The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Is, Unsurprisingly, the Exact Opposite of What It Pretends to Be

Baker Library at Dartmouth College

This one is long, even by Curmie’s standards, Gentle Reader.  Buckle up.

A few months ago, Curmie wrote a blog post criticizing the president of his alma mater, Dartmouth College, for declining to sign on to the “Call for Constructive Engagement” from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. 

Here’s a snippet of Curmie’s commentary: 

At the moment, Dartmouth is one of only two Ivy League schools not to have substantial cuts in federal funding based on little but the caprice of the most anti-intellectual administration in history.  Dartmouth’s time will come, no doubt.  Surely we’re not under the impression that craven silence is any kind of reasonable solution.

Sometimes Curmie hates being right.  When you’re dealing with an authoritarian bully like Donald Trump, the slightest capitulation, even if it’s manifested as inaction, will be seen as weakness, and further demands are both inevitable and imminent.  And so… here we are.  Dartmouth is one of nine colleges and universities currently being extorted into agreeing to asked for commentary about the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which, of course, has literally nothing to do with academic excellence, but is instead an authoritarian wet dream of governmental control over some of the nation’s most reputable, I dare say prestigious, bastions of higher education.  Dartmouth’s response, alas, couldn’t be more wishy-washy.  Curmie detects just a little too much Susan Collins in President Sian Leah Beilock’s statement.

Side note: The other schools on this particular hit list are Arizona, Brown, MIT, Penn, USC, Texas, Vanderbilt, and Virginia.  Gentle Reader, if you are an alum of any of the nine institutions listed here, Curmie urges you to head to a webpage created by a group called Stand for Academic Freedom and sign on to a petition to your alma mater’s president and trustees urging them to refuse to submit to the Compact.  By the way, apparently these schools were chosen because the White House believes they “are, or could be, ‘good actors.’”  Curmie, a theatre director for a half century or so, hereby hopes for more bad actors.  The Compact is essentially a threat masquerading as an opportunity: about as close as a government can come to a protection racket.

We start with the threat at the end of the first paragraph of the document: “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”  (Curmie can’t suppress a giggle here: the word the idiots who wrote and distributed this missive meant is “forgo.”  “Forego” means precede.  Oh, and they make the same mistake in the other direction in Section 9.  <Snort.>)  The “federal benefits” which might be jeopardized by failure to adhere to edicts from the Mad King of Trumpistan include access to federally-affiliated student financial aid, research grants, and student visas. 

OK, on to Section 1: “Equality in Admissions.”  There’s the predictable anti-DEI blather, but the really problematic paragraphs, to Curmie’s mind, come later: 

University admissions decisions shall be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the University’s website and available to all prospective applicants and members of the public.

Institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, or CLT) or program-specific measures of accomplishment in the case of music, art, and other specialized programs of study. Universities shall publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin, and sex.

What.  Utter.  Crap.  “Objective criteria”?  That would eliminate any thought process by admissions offices.  How do you reconcile, for example, excellent grades and a poor SAT score?  Could be the school has no standards; could be the student had test anxiety, or was ill or dealing with some other form of life issue the day of the test.  Curmie has been on both ends of alumni interviews: does this student have what it takes to succeed in this specific environment?  Recommendations from high school teachers really do matter; Curmie has read a few hundred of them, and not infrequently made recommendations about scholarships accordingly.

That student over there doesn’t have a very good grade point average overall, but look at how much better he did when he quit the football team and joined the marching band (or vice versa).  That other student went in the opposite direction.  Knowing why would be a good thing.  Yet another applicant is brilliant in one area but barely passable in another (Curmie saw a lot of that in theatre majors, a fair number of whom were not necessarily noted for their mathematical prowess.)  Do we celebrate the specialized excellence or go for the applicant who is very good (as opposed to outstanding) across the board.  Curmie once again reveals his inner Confucian: there is simply no way to factor all of the potential variables into an “objective” model… and if there were, it would be so complex that it could be parsed only by someone with an advanced degree in statistics and probability, not by high schooler looking at a website.

