Archon Fung: Hi, you’re listening to Terms of Engagement. I’m Archon Fung. I’m a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation here.
Stephen Richer: And I’m Stephen Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I’m now a senior practice fellow here at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School.
Archon Fung: And as always, we’re speaking as individuals, not as representatives of the university in any capacity. And so we’ve already fulfilled one request from the Compact for Higher Education.
Stephen Richer: That we be speaking as individuals rather than…
Archon Fung: Yes. Okay. Yes.
Stephen Richer: Well, we never purported to do otherwise.
Archon Fung: Absolutely. Pre-complied.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. Well, today we’re going to be talking about President Trump’s proposed compact with American universities, as we did last week. Now, when we spoke to you last week, the administration had offered it to only nine universities, and this was a list of ten points that President Trump and the administration wanted universities to adopt so that they would be given preferential opportunities, specifically with respect to federal grants and federal funding. Now, since last week, MIT has officially rejected the proposal in a letter from MIT’s president, Sally Kornbuth. A number of other universities have made public comments on it, but no other university has rejected the proposal or has accepted the proposal. A number of university bodies have taken various votes. For instance, the Vanderbilt Faculty Senate voted to reject the proposal. Now it’s up to the university’s leadership whether or not they do that. But that was the faculty of Vanderbilt. And then reportedly as of last night and then this morning, as a result of MIT’s rejection, perhaps the administration is looking at offering this compact, this proposal to all American universities and colleges and so stay tuned on that. That’s the latest news and we’ll be talking through that. As always, please feel free to put your questions into the question box. We’ll take a look at them and we’ll try to integrate them into our presentation today.
Archon Fung: Great. And as regular viewers will note, last time we had Professor Joey Fishkin, a law professor from UCLA, on to talk about the compact. He was quite skeptical and critical of the compact. And today we have a fantastic person, my friend and colleague, Danielle Allen, to give her perspective on the compact and how higher ed might move forward. Danielle is the James Conant Bryant University professor at Harvard University. She’s written many, many books and articles recently, Justice by Means of Democracy. She directs the Allen Lab here at the Kennedy School and the Ash Center And she started a sub stack that she both contributes to, but I think also curates called The Renovator. And a big part of her intellectual agenda right now is on renovating democracy and and improving it through various renovations. Danielle is we invite Danielle to come on for this show to talk about our part two about the compact. because she wrote on The Renovator an extended sub-stack post titled, Why I’m Excited About the White House’s Proposal for a Compact for Higher Education, that’s gotten some attention and some comment in part because many other people, Joey Fishkin, Aaron Chemerinsky, Steve Levitsky, and Ryan Enos, among others, have been pretty scathing in their criticism of the compact And so some of what Danielle says runs counter to that current anyway. All right. So let’s have Danielle Allen on. Great.
Stephen Richer: So, Professor Allen, I know that you write in the post that you think universities should reject the compact proposal as it currently is. But why are you excited? What’s the thesis? What’s motivating the headline there that you’re potentially excited about this offer?
Danielle Allen: Thanks, Stephen. And please call me Danielle. And thank you, Archon, also for having me. So I have been arguing for a while that there is a need for a new social contract between America and higher ed or between colleges and universities and the American people. So in that regard, I was excited by the idea that we can have a conversation about what that compact should be. I think it’s overdue. And also I was secondly excited about what happened ten days or so ago because Higher Ed has been having trouble coordinating around proactive vision for the future of Higher Ed. Lots of organizations are afraid to draw attention to themselves, so that blocks them from coordinating. Other organizations, for example, Harvard, my own home institution, is involved in protracted negotiations with the administration, and that prevents them from coordinating with others. So suddenly it seemed here was a group that were all exactly in the same position. And therefore they had the space to coordinate with each other. And they already had the administration’s attention, so they didn’t have to fear drawing new attention to themselves. So what I saw was an incredible coordination opportunity to embrace the idea that there might be a new social contract between higher ed and America, and then to consider precisely what should be in it. So I didn’t think that the compact as written was really a reasonable way to go. But I did think the idea that we might see some higher ed institutions coordinating to address the question of what should be in a compact between higher ed and America was very worthwhile.
Stephen Richer: So kickstarting this conversation and having a number of universities at the table rather than just having it be unilateral negotiations between one university and the Trump administration.
Danielle Allen: Yeah, that’s definitely part of it, though I would add to it. I mean, another part of my post was the idea that the effort should really be redirected away from executive action into legislative action. But I also think it’s important to remind people that it’s completely reasonable for an executive branch to propose a framework for legislation. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in an executive branch doing that. And so if the whole conversation could be rerouted through, for example, the relevant congressional and Senate committees that focus on the Higher Education Act, I think we would actually be on our path to something productive.
