HANOVER — Dartmouth, on Saturday, became the latest institution to reject an invitation from the Trump administration to join a higher education compact.
“I do not believe that a compact—with any administration—is the right approach to achieve academic excellence, as it would compromise our academic freedom, our ability to govern ourselves, and the principle that federal research funds should be awarded to the best, most promising ideas,” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock wrote in a Saturday message to the community.
She submitted feedback to the administration on its proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” in a Friday phone call with the White House and in writing on Saturday.
Dartmouth was one of nine schools the administration initially invited to collaborate on its 10-point proposal, which asks schools to commit to the White House’s vision for academic institutions in exchange for priority access to federal funding.
Beilock issued her statement a day after Dartmouth College faculty from a wide range of academic disciplines addressed a packed room of about four dozen people during an afternoon “teach-in” where they outlined how the Trump administration’s higher education compact poses a threat to the school’s academic autonomy.
The event was hosted by the college’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, a national union that held teach-ins on Friday at the eight other schools that were initially invited to collaborate on the Trump administration’s compact.
“(It’s our) attempt to be together,” Patricia Stuelke, an English professor and member of the AAUP, said of the teach-in, while visitors slid slices of pizza onto paper plates and filed into the basement room of the Haldeman Center.
Among the first speakers at the teach-in was East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies professor Lynn Patyk, who underscored how the compact’s encroachment on institutions’ self-governance mirrors tactics used by an authoritarian government in Russia.
“The compact in its very premise is absolutely unacceptable in any democratic (government),” she said.
Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, or WGSS, professor Molly Geidel, spoke about how the compact’s demand that universities change or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas” poses a threat to the department.
Much of WGSS’ curriculum is meant to spark resistance to misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism, she said. “This is why I couldn’t teach what I teach, and WGSS probably couldn’t exist under the compact,” she added.
Geidel also raised concerns about the compact’s requirement that universities define “male,” “female,” “woman,” and “man,” “according to reproductive function and biological function.”
“Many people don’t identify this way,” including the scholars and writers that Geidel teaches about, she said.
“We at WGSS…are generally fighting for a world in which people, especially feminine ones, are not defined by their reproductive function,” said Geidel, who pointed out that this requirement in the compact is specifically targeted at trans people.
“It is meant to erase and exclude them from campus life, and to terrorize them,” she said.
Geidel was among the roughly 30 faculty and students who presented a petition to Dartmouth’s administration on Oct. 10 urging president Sian Leah Beilock to reject the White House’s proposal.
The petition garnered more than 500 signatures from faculty and graduate students at the time it was presented.
Members of Dartmouth’s science departments also voiced their concerns at the teach-in. Among them was professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Brad Duchaine, who noted that the compact “violates the principles of scientific research.”
Instead of using Congress to pass legislation about how universities conduct research, “what we have instead is the executive branch using federal funding as leverage to extract commitments from individual institutions outside of any legislative process,” Duchaine said.
“That’s not governance, that’s coercion.”
Duchaine expects institutions that sign on to the compact will face backlash from other scientists.
“The scientific community operates on norms of fairness, merit and impartiality, and when universities cut political deals for funding advantages, they violate those core values,” he said.
In her message to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and two other members of the Trump administration, Beilock said that she is interested in improving higher education, but that she doesn’t think the compact is the way to do that.
“Our universities have a responsibility to set our own academic and institutional policies, guided by our mission and values, our commitment to free expression, and our obligations under the law,” she wrote. “Staying true to this responsibility is what will help American higher education build bipartisan public trust and continue to uphold its place as the envy of the world.”
As of Friday, five out of the nine universities that received the compact had rejected the White House’s proposal.
On Wednesday, Brown University became the second school, following the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the first in the Ivy League, to reject the compact.
The next day, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California announced their rejection of the compact, followed by the University of Virginia on Friday.
As of Saturday evening, the University of Arizona had yet to make a public statement regarding their decision in advance of the White House’s Monday deadline to provide feedback on the compact.
While most schools have had negative responses, the University of Texas at Austin, the first of the nine schools initially approached about the compact to issue a public response, expressed enthusiasm.
“Today we welcome the new opportunity presented to us and we look forward to working with the Trump Administration on it, ” the chairman of the university’s Board of Regents said in an Oct. 2 statement.
While speakers at Friday’s teach-in outlined the dangers that the compact poses to higher education, they also encouraged students and faculty to take action.
“Don’t mourn; organize,” Dr. Don Kollisch, an associate professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, said in his speech.
A student-organized rally opposing the compact was scheduled for later on Friday afternoon outside Dartmouth’s administration building.
“Seeing undergrads come out and be in conversation with their faculty about the idea of what college is for is just really moving and gives me hope,” AAUP organizer Lukas Moe said in an interview at the end of the teach-in.
The feeling was mutual among students at the event.
“It’s really nice to be able to come together, it’s just sad that it has to be against this compact, which has no place here,” Anna Valdez, a Dartmouth senior majoring in history and psychology, said as people streamed out of the hall at the end of the two-hour event.