U.Va. rejects Trump federal funding compact

The University of Virginia has rejected President Donald Trump‘s administration’s compact to receive preferential treatment in federal funding, the school’s interim president announced late Friday afternoon.

The decision came after a day of protests near the Rotunda on U.Va.’s Grounds, as student and faculty groups had increasingly voiced opposition to what the White House dubbed the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, saying that agreeing to a set of tenets proposed by the Trump administration would mean the end of academic freedom at Thomas Jefferson’s university.

U.Va. became the fifth university to decline to participate in Trump’s compact. Providing federal money based on anything but merit would undermine the integrity of research and further erode public confidence in higher education, the university’s interim president, Paul Mahoney, said in a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and White House officials.

“The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship,” Mahoney wrote in the letter, which was later sent to the university community. “A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.”

The White House has faced a flurry of rejections after inviting nine universities to become “initial signatories” of the compact, which asks colleges to make commitments aligned with Trump’s political priorities in exchange for favorable access to research funding. The White House asked university leaders to provide initial feedback on the compact by Oct. 20, yet as the deadline approaches, none have signed on to the document.

The 10-page proposed agreement from the U.S. Department of Education was sent in early October to some of the nation’s most selective public and private universities: Vanderbilt, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and U.Va. It was not stated how or why the schools were selected for the compact.

Those that have not yet announced a decision as of Friday are Dartmouth, Arizona, Texas and Vanderbilt. The universities did not immediately respond to questions.

In a letter sent alongside the compact, Trump officials said it provided “multiple positive benefits,” including favorable access to federal funding. In exchange, colleges were asked to adopt 10 pages of commitments aligned with Trump’s views.

The administration asked for commitments to eliminate race and sex from admissions decisions, to accept the government’s strict binary definition of “man” and “woman,” to promote conservative views on campus and to ensure “institutional neutrality” on current events, among other provisions.

According to U.Va.’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, more than 1,000 people gathered earlier Friday on the Lawn to protest the compact, a coordinated action at all nine universities.

“Today’s events demonstrate the power of collective organizing and action to defeat tyranny,” the chapter said in a statement following the announcement that U.Va. would not sign the compact. “We hope that we serve as an example to the other public universities that received the ‘Compact’ — the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Arizona — giving them the courage and clarity not to buckle.”

At U.Va., many faculty groups overwhelmingly voted to oppose the university’s signing of the compact, or even conducting deliberations on it. Virginia State Senate Democrats sent a letter to Mahoney and Rector Rachel Sheridan, saying that if U.Va. signed the agreement, “there will be significant consequences in future Virginia budget cycles.”

In June, former U.Va. President Jim Ryan resigned while the university was under investigation by the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, and he said in a statement that he was doing so in order to help U.Va. preserve federal funds that support research projects and jobs, as well as student financial aid. Mahoney, the U.Va. School of Law’s former dean, was named in August as the university’s interim president.

He organized a working group to study the 10-page compact, Mahoney and Sheridan announced Oct. 6, while noting that “it would be difficult for the university to agree to certain provisions of the compact.”

In his letter to McMahon, Mahoney wrote, “Higher education faces significant challenges and has not always lived up to its highest ideals. We believe that the best path toward real and durable progress lies in an open and collaborative conversation.”