Archon Fung: Great. I think there are two parts to your post and to the debate generally that are a part of discussion and subject of disagreement. The first is what’s wrong with universities, if anything, right? So the critical substantive part. And then the second part is what should we do about it? And so maybe if we could, we’ll talk about both. We need to talk about both. And you do in your Substack post. But on that first, I do think it’s a matter of debate because my perception right now is in the debate between the Trump administration and many higher ed institutions. higher ed leaders and people in higher ed are reluctant to acknowledge that anything is wrong with universities and are in kind of a defensive position. And part of why your post is super interesting and provocative is you say, no, there’s a lot wrong and we need a new contract for between higher ed and American society. So could you go into some of what you think your major concerns with the current status of higher ed are, what higher ed is doing and where we should be going?
Danielle Allen: Sure. Well, I mean, it’s interesting. I have a different picture of where opinion within higher ed is. I want to just say that first. I actually think there’s pretty widespread recognition that we have a lot of challenges and that we’ve lost the trust of the American people. You could say we’ve lost credibility with the American people. I think that’s pretty widely recognized. And there are, I think, good reasons for that collapse of legitimacy. ideological skewing does matter. And we do have to figure out how to achieve viewpoint diversity on campus. I mean, it’s an unproductive thing for everybody. If people are educated in contexts that really only give them an aperture to sort of part of the world, they have to understand the whole world. And if we’re not achieving that on our campuses, then we’re failing our students. So that seems like a really big thing. Secondly, there are the issues of cost. The increasing burden on students and families, the problems of student debt and the like. And we’ve known this has been a problem for decades, literally. I mean, two and a half decades at least, we’ve had clarity that the increasing costs of higher ed were going to sort of break the system eventually. And I think that’s what’s happening. And we have not achieved appropriate approaches to cost control. I think there’s widespread recognition that we need to do that work. And the last thing I would say is it’s not just about Having viewpoint diversity on campus, that’s important, but also it’s really the question of whether or not we can develop a culture of often said civil discourse or simply sort of productive negotiation across lines of difference, including ideological difference. But to do that is really to cultivate what I call civic strength, the capacity of a democratic society to foster relationships among citizens of widely differing points of views that support productive negotiation through institutions. and that cultivation of civic strength is fundamentally about civic education a focus on civic education is something that higher education has by and large walked away from over recent decades so those would be three things that i think are all actually highlighted by the compact that I would agree and I think actually many in higher ed agree that those are areas where we need to do work.
Stephen Richer: I want to pick up on that thread that danielle mentioned about integrating civic education and civic knowledge into a future compact. But I was a little surprised to hear you say that, what you just said, because I feel that every university president that has made a comment on this whole situation has said, we acknowledge that there are things that we need to improve. We acknowledge that the university system is so exclusive that it’s inaccessible to so many Americans. We acknowledge that there’s a need for more intellectual diversity. And so I actually feel exactly what Danielle said, that there is a recognition now maybe that has come out more as a result of some of these conversations yes or maybe it’s just a pr thing where it doesn’t sound good to say hey look we’re perfect you don’t need to be worried about us stop talking about us but maybe it’s just a stronger bargaining position to say we recognize that we have some weaknesses as an organization however we don’t feel that this is the appropriate means to go about achieving that It seems like the intellectual diversity one is the one that most people pick up on. And it seems like one that’s been a constant for the Trump administration to harp on. But I thought the one that was interesting and goes to maybe some of the populist roots of President Trump was the cost. And that’s something that every American family thinks about, whether it’s prohibitively expensive or whether they send a kid to university and then they’re saddled with debt for a long time. And so I thought that that was sort of a… interesting blend between maybe things that would have appealed to the right of center but and then things that maybe wouldn’t have been ordinarily seen as part of the you know the trump coalition yeah yeah.
