First the stick, now the carrot
Trump came for the Ivy League this spring. Now it’s the UA’s turn.
The Trump administration finally got around to the University of Arizona.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, he has tried to bully universities into following his political agenda.
It’s been an unrelenting onslaught of threats to withhold federal research funds, pushing universities to get rid of their DEI programs and a multitude of other demands.
That blitz began at private Ivy League schools and expanded to include public universities on the East Coast, before moving westward to the Midwest and now the Southwest. This week, it hit the UA and eight other universities.
But instead of a stick, the Trump administration is offering a carrot.
Federal education officials sent a letter on Wednesday to the UA and the other universities offering them the chance to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
If UA officials sign the compact, they’ll get preferential treatment for federal funding, along with invites to White House events.
In exchange, they’ll agree to follow Trump’s agenda on an array of issues, such as not considering race or gender for new students and professors and protecting the feelings of conservatives on campus.
The universities also would freeze tuition rates for five years and, in some cases, offer free tuition for STEM students.
It’s unclear what would happen if the UA doesn’t sign.
But the UA certainly has a lot of money on the table. The school gets roughly $470 million annually in federal research grants and more than $70 million in Pell Grants for students.
As a reminder, it took two years for the UA to dig itself out of a $177 million hole.
For the moment, university officials are studying their options.
“The university first learned of the compact when we received it on Oct. 1. We are reviewing it carefully,” UA spokesperson Mitch Zak said.
Why the UA?
It’s not clear yet why the Trump administration picked the UA for its first round of “offers” this week.
May Mailman, the main architect of the Trump administration’s strategy on higher education, told the Wall Street Journal that White House officials chose schools they believed could be “good actors.”
“They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education,” Mailman told the Journal.
At the UA, that apparently refers to President Suresh Garimella, who took the reins last year.
We reached out to the UA on Thursday to get more details, but the school only released that brief statement about carefully reviewing the compact.
But there’s been no shortage of local news coverage of how Garimella’s administration has steadily acquiesced to Trump’s demands, often in the face of stiff pushback from faculty members.1
In February, federal officials sent a letter demanding that universities either get rid of their DEI programs or lose federal funding. The UA then removed two diversity-related websites and the phrase “committed to diversity and inclusion” from its land acknowledgement statement
In March, a group of UA faculty, students and staff delivered a petition with more than 3,300 signatures to UA administration, asking for the reinstatement of DEI statements and resources.
In April, Garimella sent a letter to Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen laying out the steps Garimella had taken to end DEI at the UA, such as removing DEI references from job postings, cutting programs, services and committees related to DEI and adding a non-discrimination statement to every UA website. The letter earned praise from Petersen (and maybe put the UA on the Trump administration’s radar?) as the Arizona Legislature followed Trump’s lead and targeted DEI at state schools.
In May, the UA consolidated campus resource centers, such as the Women and Gender Resource Center and African American Student Affairs, into the Campus Community Connections program. The UA also closed the website for the Immigrant Student Resource Center.
On Thursday, Professor Leila Hudson, wrote to Garimella in her capacity as the chair of the UA Faculty, calling the offer from the Trump administration a “dirty compromise.”
“I remind you of what you know well — that our institutional mission transcends all partisan politics and the dirty compromises that partisan politics demands. Our mission does not work without a bedrock commitment on the part of our leadership to everyone’s freedoms — constitutional, academic and otherwise,” Hudson wrote.
And Eddie Barrón, an at-large senator with the Associated Students of the UA, told the Daily Wildcat it would be absurd for the UA to sign the compact.
“This is something that the Trump administration is moving towards to silence our universities and pressure them into abiding by these policies that he wants,” Barrón said.
Another reason why the Trump Administration singled out the UA — remember ASU was on a list of 50 universities this spring that the Trump administration was investigating for DEI policies — might be its tenuous financial state.
While the UA has said it has solved its financial crisis, any substantial cuts to federal funding would force the university to make some hard decisions about programs and staffing.
Subscribe to the Tucson Agenda and we’ll keep track of all the ins-and-outs of those hard decisions for you.
What’s the deal?
Alongside the UA, two other public universities got an offer this week: the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia.
The private universities are Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University.
Right now, officials at those universities must be poring through the list of demands in the 10-page compact, which Trump officials described as “the priorities of the U.S. government in its engagements with universities that benefit from the relationship.”
And, in somewhat cryptic fashion, the compact hints that if universities don’t comply, they might need to start looking elsewhere for funding.
“Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits,” the letter states.
