Trump Proposes an Unconstitutional 'Compact' to Universities to Put Them Directly Under the Federal Thumb
A few months ago, a group of anti-freedom conservatives—no doubt hoping to benefit from the favor of Donald Trump’s sponsorship—advanced an idea for a “compact” that Trump would impose on universities. Now he’s putting that idea into practice, in exactly the form they suggested: a “compact” with the universities.
At MSNBC, two academics sum up this rotten deal:
On Wednesday, the Trump White House sent a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” to nine top U.S. universities. The memo offers these institutions a devil’s bargain: In exchange for a promise of preferential access to federal grants, universities must follow the administration’s dictates on admissions, tuition, grading, student discipline, campus speech and protest rules, faculty and staff hiring, athletics, and many other domains that go far beyond federal law.
Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would give up its legal rights and would forever be subservient to the whims of the government. If the Justice Department decides that a signatory violated the vague terms of the agreement, that university would be forced to return all federal money it received in that year—along with any private donations at donor request. …
Most importantly, the administration’s dictates would be an impermissible overreach into the free speech of private institutions, according to legal experts across the political spectrum. The government may not use its funding to compel speech or to force recipients to give up their constitutional rights, which is precisely what the Trump administration seeks to do. The compact would even require that “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives,” abstain “from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.”
The clear aim of this deal is to place universities under federal control, capturing them as the personal fiefdoms of Donald Trump. But the only “compact” that matters here is the U.S. Constitution. Federal funds are not Trump’s to employ for his own ends, and it is unconstitutional for the president to use taxpayers’ money to impose ideological loyalty tests.
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