More importantly, the past matters, but it isn’t the sole determinant of future success.  Standardized tests measure test-taking ability more than knowledge.  Curmie has made this point more times than it’s practicable to link to all the examples here, but this one, with reference to his own experience as a test-taker, may be taken as illustrative.

Oh, one more thing: this administration sure does care about “objectivity” when it means rich white folks benefit (students really do perform better on the SAT if they’ve taken one of those often expensive prep courses).  And their quest for transparency inevitably means lawsuits, and that, too, benefits families that can afford lawyers.  The desire to break down the data by race, national origin, and sex—but not the economic status of the student—is sort of a tell, isn’t it?  But, more significantly, where was that reverence for objectivity when the nation was saddled with cabinet appointees like Kennedy, Hegseth, and McMahon, all of whom are objectively unqualified to be hired by their agency, let alone lead it?

The Compact, in other words, should be rejected based on its first section alone.  But (insert late-night infomercial voice here) wait!  That’s not all!  Moving on to Section 2: Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse.  Here’s the money quote: 

A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.  

That all sounds pretty innocuous: well, except for the paranoia about sparking violence (!) against conservative ideas.  (Curmie, who has spent considerable time on college campuses over a period of more than half a century, has literally never seen anything approaching violence against conservatives.)  Tellingly, the proposal is sufficiently vague that virtually any actual examination of an ideology could be seen as attacking it.  Racism is conservative.  Sexism is conservative.  Homophobia is conservative.  True, most 21^st-century conservatives reject, or at least purport to reject, these ideologies, but all have been standard conservative doctrine in Curmie’s lifetime.  (Curmie is old, but not that old.)  And transphobia and Islamophobia are still central to the right’s playbook.

Curmie belittled more than a few arguments from the right at some point in his career: not because they were from the right, but because they didn’t stand up to scrutiny.  He also got in trouble for saying that not all feminist arguments are good arguments, and that a proposal to enforce “anti-racism” (not being racist was insufficient) on all students in a program was “Stalinistic.”  That kind of criticism would no doubt be applauded by the Regime, not because it was well-reasoned, but because it furthered their point of view in an “enemy of my enemy” sort of way.

There’s a fair amount of argumentation in Section 2 that’s actually good policy, but rather ironic coming from this administration.  It’s fine to assert the importance of civility and to note that “Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.”  But this administration was strangely quiet when tenured faculty were fired for being insufficiently obsequious in mourning the death of Charlie Kirk.  Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Plus, of course, the kinds of policies proposed in this section about safeguarding free expression have already been adopted, generally long ago, by virtually every college or university in the country.  There may not have been universal enforcement, but these matters are often more complicated than the Trumpsters would have us believe.  Curmie is especially fond, though, of this sentence: “The university shall impartially and vigorously enforce all rights and restrictions it adopts with respect to free speech and expression.”  It follows shortly after the prohibition of “support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.”  (“Support” is, of course, undefined.)  Oh, and there’s a prohibition against countenancing genocide (except when perpetrated by Israel, bien sûr).  We’ll just antiphrastically avoid noting that even supporting violence is protected speech unless there is a specific and imminent incitement.

By the way, Antifa, which is not an organization at all, but simply an anti-fascist (notice the first six letters) ideology, is now characterized by Dear Leader and his merry band of sycophants as a terrorist threat.  So much for free speech, a ”broad spectrum of viewpoints,” and similar sentiments. 

Section 3: Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring.  Boy, that would be great.  Having, say, a university president not be selected by the politically appointed trustees here in Texas would be a big step in the right direction.  Oh.  Wait.  That’s probably not what this section means, even if that’s what it says.  There’s also the same bullshit about objectivity as for admissions.  I mean, hire the professor who has the best (perhaps padded) résumé, not the one students respond to, right?  These people neither know nor care about actual education.

