Top U of A professors urge rejection of Trump compact

About 80 top University of Arizona professors sent a 20-page letter to UA President Suresh Garimella, asking him to reject the White House higher education compact and warning there’s no assurance the university would get federal funding benefits for complying.

The compact should be rejected in order to protect “academic freedom, institutional independence, and legal integrity” as well as UA’s financial needs, says the letter. Its signees are all Regents professors, a designation the UA has described as “an honored position reserved for faculty scholars of exceptional ability who have achieved national and international distinction.”

There are many “compelling reasons” to not sign the compact, the professors wrote. “Among the most serious of these is that the alleged new benefits of compliance are unclear — they are implied, but there is no explanation of how this ‘priority to federal funds’ would operate, or assurance that the University of Arizona would actually benefit.”

“There is no clear ‘quid’ for the requested, institution-altering ‘quo,’” they warned. “Yet if we do sign, and are deemed to be in default, the Compact suggests we not only would lose these ill-defined new benefits, but would sacrifice the federal benefits that we already enjoy.”

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Committee of 11 wants coalition

The letter comes as a UA faculty leadership group, the Committee of 11, voted unanimously Friday to form a multi-university coalition with faculty leaders of the nine universities the White House has asked to sign the compact.

Chair of the Faculty Leila Hudson said universities across the nation could rise up and support one another if “political, ideological and partisan” battles are to affect them in transformative ways.

The coalition goal is to have “nine schools working together for the best and to improve and to find the best path to excellence,” said Johann Rafelski, a member of the group of faculty leaders known as C-11 who are elected by their peers.

“Any compact work in principle should come from our ranks, because maybe we should take this compact, the government compact, as a stimulus to express our views about what makes a university excellent,” said Rafelski, a UA professor of physics. “For example, less administration and more academic training, and so on. But that is for the committee then to spell out and formulate.”

The actions by the Committee of 11 and the Regents professors follow others in the last week about the compact. UA’s Faculty Senate and the Tucson City Council both approved resolutions, on Monday and Wednesday, respectively, urging Garimella to reject the compact.

Garimella has said only that he’s working with the Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s three public universities, and consulting with shared governance leaders before making a decision.

The 10-page “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” sent by the White House Oct. 1 asks for the signatures of nine universities, including the UA, in return for ”multiple positive benefits,” including priority access to federal funds and looser restraints on overhead costs of federal grants.

Universities have the deadline of Oct. 20 to provide “limited, targeted feedback,” and a final deadline of Nov. 21 to sign onto the compact.

The compact asks the schools’ leaders to agree to ban the use of race or sex in hiring and admissions, freeze tuition for five years, cap international undergrad enrollment at 15%, change or abolish groups which criticize “conservative” ideologies, and ban university employees from speaking about any societal or political event unless it directly impacts the university, among many other requirements.

The other universities are Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia. MIT’s president said Friday she cannot support the compact.

‘Potentially unconstitutional’ terms

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The UA Regents professors note that the Trump administration letter accompanying the compact said universities that sign could receive benefits, including “allowance for increased overhead payments where feasible, substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal partnerships.”

“Without clarification,” the Regents professors wrote to Garimella on Oct. 6, “UA thus could be ceding authority over internal operations and academic policies for no enforceable or concrete new benefits.”

They added that certain terms of the compact are “vague, overbroad, and potentially unconstitutional” and that some may not align with other laws and policies that already bind the UA, such as state laws.

Among these, they listed: banning the considerations of race, sex, political views, or nationality during admissions; protecting “conservative ideas” and abolishing units that display hostility against them; the U.S. Justice Department’s oversight of the compact, which isn’t defined and comes with serious penalties, including repayment of federal funds and mandated donor refunds; among others.

The Regents professors also cited bottom-line reasons for opposing the compact:

• The “severe financial constraints” the UA continues to face, after recently eliminating its $177 million deficit revealed in fall 2023; and the importance of a “robust federal partnership in assuring that we can continue to engage in the cutting-edge research, superb teaching, and outstanding community engagement for which we are known both nationally and internationally.”
• The current “political environment” the UA is operating in and the numerous ways in which compliance or non-compliance with the compact will influence its national and international academic reputation, its relationship with state partners, its ability to recruit and retain top teachers and scholars, and the relationship of teachers with their students.
• The “leadership role” the UA plays among the state’s three public universities. In-state students choose between the three universities, and “when any of us degrade, all Arizonans suffer,” they wrote.

The letter tells Garimella to undertake due diligence to: seek greater clarity on the numerous legal, financial and operational implications of the document; engage with directly-affected peer institutions to seek a coordinated response; and ensure transparent consultation with faculty, students and external stakeholders.

“We hope you will engage faculty, students, and other members of the UA community, given that the consequences will be felt most directly by them. Transparency, procedures that respect and encourage genuine campus engagement, and above all openness to disagreements about the vexing law, policy, and ethics that govern our academic work are indispensable, democratic baselines for a public university,” the professors wrote.

‘We should be 100% apolitical’

Meanwhile, at its meeting Friday, the Committee of 11 discussed many questions about the compact, including whether it would influence the UA’s curriculum; what is the definition of “conservative” values; how is the university meant to have a diverse set of opinions when it cannot ask those questions in hiring interviews; how the compact would impact the everyday lives of gender-diverse students and colleagues; and if the UA should consider negotiating on different aspects of the document.

Ted Downing, chair of the Committee of 11, started the meeting by noting that the UA is Arizona’s flagship, land-grant university, with resulting commitments to agriculture, engineering and to providing practical and affordable education to communities in the state.

He said the Justice Department asserts in the compact the power to strip the UA of federal benefits of up to two years and to demand the repayment of federal money received in the entire year in which the department decides any of the compact’s requirements was violated.

Downing also noted that signing the compact would mean the UA has to publish its admissions data by race, gender and test scores and assure that no single ideology dominates the classrooms. The compact also defines “male” and “female” by strictly biological sex, adds ideological testing to the hiring of faculty and administrators, and requires international students to face ideological screening during admissions to favor applicants who “support American and Western values,” he pointed out.

C-11 member Marlys Witte said of the compact, “I view this as the latest symptom in a chronic, debilitating and eventually fatal disease, where we see our rankings falling at a time when ASU (Arizona State University) hasn’t been given this offer.”

The committee voted with 10 members in favor and one abstention to empower UA Faculty Chair Leila Hudson to form an inter-institutional committee to discuss the faculty position on the compact.

Tomas Cerny, a C-11 member who proposed the motion to create the multi-university committee, said he would like to take a systematic approach as an engineer and prefers not to have the UA’s answer to the compact be a “yes” or “no.”

“This is not a binary thing,” said Cerny, an associate professor of engineering. “I would honestly love to go bullet-by-bullet and say, ‘This is already what we are doing, this is something that is in a direct conflict with what we are doing.’ … But there is too much political bias going on. It’s not our game, we are academics. We should be 100% apolitical.”