Archon Fung: Good good uh and so let me uh I agree with what both of you said many higher ed leaders many faculty uh in private conversations will say hey look you know there’s a lot wrong with higher ed we’re far from perfect and I don’t think anyone would in public say that we’re perfect except for uh Thomas Massie did say that about MIT and yeah X post uh so this is a senator u.s senator from kentucky very conservative uh or u.s house member house i think he’s a representative yeah yeah I believe he’s a two-time MIT graduate. I spoke to one of his professors this weekend who said he was an absolutely brilliant undergraduate student. I didn’t know that. I don’t know Massie. So Representative Massie responded on X to the compact, quote, the surest way to screw up the world’s best technical school is to let the feds tell them how to run it. Congrats to my alma mater. This is after President Sally Kornblit’s letter rejecting the compact. Congrats to my alma mater for turning down a bribe to let the executive branch dictate what happens to its campus. A lot of things are wrong in America, comma, this is the key passage, but MIT is not one of them. So I think the consensus among… both of you and probably me as well, is, no, even MIT, there’s some things wrong with MIT that could be fixed. And then the debate is about what those things are, and then whether this is a point of departure, a promising point of departure.
Stephen Richer: Well, and I think Danielle would point out, and her article does, is that… federal involvement in universities is not new. And she recounts the history since the nineteen fifties, I believe. And so, like, did you, Danielle, do you find that comment to be credible given federal involvement?
Daniell Allen: Well, I mean, it’s certainly the case that the way federal involvement is unfolding right now is problematic. What we are watching with the compact is the effort on the part of the White House and Department of Education to legislate by fiat. And legislation should pass through the legislature. So in other words, there has always been a formal relationship between expectations of universities and funding streams. Go read the Higher Education Act, and that’s all the way through it. But the point is that that’s come through legislation. And it’s about equality for all institutions that everybody faces the same law. So what we’ve watched instead in the sort of deal-making culture coming out of the administration is a replacement of law with deal-making that erodes equality before the law. It erodes fairness. It erodes business planning, stability and the like. It also obviously undermines our constitutional structure where lawmaking should, again, properly pass through the legislature. So those are the issues as I see them with regard to the methods that are being used.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. Now, one thing you said about that you liked potentially about the administration’s overture was that it solved the collective action problem, that it brought nine universities to the table to have this conversation together. And yet we’ve already seen that MIT stuck its neck out on its own, that it didn’t sign a joint letter that was joined with the other eight universities. And now it seems the Trump administration is going to send this to every single university and every single college. So has that potential solution to the collective action problem already failed?
Danielle Allen: I think in fact, I mean, if the Trump administration does genuinely send this letter to all colleges and universities, then honestly, I think it just makes my point abundantly clear that what they’re doing is legislation and legislation should pass through the legislature. And so there is only one reasonable response at that point if they really do send the letter to everybody, which is that everybody needs to pull on their big kid britches and form a coalition and do the work of actually clarifying the recommendations they would make for amendments to the Higher Education Act.
Archon Fung: Interesting, so it may be the case that sending the letter, expanding the scope and sending it to all universities makes the need for collective action even more evident as it makes the possibility for collective action lower, because I’m sure that many of those colleges and universities will be tempted to sign on to some version of the compact because of all kinds of reasons, political reasons, self-interest reasons. Maybe they think that they may be gain in the funding game, et cetera, if they sign on before other people. So do you think that collective action is harder or easier after MIT and then the expansion of the offer?
Danielle Allen: I think I would say that if it truly goes to everybody, it’s so patently extra constitutional. I see. But it does solve the collective action problem. The only constitutional response is to take the conversation up through the legislature. Mm-hmm.
Stephen Richer: And so Miles asked in the chat, who’s the right body to be starting this? I don’t you all know the higher ed world much better than I do. Is there an existing body that could say, hey, we’re going to form a subcommittee because clearly the Trump administration has an interest in this and we think that we can help this conversation. Is there such a body or does it just we just need the initiative of one or two presidents to really call that body to convene? What do you think, Danielle?
Danielle Allen: I mean, it can function in any number of ways. I mean, yes, the American Association of Universities could convene a task force to do this work, and I think it would be a wonderful thing if they did. Good idea. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has in various ways been trying to achieve coordination. I do think it always matters for some set of distinguished leaders within the sector to, of their own steam, come together and decide that they want to lead such a conversation. It’s also important to recognize the huge diversity of institutions across the sector. So roughly, seventy seven percent of institutions are what you would call open admissions institutions. That is to say, they’re not selective in their choices. So obviously, all of the material in the compact that’s about admissions is only targeting a quarter of the actual institutions in higher education. So that’s the other reason it’s so important for the sector wide associations to come to the table, because they can bring that sort of diversification across the sector that you need to actually have any approach that’s going to be implementable. Yeah.
Stephen Richer: So I guess, you know, Danielle writes a few times that this is a golden opportunity to start that conversation and show that you’re moving the ball forward on your own. So why haven’t, say, the fifty most competitive research universities done this? Is it because they dispute the predicate that there is this challenge or because nobody wants to be doing this right now because they’re fearful and they have other things going on?
