On Oct. 2, 2025, Governor of California Gavin Newsom issued a statement threatening to cut down billions of dollars in funding for any “sell out” schools complying with the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education proposed by the White House. Newsom called out the Compact for being “a hostile takeover of America’s universities.”
Divided into 10 points with the last two addressing exceptions and enforcement, the Compact addresses eight areas in which the Trump Administration seeks to assert policies favorable to them over higher institutions. It covers eight categories: Equality in Admissions, Marketplace of Discourse and Civil Discourse, Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring, Institutional Neutrality, Student Learning, Student Equality, Financial Responsibility and Foreign Entanglements.
The Compact lists policies which are aligned with conservative agenda such as prohibiting consideration of ethnicity, religious beliefs or gender orientation in the admission process, abolishing institutional units against conservative ideas, enforcing sex-based distinctions in sports and capping the total population of foreign students at 15 percent with no more than 5 percent of students from a single nation.
This offer was extended in a letter sent out to nine schools across the country including Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Arizona (UA), University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia (UVA) and Vanderbilt University.
The Compact has faced many criticisms. Higher education organizations such as American Association of Colleges & Universities issued a statement in which they denounced the Compact as a government overreach to impose their ideology and a hindrance to the schools’ freedom. The University of Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Association of University Professors also issued a statement urging their school to refuse the proposal, whatever the consequences may be.
Of the nine schools that received the letter, the faculty senates at both UVA and UA overwhelmingly rejected the Compact. At UVA, 97 percent of members voted against it, while at UA, the resolution urging the university to reject the Compact — and any similar proposals in the future — passed with 40 in favor, eight opposed and one abstention out of 75 voting members.
Newsom expressed a similar concern about the Compact in his statement. Further, he countered it with his own threat to take away state funding, including Cal Grant, to any schools. Cal Grant is California’s state-funded college aid program which is the largest in the nation, spending $2.5 billion as of last year, of which $43 million was allocated to UCs for tuition purposes.
He addressed the issue again on Oct. 3, 2025, when he signed the legislation for Quantum Technology and Fusion Energy Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. He emphasized that the White House’s offer is “not a choice” and that he urged California schools to “do the right thing” for the academic freedom of the country.