Section 4: Institutional Neutrality.  This is actually reasonable, except, of course, that it is intended in this document (see above re Charlie Kirk aftermath) to extend past insisting on neutrality from employees in their “capacity as university representatives.”  It’s also interesting and ironic that President Beilock of Dartmouth is quoted approvingly in this section of a document that is being used to extort her college.

Section 5:  Student Learning.  This is a screed against grade inflation.  Curmie wishes them luck.

Section 6: Student Equality.  Mostly an attack on trans athletes, with some argument against, say, scholarships designated specifically for students of a particular sex, race, national origin, etc.  The section is simplistic and predictable.  (Curmie would be interested in seeing a discussion of donor’s rights in this regard.  So, he suspects, would Beloved Spouse, who works in Financial Aid.) 

Section 7: Financial Responsibility.  The GOP, which has been largely responsible for under-funding public universities (including some of the nine schools affected by thee Compact), is suddenly concerned with students being “saddled with life-altering debt.”  It’s certainly true that there are a lot more administrative staff than necessary, especially in Student Affairs; it’s also true that upper-level administrators are almost universally overpaid relative to other staff and faculty.  (That part doesn’t get mentioned, of course.)

But the level of reporting demanded in this section (and others) actually increases administrative costs.  Curmie is so old that he remembers when it was the liberals who were all about administrivia.  Not so much, now…

There’s also a demand to freezing “effective tuition rates” (does that mean inflation-adjusted?) for five years.  Yawn.  More grandstanding than policy.  Next.  Oh, and universities should “refund tuition to students who drop out during the first academic term of their undergraduate studies.”  This has got to be a contender for stupidest fucking idea in the history of stupid fucking ideas.

And… there would no tuition charges for student in the hard sciences at schools with more that a $2 million endowment per student.  This one, apart from being profoundly stupid by de facto punishing universities for having good science programs, seems aimed at specific schools.  Curmie’s alma mater, for example, is certainly in good financial shape, but it comes in at $1.8 million or thereabouts in this metric.

This entire section, like Section 1, is enough to make any competent administrator reject the entire Compact, even if other parts of it make a fair amount of sense… which it sort of does in a couple places.

Section 8: Foreign Entanglements.  There’s a lot of nonsense about money laundering and such-like before we get to the real stuff about limiting enrollment by foreign students.  This is supported by predictable jingoistic argumentation about requiring “foreign students [to] exhibit extraordinary talent that promises to make America stronger and more economically productive, and the selected students are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values, ultimately increasing global understanding and appreciation for the United States and our way of life.”

Curmie speaks here from years of experience with an exchange program with a British conservatory.  The rationale wasn’t about making America more economically productive (the only thing this administration cares about); it was about enhancing American students’ education by exposing them to peers who had grown up in a different society and a political system and had been educated in a different manner.  It was about establishing relationships that would be beneficial to students from both sides of the Atlantic.  (For the record, there are at least a few of those British students who now live and work in this country.  This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it is simply a thing.)

Trump’s purported America First ideology in fact diminishes opportunities for American students to experience… wait for it… a “broad spectrum of ideas.”  It also wants to deny access to anyone who might not be willing to swear allegiance to “American and Western values.”  How would they know without being exposed to them except in the abstract?  And if those values are indeed superior, wouldn’t even a skeptical student smart enough to get into one of those universities end up being converted?

By the way, apparently those “objective” standards for admission apply only to American students.  Curmie speaks only for himself, but he’d rather have a better student who happens to be Chinese or Saudi than a lesser student who’s American.  If you’re an American student who can’t compete: get better.

Anyway… Section 9: Exceptions.  Nothing of substance here.

Section 10: Enforcement.  More busy-work; more threats.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

The Compact, as expected, does exactly the opposite of what it purports to do.  It places the government as the de facto decision-maker for both public and private universities.  It restricts freedom of speech even as it pretends to support it.  It reveals a profound ignorance about the way higher education works and a contempt for scholarship, teaching, and learning.  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…

Orwell was an optimist.