Archon Fung: Uh, it’s an interesting question. I think it kind of loops back a little bit to where might this happen and what’s the right body. So Danielle, you mentioned some quite encompassing bodies, but then also in your subtract post, you said maybe it should be these nine that are able to act collectively, which is a good idea. That’s another possibility. Another possibility, a third path. The fourth possibility is the Ivy plus presidents who I understand meet on a regularly, you know, fairly regularly basis, regular basis. Another criticism might be the Ivy Plus might be exactly the wrong body to do that because it’s too elite. Maybe you would want large state school presidents, public universities to do that. But it wouldn’t presume to have to sweep in all universities. I could say this is just a compact between these twenty universities and the administration because we think that just the principles that one. Yeah, exactly.
Danielle Allen: I would I’m arguing against any compact being the structure for regulating the sector. I think that all a compact should ever be used to do would be a statement of principle that would point directionality for amendments to the Higher Education Act.
Stephen Richer: OK, so getting to the actual substance itself of the of the document of the statement of principles, how did we miss civic education last time in the nineteen fifties and any of the subsequent documents? And how do we integrate it into any future document?
Danielle Allen: That’s a great question. I mean, that’s a long story. I don’t know if we have time for all of it, but the short of it is that American educational policy was really impacted first by World War II, the need to build the atom bomb, which led to massive federal investment in the STEM components of research universities. That was then followed up by anxiety provoked by the launch of Sputnik, which led President Eisenhower to also be concerned that the U.S. was falling behind with regard to STEM education. So his educational policy also doubled down on STEM education. Then in the early eighties, we were really worried about economic competitiveness, especially in relationship to Japan. So President Reagan’s economic and educational policy again doubled down on STEM education. Right. Then in the nineteen nineties, we were really worried about rising income inequality. And the policy view was that the way to correct that was to disseminate STEM skills as far and wide as possible to reduce the wage premium on a STEM education. So we again doubled down on STEM education. And in the meanwhile, the country was also polarizing so that by the time we got to the early two thousands, we had really invested a lot in STEM. We had just neglected civic education. We reached a point where we were putting about fifty dollars per kid per year of federal monies for STEM ed and five cents per kid per year to civic ed. And at the same time, polarization has started to emerge that then in the early two thousands in the National Governors Association wanted to try to introduce standards, shared standards across the country. This is in K through twelve, not higher ed. They were able to achieve standards in English language arts and also STEM, but not in social studies. And so that kind of fell out of our K through twelve educational system. We didn’t have accountability. We didn’t have testing and the like. Other kinds of dynamics inside higher ed led to the deprioritization of things like U.S. history, you know, sort of concerns about nationalism, concerns about ethnocentrism and so forth, displaced what had been a traditional curriculum for civic learning in higher ed. So all of these forces have combined together to leave a place where we’re not actually educating for the core functions of democratic citizenship. The STEM education does put us in a position to compete with, say, a China, say a Russia, say a Singapore on those dimensions. But importantly, we want to compete not just as any old country, but as a democracy. So in addition to being strong in STEM, we actually have to be strong in civic strength, which is what democratic education provides. So it’s a long story for why we lost sight of that, took our eye off the ball on that one. But we certainly need it and we need it in higher ed and we need it in K through twelve as a core part of the American educational system and a core part of American educational excellence.
Archon Fung: Yeah, so I agree that getting greater civic education in primary, secondary, and higher ed is important. I worry that the legislative path might be counterproductive, especially in this polarized environment. So if you’d had strong civic ed as a huge part of a priority for higher ed in the nineteen fifties at some point, strong views of anti-communism, exclusive views of anti-communism may have been part and parcel of that. I think part of some of the struggles over culture that you’re seeing now around higher ed and the Smithsonian and other places is about what version of the civic. And I worry that legislating that through Congress might create some pretty exclusive versions of civic education that I would be opposed to and you might be. What do you think about legislating civic education and with a possibility that the wrong content of civic education might resolve?
Danielle Allen: You don’t need to legislate content. And in fact, our federal government has consistently for decades made it a policy not to legislate content. And that should be an unshakable commitment, and we should all defend that commitment. That hasn’t prevented us from legislating investment in STEM education. And if you look at the Higher Education Act, you will see places in the Act where investment in STEM education has been encouraged. You will also see throughout the Act places where there’s been a recognized problem, for example, binge drinking and hazing in the late eighties and nineties, where what is legislated as the requirement that campuses establish task forces and determine how they’re going to solve this problem. So we are quite used to a structure where there’s a goal, there’s an incentivization, and there’s also autonomy for institutions to determine what the right pathway is for them to meet that particular goal. So I believe we are capable of that in this time as well.
