This story is part of our monthly Campus Dispatch series. Read the rest of the stories in the series here.
The Trump administration is playing a game of carrot-and-stick diplomacy with higher education.
Earlier this year, the board has withheld billions in federal funding and subsidies from some of the most elite colleges and universities in the United States for allegedly promoting campus cultures rife with anti-Semitism and left-wing ideologies. Now the White House is trying to change its tune by offering universities a role as collaborators in his right-wing agenda.
Nine schools, both public and private, received the so-called Compact for academic excellence in higher education on October 1. Among other requests, this sweeping proposal from the Trump administration requires participating universities to limit international student enrollment to 15 percent, platform conservative ideology by reevaluating departments or “institutional units” seen as unfriendly to such beliefs, reduce inflation by following government-dictated standards, and adhere to strict, binary definitions of sex and gender.
The nine universities chosen were Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, Vanderbilt University, the University of Southern California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Pact states that if these institutions agree and successfully meet its terms – a standard that will be reviewed and approved annually by the Department of Justice – they will receive priority “federal benefits,” including research funding, government contracts and access to student loans.
‘It’s so clearly unlawful’
The pact “is the greatest infringement on the freedom and autonomy of higher education that has ever occurred in this country,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a professional association that represents about 50,000 university faculty in 500 chapters nationally.
Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney for LGBTQ+ rights organization Lambda-legalagrees.
“It’s so clearly illegal, and [the Trump administration] knows that, and that’s why they can even bring it up [to] Ask universities to do this voluntarily,” Hite said.
Among many preconditions, the pact asks schools to “commit to defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘female’ and ‘male’ based on reproductive function and biological processes.”
It further claims that “women’s equality requires single-sex spaces.” In other words, the government wants universities that join the pact to ban transgender people from the toilets, locker rooms and sports teams that match their gender identity.
“By adopting biological definitions of what a man or a woman is — according to some people in the federal government — universities would be participating in a multi-tiered system in which queer and trans students are once again placed at the bottom and given the least protections,” Hite said.
“The pact refers to equality many times, while at the same time demanding that universities maintain this fundamentally unequal system on campus,” he added.
The compact has proven overwhelmingly unpopular so far.
Of the nine original recipients, seven schools have rejected the deal in its current form. Only Vanderbilt University and UT Austin have yet to publicly give a definitive answer as to whether they will make a deal, although Vanderbilt’s chancellor has suggested hesitation on certain aspects of the agreement. New York Times reported on October 20. UT Austin is reportedly in talks with the administration, one A White House official told Axios. The Trump administration had initially asked for answers by October 20.
MIT was the first to reject Trump’s proposed deal.
“Fundamentally, the document’s premise is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based solely on scientific merit,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth wrote to Education Secretary Linda McMahon on October 10, nine days after receiving the administration’s offer letter.
Other schools later followed suit, including Brown and the University of Pennsylvania. The two Ivy League institutions had previously struck deals with the Trump administration, which restored research funding in exchange for adopting policies, among other things ending gender-affirming care for minors at Brown and excluding transgender women from women’s sports teams at both.
‘All eyes are on UT Austin’
After MIT’s rejection, Trump extended the opportunity to sign the agreement on October 12 to all US higher education institutions Truth Social Post.
For UT Austin, the initial reactions to the compact were much more positive. Kevin Eltife, chairman of the Board of Regents for the University of Texas system, said he was “honored” that the university was among the first to be approached by the administration.
“We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and revising the compact immediately,” he said said in a statement.
But Eltife’s apparent excitement is increased worries on some campuses in Texaswhere state law already requires public universities to adhere to a number of provisions similar to those in the compact.
Texas Senate Bill 17which prohibits education and discussion of diversity, equity and inclusion on campuses, went into effect in January 2024. And in August 2025, the Senate decided past a “bathroom law” that, starting December 4, will ban transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals from using public restrooms that match their gender identity.
Groups like Texas Students for DEIa student-led organization that advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion in education was founded in response to these laws and is now turning their attention to protesting the pact.
