On October 1, 2025, according to external reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, and others, the White House sent a letter inviting nine universities to enter into an accompanying nine-page Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education (the "Compact").1 Per these news outlets, the letter states that universities that sign on to the Compact will receive preferential access to "multiple positive benefits," including "substantial and meaningful federal grants" as well as invitations to White House events and discussions with Administration officials.2 The full extent of the benefits, however, and how a preference in the federal grant process would be implemented, are not clearly set forth in the document. While the letter accompanying the Compact frames it as an avenue to preferential access, the Compact itself indicates that institutions that choose to "develop models and values other than those below," would, by doing so, "elect[] to forego [sic]...federal benefits."3
A senior White House adviser for special projects told reporters that the goal behind the Compact is to push schools to do things that "are not hard decisions, but they are hard to go at it alone."4 The letter accompanying the Compact says that the Compact is "largely in its final form," with the goal of execution by an initial group of institutional signatories "no later than November 21, 2025," but that "limited, targeted feedback" would be accepted.5
Press reports about the Compact have elicited strong, widely varied reaction from state government leadership in California6 and Texas,7 where two of these nine institutions are located.
The Compact has significant, first-impression implications for academic institutions, including reinforced non-discrimination standards for student admissions, heightened reporting and disclosure requirements relating to violations of civil rights laws, and potential changes to institutional governance, among others. The Compact comes amid ongoing efforts by the Trump administration to pressure academic and other institutions into adopting its policy priorities, especially with respect to scientific research, promotion of ideological diversity in faculty hiring, diversity programming, transgender athletes, and mitigating antisemitism on campus. At this time, it is not clear if or when the administration intends to invite universities other than the initial nine to sign the Compact.
Below we provide a high-level summary of the Compact's material terms, and flag certain important questions regarding the implementation and enforcement of those terms.
Overview of the Compact and Its Enforcement
With certain limited exceptions outlined herein, the Compact requires universities to agree to the following policy priorities:
- Equality in admissions. With the exception of institutions "comprised of students of a specific sex or religious denomination," schools would be prohibited from considering sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious association, or any proxies thereof in any decision related to student admissions or financial support. Signatories must publish on their websites the objective criteria on which they base admissions decisions; require all undergraduate applicants to have taken a widely used standardized test like the SAT or other "program-specific measures of accomplishment" in the case of the arts and other specialized programs; and report anonymized applicant data (including GPA and test scores) by race, national origin, and sex.8
- Marketplace of ideas and civil discourse. Signatories must "foster[] a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus," "with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines." Institutions must revise governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including "transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas," and to adopt a policy protecting academic freedom. Institutions also must require "conditions of civility" to foster the freedom to debate and must "commit to using lawful force" to maintain such conditions, ensuring that they "do not knowingly (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations; (2) allow demonstrators to heckle or accost individual students or groups of students; or (3) allow obstruction of access to parts of campus based on students' race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion." Furthermore, signatories must adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.9 These provisions are likely to raise certain First Amendment concerns, including by specifying protection for "conservative" but not other ideas; by giving the government authority to monitor and enforce conditions related to viewpoint diversity within each signatory university; and by obligating signatories to prevent "belittl[ing]," "heckl[ing]" and "harassing" for one's views, at least some amount of which the Supreme Court has held is protected by the First Amendment.
- Nondiscrimination in faculty and administrative hiring. Signatories must commit to "rigorous and meritocratic selection based on objective and measurable criteria" when selecting staff, and consistent with Title VII and other anti-discrimination laws, must not consider factors such as sex, ethnicity, race, national origin, disability or religion in "any decision related to the appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level," except as permitted by law.10
- Institutional neutrality. Signatories must commit to certain institutional neutrality policies that require university employees acting in an official capacity to "abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university." These policies would be applied "with equal force" across an institution, whether at the college, school, department, program, center, or institute level.11
- Student learning. Signatories must make certain "grade integrity" commitments, including neither "inflat[ing]" nor "deflat[ing]" grades for any "non-academic reason." Rather, grades must "reflect the demonstrated mastery of a subject that the grade purports to represent." To that end, schools must agree to "use public accountability mechanisms to demonstrate their commitment to grade integrity, such as publishing grade distribution dashboards with multiyear trendlines, public statements that explain student outcomes and any unusual upward trends, and comparisons with peer institutions."12
- Student equality. Signatories must treat students "as individuals and not on the basis of their immutable characteristics, with due exceptions for sex-based privacy, safety, and fairness" (e.g., single-sex spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms, and fair competition in sports). Signatories must commit to "defining and otherwise interpreting 'male,' 'female,' 'woman,' and 'man' according to reproductive function and biological processes." Unequal treatment based on any other immutable characteristics would not be permitted in the context of, e.g., grading and access to buildings, scholarships, and other university resources. Institutions also must agree to "maintain clear and consistent disciplinary standards that apply equally to all students, faculty, and staff."13
- Financial responsibility. Signatories must commit to freezing the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years. In addition, signatories must publicly post statistics about average earnings from graduates in each academic program and refund tuition to undergraduate students who drop out during the first academic term. Furthermore, any university with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student would agree to not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs, with exceptions for "families of substantial means." Finally, signatories are required to commit to accepting full transfer credits from the Joint Service Transcript of military service members and veterans enrolling in academic programs.14
- Foreign entanglements.
