The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has declined to sign onto the Trump administration’s proposed compact, which would mandate campus reforms in exchange for preferential access to federal funding.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth announced the decision on Oct. 10 in a campus-wide letter attaching her formal response to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who invited nine universities to sign the new agreement.
The proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” would require participating universities to freeze tuition for five years, limit international student enrollment, and adopt the federal government’s biology-based definitions of sex and gender when it comes to sports or single-sex spaces.
Other provisions call for reinstating the SAT requirement for applicants, curbing grade inflation, prohibiting the use of race and sex as factors in admissions or employment, and reforming or dismantling departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
MIT ‘Cannot Support the Proposed Approach’
In her response, Kornbluth acknowledged that MIT shares some of the administration’s stated goals, such as focusing on merit, reducing costs for students, and upholding free expression.
“These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission—work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health, and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law,” Kornbluth wrote.
She also noted that MIT disagreed with a number of the demands, saying that they “would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution” and that the premise of the document is inconsistent with MIT’s core belief that “scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”
“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence,” Kornbluth wrote.
“In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”
MIT is the first of the nine universities invited to join the compact to publicly reject it. The administration also invited Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University.
It’s unclear why those particular institutions were chosen or whether other schools will be offered the same terms.
The Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times by publication time.
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