Donald Trump’s compact for higher education signals a wholly new way in which universities can be yoked to the ideology of State administration. This new model of administrative authoritarianism is likely to have a large impact worldwide, including on the higher education landscape in India where political intervention tends to happen through direct policy and administrative decisions by the State. Trump’s compact, on the other hand, is offered as a choice to US universities — to those “Institutions that want to quickly return to the pursuit of Truth and Achievement”. Institutions which accept the compact will gain access to significant federal funds. Their adherence to the terms of the contract will be reviewed annually by an external agency, and non-compliance will be penalised by the return of any funds obtained.

An electoral base sceptical of scientific research, including that on environmental degradation and economic realities, now faces a promise of truth and achievement untarnished by ideology. Such is the nature of the post-truth world’s return to the pursuit of Truth. Universities entering the compact will have to institute a range of policy reforms, including identity-blind student admission and financial support as well as faculty and staff appointments, an open climate in civil discourse on campus, institutional neutrality vis-à-vis socio-political incidents, a five-year tuition freeze for American students with particular preference for students pursuing the hard sciences, clear and neutral standards for grading, and the reduction of foreign involvement and recruitment of international students.

Nine universities made up the cohort to whom the compact was offered on October 1 — Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the universities of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Southern California, Texas at Austin, Virginia, and Vanderbilt. Except Vanderbilt and UT Austin, which have offered ambiguous responses, all the others have rejected the compact. The federal administration has now offered the compact to institutions nationwide. On October 27, New College of Florida became the first institution to offer to accept the compact.

The compact is a departure from Trump’s bitter and intense face-offs over the issue of anti-Semitism on university campuses. On a superficial level, the compact offers a degree of fairness and support for mainstream American values and interests. But there is no doubt about which America it seeks to support; suppressed, minoritised, and immigrant interests have no place here. The open marketplace of ideas implies space for conservative voices; non-identarian admission and appointment signal the end of institutional support for minorities. Foreign students and staff are no longer welcome.

It’s a fairness that appeals to Trump’s support base. It can even win him some new ones. A five-year tuition freeze for American students may resonate with a population that has become exhausted with astronomical sticker prices on college degrees and is increasingly unconvinced about their worth. A significant part of the mainstream (worldwide) has increasingly become disenchanted, indeed antagonised, by what they see as the domination of Left-liberal views on campus. It explains why the outrage against the bullying of universities has primarily been limited to students and faculty and has not drawn significant support beyond the intelligentsia. The mainstream may very well see the idea of a fair marketplace as a balance-setter, even though there is little doubt that this call for fairness actually aims to swing the ideological pendulum to the other end.

“The increasing costs of higher education are weakening domestic popular political support for higher education,” the former Canadian Opposition leader, Michael Ignatieff, recently said at the Times Higher Education’s Going Global Conference in Toronto. “It becomes easier and easier for populist politicians to attack higher education as a kind of elite luxury that the taxpayer pays for.” Ignatieff knows the bitter reality personally; he was the rector of Central European University from 2016 to 2021, an institution that, for the most part, was forced to leave Hungary for Austria by the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the pioneer of illiberal democracy in Europe, sometimes called ‘Trump before Trump’. Ignatieff points out Orbán was “the master” who had learned before anyone else “that controlling the universities that recruit and train elites means they can eventually control the political system.”

I felt the close breath of this ideological struggle between the right-wing Hungarian government and a weakened Central European University this summer during my stint as a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in the eviscerated CEU campus in Budapest. Orbán has exploited the legal vulnerability of an internationally chartered university to force out of Hungary the institution supported by his arch-enemy, the Hungarian-Jewish philanthropist, George Soros. While ideology continues to fuel the hostility between universities and populist dictatorships worldwide, the latter’s preferred modes of interference and domination remain legalistic and bureaucratic. We see this with the current regime in India where public institutions are structurally dependent on state or Central administrations, not only for funds but also
for staff appointments, including the constitutionally-mandated gubernatorial appointment of vice-chancellors and faculty recruitment through networks of political connection and party loyalty.

Trump’s compact is very different; it is in clever but superficial accordance with the character of American capitalism. It makes its appearance as a choice offered to universities that becomes for them a favourable financial transaction. But as a national measure that is now open to institutions across 50 states, it is also what Ignatieff calls “a ‘renationalization’ of one of the most outward-looking educational systems in the world.” For a political party that has always pushed for less, not more, government, this striking opportunism seeks to bring what is possibly the greatest space for dissent, free thought, diversity and internationalism under administrative and ideological control. But right now, it is the carrot that looms large, not the stick. Choice, money, and transaction —aren’t these the fundamental markers of the free market? But by what sleight-of-hand does the carrot melt into the stick?

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University and writes here in his personal capacity