- International student admissions. Signatories must cap admission of participants in the Student Visa Exchange Program to no more than 15 percent of the university's undergraduate student population,15 with no more than five percent of the undergraduate student population from any one country. Furthermore, signatories must commit to selecting foreign students based on "demonstrably extraordinary talent, rather than on the basis of financial advantage to the university," "to screen out students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values," and to provide all known information about foreign students, including discipline records, to the Departments of Homeland Security and State.16
- Money laundering program. Signatories must maintain an anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer ("KYC") program in accordance with federal law, which program must include: (a) procedures to verify counterpart identification and retain necessary identifying and transaction information; (b) a designated compliance officer to coordinate compliance with the program and make timely disclosures to federal agencies; (c) suspicious activity reporting procedures and document retention guidelines for any suspicious activity reports and supporting documentation; and (d) training and education of appropriate university personnel concerning their program responsibilities.17
- Enforcement. On an annual basis, signatories must (1) via their President, Provost, and Head of Admission, certify annually to their institutions' adherence with the Compact and (2) conduct (or hire a third party to conduct) and post publicly an anonymous poll of faculty, students, and staff to evaluate institutional performance under the Compact. Signatories found by the Department of Justice to have "willfully or negligently" violated the Compact will lose access to "the benefits of this Compact" for one year, or two years for subsequent violations. Signatories found to have violated the Compact must return to the U.S. government "all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of violation" and "any private contributions" to the institution during the period of violation "shall be refunded to the grantor upon the request of the grantor."18
Open Questions Regarding Authorization, Implementation, and Enforcement
The Compact leaves open important questions about its authorization, implementation and enforcement, including penalties on any signatory university for failing to meet the Compact's obligations.
The Compact does not explain the statutory or other basis that authorizes the Administration to give preferential access to federal programs, such as grants, on the basis of signing such an agreement, or of excluding from (or granting less favored access to) programs and benefits to institutions that do not agree to it. Some commenters have suggested that the Compact would be subject to constitutional challenge, either in whole or in part.19
Many concepts and terms in the Compact are as yet undefined and/or vague. Accordingly, signatories may find it difficult to know whether the Department of Justice will deem them in compliance with its requirements. For example, with respect to student learning, the Compact does not provide guidance on the "non-academic reasons" that would run afoul of the grade integrity requirements; and with respect to foreign entanglements, it is not clear how to judge if an applicant has demonstrated "hostility" to the "values" of the United States or its allies.
The scope of benefits under the Compact, and relatedly the scope of liability for violations, likewise are unclear. For example, if an institution signs on to the Compact's terms and the Department of Justice determines that the institution has violated one or more of those terms, would all federal benefits—research dollars and beyond—be affected by an instance of non-compliance, or would only those additional or new federal benefits that have accrued as a result of the institution having signed onto this Compact (the scope of which is unclear as well) be affected? In addition, it is unclear how this Compact could facilitate or enforce the requirement that signatories return private contributions upon request of contributors, which would interject the federal government into private funding agreements to which it has no privity. Finally, but importantly, signatories must certify annually to their institutions' adherence to the Compact. This raises the prospect whether violations might provide an avenue for False Claims Act liability (with its attendant treble damages) and thereby support the Trump administration's recent push for that statute's use against federal funding recipients that fail to comply with funding conditions.20
Footnotes
1. Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education (undated) (document reportedly circulated by the White House), available at Washington Examiner, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Compact-for-Academic-Excellence-in-Higher-Education-10.1.pdf. This copy of the Compact was posted by the Washington Examiner and has not been independently confirmed by Ropes & Gray or, to our knowledge, posted publicly by any government source. The nine universities include Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia.
2. Natalie Andrews & Douglas Belkin, White House Asks Colleges to Sign Sweeping Agreement to Get Funding Advantage, Wall Street Journal (Oct. 1, 2025), https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/trump-universities-compact-federal-funds-agreement-df158493.
3. Compact at 1.
4. Andrews & Belkin, supra note 2.
5. Betsy Klein, White House Calls on Universities to Agree to Demands for Expanded Access to Federal Funding, CNN (Oct. 2, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/politics/white-house-higher-education-compact-federal-funding.
6. Office of Governor Gavin Newsom, Governor Newsom: No State Funding for "Sell-Out" Universities (Oct. 2, 2025), https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/02/governor-newsom-no-state-funding-for-sell-out-universities/.
7. Asher Price, UT official "honored" to receive Trump's university demands. Axios Austin (Oct. 2, 2025), https://www.axios.com/local/austin/2025/10/02/trump-compact-texas.
8. Compact at 1-2.
9. Compact at 2-3.
10. Compact at 4.
11. Id.
12. Compact at 5.
13. Id.
14. Compact at 6.
15. For universities presently over the 15 percent population, incoming matriculating classes should meet the 15 percent cap.
16. Compact at 7-8.
17. Id.
18. Compact at 9.
19. Erwin Chemerinsky, Trump's 'Compact' with Universities is Just Extortion, New York Times (Oct. 2, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/opinion/trump-compact-universities-constitution.html.
20. Memorandum from the Deputy Attorney General, U.S. Dep't of Justice, to the Office of the Associate Attorney General et al., Civil Rights Fraud Initiative (May 19, 2025), https://www.justice.gov/dag/media/1400826/dl?inline; U.S. Dep't of Health & Hum. Servs., DOJ-HHS False Claims Act Working Group (July 2, 2025), https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-doj-false-claims-act-working-group.html.
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