake¡±.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

¡°The fear of breaking ranks is also an important consideration with regard to keeping and attracting top faculty,¡± he told?ÌÇÐÄVlog.

¡°Perhaps most important, if the compact becomes operational, it establishes a terrible precedent for further state intervention in higher education. The question of where it will end must weigh on the minds of everyone in the academy ¨C academics, administrators and students.¡±

ÌÇÐÄVlog

Of the original nine, the universities of Arizona, Southern California, Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as Brown University, Dartmouth College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all refused to sign the agreement. But Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin have been less clear in their stances.

Morgan said the refusal represents the ¡°first significant manifestation of solidarity¡± among universities, but that the administration will likely find some signatories eventually among those with a history of affiliation to conservative ideas.

David Kirp, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, said the administration underestimated the value placed on academic freedom and university presidents have seized the opportunity to be ¡°heroes¡± on their campuses by turning down the deal.

¡°These presidents did what was both necessary and courageous, willing to accept the blowback in order to ensure the survival of the university, because if they had caved that would have been it for higher education as we know it in the United States.¡±

Kirp said the earlier criticism that Columbia University received for making a deal has served as a ¡°wake-up call¡± to the rest of the sector and that they will fear that any deal with Trump is ¡°not worth the words on the paper¡±.

The University of Virginia has become the latest institution, and the first public university,??with the federal government this week. It agreed to ban using race in hiring and admissions practices in exchange for the White House dropping a series of pending investigations.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

But Kirp said the compact was an ¡°overreach¡± from the Trump team, which, combined with the ¡°No Kings¡± protests across the country and signs of a fightback from across the aisles of the US Senate,?is ¡°tentative good news¡±.

However, Joshua Travis Brown, an assistant professor in the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University, said Trump did not overstep and just needs one institution to agree to the compact to establish a foothold that ramps up the pressure on others.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

¡°Trump will not back down, persistent pressure is part of the strategy and negotiating process.

¡°Social norms are difficult to change, and that is what this administration is striving to accomplish in higher education ¨C their vision for new norms in a new era moving forward.¡±

UCL¡¯s Morgan said Trump will declare victory whatever happens and probably views the deal as a ¡°win-win situation¡±.

¡°If universities sign up, he can claim to have cleaned up the HE sector of DEI, socialist, woke influences. If they don¡¯t, he beats the drum against left control of universities as fundamentally unAmerican, which pleases his base.¡±

Greg Weiner, the president of Assumption University, said universities needed to strike a balance between a legitimate need to preserve the independence of higher education and the interest of taxpayers in ensuring public funds are well spent, while solving the real issue of ideological bias on campuses.

¡°The answer to that, in my view, is higher education being willing to take a hard look at itself and address concerns that are legitimate without allowing public funding to become a cudgel for things that are not, and shouldn¡¯t be, within the purview of government. If we don¡¯t regulate ourselves, others will.¡±

ÌÇÐÄVlog

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com