That sentence echoed what Mailman told conservative columnist Ross Douthat at the New York Times last week (which we highlighted in this week’s Education Agenda). She said universities should model themselves after Hillsdale College, a conservative school in Michigan that doesn’t take any federal money.
To comply with the compact, the UA would also have to cap international students at no more than 15% of the undergraduate population, and no more than 5% could come from any one country.
The rationale for the cap appears to be steeped in the Trump administration’s fervor over pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University earlier this year.
“Universities that rely on foreign students to fund their institutions risk, among other things, potentially reducing spots available to deserving American students, and if not properly vetted, saturating the campus with noxious values such as anti-Semitism and other anti-American values, creating serious national security risks,” the compact states.
The Trump administration has already gone a long way to discourage international students from coming to the U.S. This spring, federal officials revoked the visas of thousands of international students, often on flimsy or mistaken grounds.
UA officials said this week their incoming freshmen class is 19% smaller than last year’s, largely due to a drop in international and out-of-state students.
The compact also demands that universities promote a “vibrant marketplace of ideas.” But university officials also must tread lightly when it comes to conservative views. They would have to get rid of departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
There are numerous other demands in the compact:
Universities can’t consider race, gender, political views, sexual orientation or other such factors in admissions or hiring decisions.
If a school’s endowment exceeds $2 million per student, the university won’t charge tuition to students in the hard sciences.
Tuition would be frozen for “American students” for the next five years.
Universities have to use standardized testing for admissions.
They have to stop grade inflation.
The list goes on from there.
What’s next?
To be honest, we’re not sure. There are a lot of unanswered questions.
Garimella was hired by the Arizona Board of Regents, not the university. It is unclear whether he has the authority to sign on to the compact, which would change a number of university policies that affect the UA’s finances, such as the five-year pledge to freeze tuition and limiting enrollment for foreign students.
We expect the UA Faculty Senate, students, powerful alumni, and local politicians will all weigh in on the proposal in the coming days, likely asking Garimella not to comply in advance.
And if the UA signs on, we expect a bevy of lawsuits from the community suing the first university in Arizona to be directly targeted by the Trump administration.
When the next shoe drops, we’ll be sure to report on it here.
Kudos to the Star’s Prerana Sannappanavar, the Sentinel’s Paul Ingram, and AZPM’s Hannah Cree for ongoing reporting on the topics on this list. And, as much as we hate to do it, kudos to the Washington Examiner for posting the compact. Un-kudos to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for referencing it without posting the source material.
U of A and ABOR: Hi, we haven’t met. But I really feel for the position you’re in. Really (ask me how I know…). This probably feels like a devil’s bargain to you, and you know that behind that shriveled carrot is a very large stick. In boardrooms, you’re hearing “we need to stay off the radar” and “if we don’t take the extra money, someone else will get it,” and “we need to think of the institution.” You’re probably worried not taking it paints a big ‘ol target on your back. You’re probably losing sleep. You might feel like there’s no one you can talk to about this outside of your small circle.
Putting you in this no-win situation is the point. Was it bad luck you’re one of the nine? Is it precisely because you complied in advance? Who knows, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. You’re in this situation now.
One thing we can be sure of is that if you sign this thing, this isn’t over. This is likely some think tank’s Step 3 of a multi-step process to give public universities a choice: break along OUR fault lines or die.
I’ve read that ten page compact, basically fell asleep with it in my hands last night as I obsessed over my finger-smudged copy. It leaves a lot of doors open to suppress academic freedom, and closes a lot of doors to students who don’t fit their mold, doesn’t it. You are all smart people, you can see what the ramifications are here, what they’re trying to do. You know it won’t stop with this, why build a tool if you aren’t going to use it?
Don’t sign it.
Don’t.
This administration has a history of not following through on their carrots, and you’re going to get the stick NO MATTER WHAT. We’ve seen this across the board, that the early adopters of these policies were not spared consequences. Now we’ve seen they’ve been made into examples.
Do you want the U of A to be what shows the country what Steps 4, 5, and 6 looks like? Do you want to be Ground Zero for the dismantling of any academic program Steven Miller doesn’t like? Do you want to be the University that is overrun with federal goons arresting students because they’re “Antifa?”
If the next 3+ years are going to be difficult anyway, regardless of signing or not signing that compact from Hades, then make them 3+ years where you’ve upheld the values you were committed to; the values your staff, faculty, students and community believe you are a beacon of. Make this 3+ years one of principled defiance and not of obsequious compliance.
Do not sign it.
Just remember our roots as a University run deep and have met the needs of this State proudly. Don't think this compact won't cone without further entanglements.
Just BEAR DOWN and say No.