A Raw New Deal

Last Wednesday, the Trump administration dangled a raw deal before a handful of universities. Nine colleges received a letter outlining the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”—which proposed special treatment for those who would sign. The document turns a manifesto of conservative grievances into policy, sprinkled with cost-cutting measures, and violates the very principles it claims to protect.

The relationship between higher education and American democracy was well-articulated shortly after the nation’s founding. In his first and his final addresses before Congress as president, George Washington stressed the importance of the symbiotic relationship. “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of Science and Literature… knowledge is in every country the surest basis of publick happiness” he told lawmakers in 1790. A free nation depended on citizens who knew their rights; guarded against abuses; and could tell oppression from fair authority. It survived when people stayed alert to overreach, accepted what’s necessary, and called out power when it crosses the line.

“Whether this desirable object will be best promoted by affording aids to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients, will be well worthy of a place in the deliberations of the Legislature,” Washington said.

But it also reframes laws and practices borne of the fight against discrimination as discriminatory themselves. As I wrote in April, this is part of a broader conservative effort to roll back the machinery that gave the Civil Rights Act force, fitting neatly into the revisionist ruminations on case law conservatives have advanced since the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision. Their argument: The Court didn’t break with precedent, it finally saw the law correctly.

“Treating certain groups as categorically incapable of performing—and therefore in need of preferential treatment—perpetuates a dangerous badge of inferiority,” the document says. But accepting that premise means accepting a lie about why race-conscious admissions were created in the first place.

Washington imagined a university to form citizens bound by a shared devotion to preserving democratic principles. Trump’s plan imagines a network to train America in a conservative image.

In my 2021 book, The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right, I argued that America’s open secret has always been that it never gave Black students an equal chance at success. For most of U.S. history, they were systematically excluded from higher education. From Harvard’s founding in 1636 to Brown v. Board of Education’s declaration that separate was inherently unequal, institutions treated Black people as incapable of performing—sometimes even more harshly after Black firsts proved otherwise. The North was no less guilty than the South: In 1831, a proposal for a Black college in New Haven sparked open rioting. Jim Crow then codified exclusion, barring Black students from the best-resourced schools by force of law.

America could have chosen to open its colleges to all students—like John Fee did with Berea College in 1855, founded on the belief that God has made of one blood all people of the earth—but it didn’t.

Instead, when the higher education system we recognize today was built, it was designed almost exclusively for white men. The Second Morrill Act of 1890 technically banned the distinction of race or color in admissions, and some colleges began enrolling Black students—George Washington Carver entered Iowa State a year later and did more than fine, history shows. But many states took the compromise instead: create or fund separate institutions for Black students, which became the land-grant HBCUs. A federal report from the Biden administration found those institutions had been underfunded by $13 billion since 1987 alone. Adding that to earlier disparities paints a more bleak picture: A report in the 1940s found that not a single state funded Black and white higher education equally, with gaps ranging from 3 to 1 in DC to 42 to 1 in Kentucky.

The claim that race-conscious admissions amount to “preferential treatment” collapses under scrutiny. Students are admitted for any number of reasons: because the band needs an oboist, the basketball team needs a point guard, a parent is on the faculty, or a donor built a new library wing. Race has always been treated differently in the holistic admissions model the Supreme Court upheld in 1978—it could be one factor among many, but never the decisive one.

The Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA stopped short of banning race altogether, leaving room for students to discuss how it shaped their lives in personal essays. But the administration has acted as if it barred any consideration at all. Institutions that sign this agreement would go even further, pledging not to weigh race, sex, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, religion—or even proxies like geography or wealth—in admissions or financial aid. It’s easy enough to nod along with the principle, if you ignore America’s history of higher education and assume the words were written in good faith. Maybe that was naive before this administration took office; seven months in, it’s willful ignorance.

Remember, Jim Crow laws were “race-neutral” on their face, too. They didn’t say Black people couldn’t vote; they just required property ownership or a literacy test. Those hurdles could be waived, of course, if your grandfather fought for the Confederacy. The burden fell entirely on Black citizens, framed as their own failure rather than discrimination.

Now the administration wants to force colleges to rely on “objective” measures like the SAT, ACT, and GPA—metrics that can be gamed by those with the money for tutors, and that vary wildly across states and schools. In that world, a parent’s ability to pay for test prep becomes indistinguishable from merit. Promise is equally distributed; opportunity is not. This would reduce students to shaky numbers that mostly reflect how well a teenager can sit through a test after a bowl of Raisin Bran.

The document insists that higher education depends on a “vibrant marketplace of ideas,” where different views can be aired and debated. No one seriously doubts that principle. But the administration adds that no single ideology should ever be dominant—even if that dominance arises naturally. In effect, it calls for affirmative action for conservative thought. It’s a hypocrisy critics of higher education have had no trouble embracing.

The administration calls out discrimination against conservatives in the document, specifically—though, not exclusively. It urges states to, among other things, restructure governance and even abolish “units that purposefully punish or belittle conservative ideas.” It declares academic freedom paramount, but “not absolute.” What counts as “punishment” or “discrimination” under this administration–and perhaps, in future administrations, as well–is hopelessly subjective.

As several outlets have shown, the administration has dragged its feet on resolving civil rights complaints while pouring energy into ideologically driven probes. By July, the Associated Press reported, it had resolved just 65 complaints—compared with 380 in 2024, 561 in 2023, and 1,300 in Trump’s first year in office.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years with Washington’s words on a national university, and with the spirit behind them. He believed that even small investments in knowledge could yield enormous dividends for the nation. A national university, he told Congress, would cultivate unity, educate future leaders in government, and give the republic the intellectual strength to match its ambitions. “In a republic what species of knowledge can be equally important, and what duty more pressing on its legislature, than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?” he asked.

Washington imagined a university to form citizens bound by a shared devotion to preserving democratic principles. Trump’s plan imagines a network to train America in a conservative image.

Two centuries later, during the 2024 campaign, Trump floated his own idea of a national university. The proposal drew laughter and scorn, in part because of its design: the would-be online institution immediately called to mind Trump University—shuttered after defrauding students and paying a $25 million settlement—and PragerU, whose glossy videos sanitize the ugliest chapters of American history. But the plan also revealed how the administration understood the role of higher education.

This document is that vision re-animated. But instead of working through Congress—the body Washington charged with shaping the nation’s relationship to higher education—or trying to bully them into submission through thinly veiled probes, it asks institutions to sign their rights away willingly. In doing so, they would leave students, faculty, and staff at the mercy of an administration already eager to debase academic freedom, stifle speech, and discriminate when it suits its ideological ends.

If signed, it would create a web of ideologically captured universities. The document calls for restrictions on protest, the very tradition of student dissent, and for new rules against “incitement” which experts agree the administration applies too broadly. And it facially treats equality as universal—except, pointedly, for transgender students.