USC rejects Trump administration’s conservative agenda compact

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USC rejected the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would have shifted the university to the right, according to an announcement on Thursday.  

“We are concerned that even though the Compact would be voluntary, tying research benefits to it would, over time, undermine the same values of free inquiry and academic excellence that the Compact seeks to promote,” said USC Interim President Beong-Soo Kim in a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon. 

USC joins Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania in declining the compact, through which the Trump administration offered priority funding to nine universities in exchange for furthering the conservative agenda, the Los Angeles Times reported. The move also follows Gov. Gavin Newsom’s threat to withhold state funding from universities that accept the compact. 

Delivered to USC on Oct. 1, the compact requires that universities accept the government’s definition of gender and bans recognizing transgender people’s identities. It abolishes “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” according to the compact, and also requires a five-year tuition freeze for U.S. students and restricts foreign student enrollment. 

The university’s Academic Senate overwhelmingly rejected the compact during a virtual meeting on Oct. 6 in which students and professors described the compact as “a Trojan horse” and “antithetical to the principles of academic freedom,” according to the Times.

In the letter, Kim said that the university “fully agrees” with fostering a “vibrant marketplace of ideas where all different views can be explored, debated, and challenged,” like the compact mentions, and said in an attached statement that he looks forward to USC joining the “national conversation” about the “future of higher education.” 

White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement that universities “funded by American taxpayers should absolutely serve the national interest,” the newspaper reported.