Autumn Lauener, an organizer with Texas Students for DEI who earned their master’s degree in social work from UT Austin in the spring of 2025, worries that schools in the University of Texas system will preemptively comply with the federal government’s requests despite their legal uncertainty.
On September 25, the chancellor of the Texas Tech university system, Tedd Mitchell, sent a letter ordering all Texas Tech schools to comply with a Trump’s executive order which confirms the validity of only two genders. Mitchell’s memo told the presidents of all five Texas Tech institutions to review and modify course materials and curricula.
Trans and non-binary Texas Tech students and alumni feel frustrated and hopeless. News from the United States reported.
“Students are terrified of contacting faculty, [and] faculty are terrified to support students,” Lauener said.
(Read more: Colleges end trans-friendly housing policies amid federal anti-DEI push)
UT Austin similarly evaluates the classes and services it offers.
In compliance with SB 17, the University replace the Gender and Sexuality Center together with the Women’s Community Center in January 2024. The announced in September 2025 that the University Health Service would stop offering hormone replacement therapy to students from January 1, 2026, and revealed a plan to audit all gender studies courses.
“All eyes are on UT Austin because if they fall, the rest of the system will fall quickly,” said Alex De Jesus, co-lead student organizer at Texas Students for DEI and current master’s student at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Austin is a relatively flat branch of the state’s publicly funded higher education system. Dallas, De Jesus said, is “desperate for any kind of financing.”
“If UT Austin accepts this compact,” he added, “we will likely preemptively comply with it soon.”
Tighten the White House’s attack on queer and trans students
These actions aren’t just harmful to queer and trans students and teachers, said Wolfson, president of the AAUP.
“Like [schools] do not meet the standards of [the Trump administration’s] dogma of how badly you should treat LGBTQ+ students, you will lose your money,” he explained, “so it’s like you’re incentivized to make money [a campus] an inhospitable space.”
The pact also shows a desire “to erase our knowledge base on these questions and issues from a social, cultural, political, psychological and health perspective,” he said.
Lauener believes they have already experienced a version of this censorship. While completing a disability-focused fellowship at UT Health during their master’s program, they were not allowed to use words often associated with what they were studying, such as “intersectionality” or “neurodiversity.”
So has the word ‘disability’ itself removed from government memos and websites as part of an initiative the Trump administration has undertaken to limit or stop the use of words and terms it considers “woke.”
If UT Austin adheres to the agreement, Lauener and De Jesus both said Texas Students for DEI is ready to fight back. The group will remind Texas universities that making this deal risks violating state or federal laws.
“Parts of the pact that seem unconstitutional or difficult to implement can at least now be used as leverage and remind universities, ‘Hey, if you stick with it [with] If you say this, you will be held liable for unconstitutional orders,” De Jesus said.
For example, the agreement requires universities to impose conditions on where and how protests take place. UT students recently won an injunction against Texas SB 2972who restricted protest conditions on UT campuses between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. The pact could conflict with that ruling.
Wolfson’s organization is also prepared to take legal action.
“I believe we will have strong grounds to sue any university that may sign this compact for undermining the First Amendment rights and constitutional rights of our members on that campus,” he said. “Any university that accepts the pact must be made a pariah in the academic community.”
Hite, of Lambda Legal, could not speculate on future lawsuits. But he said the organization is willing to get involved if necessary.
Wolfson described the treaty and its underlying message as “despicable hypocrisy.”
“The argument [the Trump administration] What is said over and over again about DEI is that it takes away meritocracy… But the pact itself does the exact same thing, because it says, ‘If you adhere to our beliefs around gender, your cancer research is more likely to be funded,’ he said. “That’s basically the definition of undermining the meritocracy of our cancer research through an ideological litmus test.”
Lauener agrees.
“It feels so contradictory in many ways, for people who it’s all about [being] hands off… to try to gain control [higher education] so intense because they don’t like the product being produced,” they said.
“That just hits really hard – it’s so deeply ideological in nature,” Lauener added. “It’s not about freedom of speech or freedom of expression… it is [about] control.”
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