The head squirrel in Abattoir Hall at Enema U just sent out a letter to all the students asking for input about President Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Every university is supposed to sign this if they want to continue receiving “preferential treatment” for university funding. I’m not sure exactly who is supposed to keep track of all this since the current plan is to abolish the Department of Education.
I’m also not sure why I got the email since I graduated last May—again—but apparently, I’m still on the student mailing list.
Anyway, the university wants comments on this “compact,” and since no one asked for mine, I’m happy to supply them. Let’s take this masterpiece one section at a time.
1. Equality of Admissions. Prohibits consideration of sex, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, and political views or proxies thereof in admissions and financial support decisions.
I see nothing wrong with this. I spent several decades working at a state university where the only real admission requirements were having a pulse and a valid checking account. Enema U has never turned away anyone for any reason. If you could fog a mirror, you were welcome—and if you could dribble a basketball, you didn’t even have to fog the mirror.
2. Marketplace of Ideas and Civil Discourse. Requires fostering a “broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints,” eliminating units that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” and ensuring campus environments don’t disrupt instruction or libraries.
Once again, maybe because of where I worked, I never saw a problem. My colleagues in the History Department spanned the political spectrum from Attila the Hun to Mahatma Gandhi. Nobody ever told me what to teach or how to think. The idea that any of us would “incite violence” is about as likely as the faculty senate starting a bar fight.
3. Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring. Mandates merit-based hiring and advancement using objective, measurable criteria, without considering sex, race, national origin, disability or religion except as lawfully permitted.
That’s already how it works. A search committee sorts through résumés, interviews a few brave souls, and finally ignores all of that and hires someone they can stand to see in the hall for the next ten years. No compact can change the universal truth that universities hire people they can tolerate at lunch.
4. Institutional Neutrality. Requires university employees acting as official representatives to “abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events” unless the event directly impacts the university.
Here’s the doozy: The compact says that university employees should “abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events,” unless the issue directly affects the university. It’s kind of like enforcing an academic loyalty oath.
Excuse me? Every faculty member and administrator is a government employee—just like the President or Congress. And last time I checked, the First Amendment applied to all of us. This rule is not only unconstitutional and unenforceable, it’s downright asinine. Even if the university president signed this thing in blood, no one would pay attention to it.
Frankly, this very blog probably violates that compact. If so, I’ll add that to my resumé.
5. Student Learning. Commits to grade integrity (no inflating or deflating for non-academic reasons) and to public accountability (e.g., publishing grade-distributions and outcome trends).
Universities already try to do this. Or are supposed to. And if they are failing to do this now, this compact isn’t going to change anything. Universities don’t grade student work, the faculty does, and I doubt this compact is going to change much at the individual faculty member level.
6. Student Equality. Students must be treated individually, with sex defined biologically for certain facilities and athletics, and discipline applied equally.
Why not just come out and tell the truth. This is about transexuals in sports—an issue that is going to be solved by the state legislature and the courts—not by college deans. Until then, having a university president sign a compact will have all the legal value of a flea fart in a hurricane.
7. Financial Responsibility. Stipulates a freeze of effective tuition for U.S. students for five years, posting graduate earnings data by major, refunding first-term tuition for dropouts, and for endowments over $2 million per student to waive tuition for admitted STEM students.
Sounds good — but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Why not require universities to revert to their year-2000 ratio of administrators to students? Or insist that the football budget be smaller than the library’s? Or maybe that colleges should co-sign every student loan for a degree in “Creative Vegan Poetry.”
Academia has bloated like a pufferfish, and while this compact talks a good game, I doubt it will pierce the puff.
8. Foreign Entanglements. Caps international undergraduates at 15% (and max 5% from any one country), requires screening for “extraordinary talent,” restricts foreign funding and mandates anti-money-laundering protocols.
Utter nonsense. Enema U sits on the border with Mexico, so a lot of our students commute across that border. The national average for foreign students in U.S. colleges is only about 6%. This is a solution in search of a problem and, honestly, if the smartest people in the world want to come here to study and then stay to work, why would we stop them?
9. Enforcement. Universities must self-certify compliance annually, measure campus opinion, and face funding penalties if they violate compact terms.
Of course compliance will be reported—enthusiastically! The University administration has never met a form it couldn’t complete in triplicate. Hell, they will spend less time on this than the fake reports of the grade point averages for the student athletes.
All of this should sound a little familiar. Back in 1947, President Harry Truman decided that the best way to keep communists out of the government was to make every federal employee swear they weren’t Party members. Thus was born Executive Order 9835– the first national loyalty program. Overnight, five million civil servants were suddenly told they needed to prove their patriotism, which (as any bureaucrat can tell you) is a tough thing to document on a government form. The FBI got busy sniffing out “subversive tendencies” and the nation’s typists, janitors, and weather clerks anxiously checked their closets for red shirts.
For a while, it worked exactly as you’d expect: hundreds lost their jobs, thousands more resigned, and the paperwork multiplied like rabbits. Fortunately, the Supreme Court eventually noticed that this “loyalty” business was getting a bit un-American. In Wieman v. Updegraff (1952), the justices ruled that punishing people for joining the wrong club without knowing it was a due-process no-no. Then in Cole v. Young (1956), the Court declared that maybe firing a file clerk for being a “security risk” was just a smidge excessive.
By the late 1950s, the whole loyalty oath movement was collapsing under the weight of its own paranoia. The justices chipped away until the thing was as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and even Congress got tired of hunting for communists under every stapler. Truman’s grand plan to purify the federal workforce ended not with a bang but with a bored shrug and was replaced by Eisenhower’s milder “security” program. In hindsight, the courts didn’t so much strike down the loyalty oaths as quietly escort them to the exit, thanking them for their service and locking the door behind them.
Now that we’ve dissected this so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence,” I urge our esteemed president of Enema U to return it to the White House with this simple note attached:
“I am returning this paper. Someone wrote on it.”
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