The University of Virginia is the fifth institution to turn down President Trump's controversial compact for higher education.

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University of Virginia interim President Paul Mahoney announced on Friday that UVA was declining to sign on to the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, becoming the fifth university to reject the proposal originally pitched to nine universities by the administration earlier this month.

In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and White House officials May Mailman and Vincent Haley, Mahoney said that while the university agreed with many of the principles in the compact, it seeks “no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals. The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship.”

Mahoney also acknowledged the need for continued partnership with the federal government. “Higher education faces significant challenges and has not always lived up to its highest ideals,” he wrote. “We believe that the best path toward real and durable progress lies in an open and collaborative conversation. We look forward to working together to develop alternative, lasting approaches to improving higher education.”

The Compact

The 10-page “Compact For Academic Excellence in Higher Education asks nine prominent universities to agree to a broad set of conditions representing much of the president’s conservative agenda for higher education. It covers areas pertaining to admissions, hiring, academic governance, grading, athletics, foreign students, and campus speech that it wants the universities to endorse and monitor.

In exchange for signing on, the administration promised that the institutions would receive “multiple positive benefits," including preferential treatment for receiving federal funds. But the Compact also contains this ominous statement: “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”

The University of Virginia’s decision follows rejections of the deal by MIT, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. It’s refusal to join the compact carries extra significance because it’s the first public university among the nine to turn down the proposal, and because its former president, James Ryan, stepped down from his position earlier this year under pressure from the Trump administration, which was investigating UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Arizona have yet to officially respond, although two anonymous sources have told The Chronicle of Higher Education that Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock informed them that “she would not sign the compact as written.” The nine institutions were given an October 20 deadline for feedback.

Other Developments

As it has became more obvious that the proposed compact was receiving a lead-baloon reception across much of higher education, President Trump responded by opening the offer to all institutions, representing what is viewed as a broadening of his pressure campaign on colleges and universities to embrace his political priorities.

In a Truth Social post on October 12, Trump wrote, " Those Institutions that want to quickly return to the pursuit of Truth and Achievement, they are invited to enter into a forward looking Agreement with the Federal Government to help bring about the Golden Age of Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”

The next day Bloomberg reported that the compact had been offered to all colleges. And on Tuesday, a source at the U.S. Department of Education confirmed to The Chronicle of Higher Education that Trump’s post was intended to be an invitation to all of higher education. “We welcome any institution that wants to adopt these principles to sign the compact,” wrote the source, who the Chronicle reported was unwilling to go on the record.

On Friday, the White House tried a different tactic. According to the The Wall Street Journal, the University of Arizona, Dartmouth, UT Austin, UVA and Vanderbilt were invited to participate in a virtual meeting to discuss the compact. In addition, three other universities that were not among the original nine recipients — Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis — were also included. The meeting was an “important step toward defining a shared vision,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote in a post on X, in which she called for a“renewed commitment to the time-honored principles that helped make American universities great."

So far university officials are finding the compact to be an offer they can refuse. Students and faculty at the nine institutions have spoken out strongly against the deal, and on Friday a coalition of 35 higher education organizations issued a statement criticizing the compact for setting conditions that" run counter to the interests of institutions, students, scholars, and the nation itself." It adds that “the compact offers nothing less than government control of a university’s basic and necessary freedoms—the freedoms to decide who we teach, what we teach, and who teaches,” introducing “just the kind of excessive federal overreach and regulation, to the detriment of state and local input and control, that this administration says it is against.”

Meanwhile, the administration vacillates between enticement and coercion as it struggles to find takers for its deal. After Penn and USC rejected the compact, the White House appeared to threaten universities that don’t sign the compact.

“Merit should be the primary criteria for federal grant funding. Yet too many universities have abandoned academic excellence in favor of divisive and destructive efforts such as ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’” spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement. “The Compact for Academic Excellence embraces universities that reform their institutions to elevate common sense once again, ushering a new era of American innovation. Any higher education institution unwilling to assume accountability and confront these overdue and necessary reforms will find itself without future government and taxpayers support.”