Trump’s blueprint for tyranny

Don’t be fooled. The “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education” is not just about higher education.

For anyone who wants a distillation of President Donald Trump’s dictatorial ambitions, let me recommend the so-called “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education.” Don’t be fooled by the title.

This document is not just about colleges and universities. It is a fleshed-out version of what the president wants to do to with all American institutions.

We have seen intimations of those desires in his attack on law firms, cultural institutions, and even the American military, but never in such detail.

Think what I think. Do what I do. Or, else.

As we know by now, the modern dictatorial regime generally operates in more subtle and indirect ways than its global autocratic predecessors. But there is nothing subtle about the “compact” sent to a heterogeneous group of nine universities: the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University.

Some had already been targeted by the administration. Some had not.

Some are elite private schools in blue states; others are public universities in red or purple states. It is as if the administration is saying, “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, we are coming after you.”

The issuance of this document is another canary-in-the-coal-mine moment, and not just for higher education. It is a test for all of us, for all who value freedom and democracy, for all who don’t want to be told what to think or how to run their businesses.

The “compact” is so bold in its dictatorial ambitions that it would make authoritarians like Hungary’s Victor Orban or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan blush. Both carried out their own campaign against universities, but neither has gone as far as to demand that they sign on to a loyalty pledge like Trump’s “compact.”

In the aftermath of a failed coup in 2016 in Turkey, Erdogan changed the way university rectors were appointed. He abolished the traditional process for the selection of university rectors and gave himself the power to appoint candidates proposed by Turkey’s Higher Education Council.

Five years later, Erdogan issued a presidential decree, appointing one of his loyalists as rector of Boğaziçi University, one of the nation’s most distinguished universities. He did so without consulting its faculty.

Erdogan’s candidate had a “weak resume or suspect academic credentials marked by allegations of plagiarism. His only qualification was his close affiliation with the Turkish president and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).” He could not shake those allegations and was forced out of office six months later.

But that did not stop Erdogan. As University of Connecticut Professor Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat explained, his ongoing effort to install party loyalists as university rectors is designed to ensure that “universities’ affairs—including creating new schools and positions—can be more easily dictated by the President. Universities can be redirected from their academic mission and into tools of cultural transformation… sources of patronage, and new opportunities to enrich loyal businesses through government contracts and procurement.”

In Hungary, the government has “privatized” universities. However, as professors Gábor Halmai and Andrew Ryder noted, they are managed as “Foundations overseen by boards of Trustees. However, the term privatization is a misnomer, as these boards consist of government appointees chosen for their loyalty to the Orbán government.”

Orban has dismantled the institutional independence of Hungarian universities and the academic freedom of their faculties by claiming that their embrace of progressive values and “cancel culture” poses a real danger to academic freedom.

Sound familiar?

Trump’s “compact” deploys a similar rhetorical strategy. It purportedly defends academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and equal treatment while subjecting universities to a level of government control with no parallel in American history.

It dictates the ways universities must be run while disclaiming that that is what it is doing. “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below,” the “compact” says in its first paragraph, “if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”

Seems like it is straight out of the classic film “The Godfather”: making universities an offer they can’t refuse.

Let‘s consider some of the conditions of that offer. Under the terms of the “compact,” colleges and universities must agree that “no factor such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations, or proxies for any of those factors shall be considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions or financial support.”

Beyond that, the level of micromanaging by the government envisioned in the “compact” is breathtaking.

Consider provisions that require the use of standardized tests in their admissions process, a five-year freeze on tuition increases, the end of supposed grade inflation, a cap of 15% on the number of international students enrolled, and committing “to defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes.”

As if that were not enough, the “compact” says that universities must “commit to rigorous, good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff at all levels and to sharing the results of such assessments with the public; and to seek such a broad spectrum of viewpoints not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.”

And, in the name of institutional neutrality, it stipulates “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. Policies requiring institutional neutrality must apply with equal force to all of the university’s academic units, including all colleges, faculties, schools, departments, programs, centers, and institutes.”

Speaking about “societal and political events” has long been recognized as an essential part of academic freedom. But no more, not if the Trump administration gets its way.

The “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education” is little more than extortion. We give you money, you give up your independence and your freedom.

However, I fear that many Americans will write this off as just more fuss about colleges and universities. That would be a serious mistake.

Unless we see the “compact” for what it is—a blueprint for tyranny—and push back loudly, similar compacts might soon be coming to civic organizations, state and local governments, and businesses where you live.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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