Stephen Richer: Yes, I agree. I do not think the federal government should legislate content. I think that should remain a kind of unshakable line that we don’t cross. It’s a great set of principles. So what’s, I guess, what’s stopping just any prominent university professor from drafting a set of principles and trying to get people to start?
Archon Fung: Danielle’s starting to do that.
Danielle Allen: Yeah. I mean, you know, it’s not to be, it’s not the job of a person, right?
I mean, that’s the point, precisely, that you’re trying to help a sector figure out how to regulate itself. And so that has to have some kind of emergent properties. Whatever sort of emerges as a set of principles does have to actually reflect that. a broad field of endeavor and activity. And so it would be inappropriate for any particular single brain to be proposing that this is what the structure should be. And you liken it to the constitutional drafting where it’s not just Madison locked away in a room, but it’s in fact a convening with a lot of given tug and to come up with that document.
Archon Fung: Exactly. So if you could wave a wand, what would be the most promising next step to crystallizing some sort of higher ed collective action in this direction?
Danielle Allen: If I could wave a magic wand, there would be about two dozen brave institutions of different kinds around the country who would come together and would publicly say, we are going to take a stab at a set of principles and some initial policy proposals to support implementation of them. And we are going to reach out to Congress to share these thoughts for the sake of a conversation around the Higher Education Act.
Stephen Richer: Do you think that would ease the pressure? Do you think the Trump administration would say it looks like this is happening in and of itself? And so therefore, we don’t need to send as many messages off?
Archon Fung: I think it would increase the pressure. I think that part of the it depends on, you know, reading the crystal, the tea leaves and thinking what the goals of the administration are. But I don’t think the administration is interested in kind of autonomous self-regulation. They have a substantive, I believe they have a substantive view that you can read in the compact about what the direction should be. And if the collective action doesn’t point in that particular direction, they’re not going to be happy with it. I think, I don’t know. Would it be acceptable in your envisionment of those twenty four universities coming together for the for a representative from the administration to have a seat at that table? Yeah, may moment.
Danielle Allen: So look, That would be for those leaders who are participating in that to answer that. I can’t answer that. I think my hope would be that they would be willing to do that because at the end of the day, again, I think the compact has serious substantive questions in it. I think it gave the wrong answers to those questions, but I think those questions should be heard and engaged.
Stephen Richer: Do you think it’s hurt or helped the debate so far? The compact? Yeah, over reforming universities. Like, do you think that it has provoked more of these conversations that might lead to a productive amendment of what a university looks like? Or do you think it has caused more universities to fossilize and just get in defensive postures?
Archon Fung: That’s interesting. I think in the short term it’s caused defensiveness and fossilization. But in the medium and longer term, I think Danielle’s hope and perhaps at your prodding from your Substack post and other things that you say may point things in a more positive direction. And I think part of the defensiveness, at least among some of the people I talk to, is the thought that, well, the compact and the people proposing it, and this is, I’m repeating here, this isn’t necessarily my view, are obviously acting in bad faith. So we’ve got to invest everything we can in pushing this back and in rejecting it. And then so to Danielle, I guess this is a question, is it relevant or not? If you think that the compact and the people offering it are acting in bad faith, should that matter to you at all as somebody acting in higher ed?
Danielle Allen: Not if it’s possible for us to engage in the legislative process would be my view.
Archon Fung: Right. That’s what I got out of you.
Danielle Allen: Remember that our structure is not just about the executive branch. Our government is more than that. Sorry, my lights just turned off. I guess that means our time is up. Anyway, so yeah, I think if we can engage the legislative branch, it’s a different kind of conversation.
Archon Fung: Yeah, and so that’s really interesting because part of the implicit critique might be, I’m putting words in your mouth now, that maybe me and the people I talk to, we’re being distracted by this bad faith thing. We should focus on what the positive affirmative goal is, which is a more positive social compact that works better for higher ed and better for American society.
Danielle Allen: I do agree. that re-winning the trust of the American people requires those of us in higher ed to take proactive steps.
Archon Fung: Great.
Stephen Richer: I really like that Danielle in the article walks the walk in addition to talking the talk. Not only are you talking about civic, education, civic knowledge, but it keeps pointing out that, guys, there’s this body called Congress, and this is something that maybe they should be involved with, and we should be going through this branch. I’ve already told you my thoughts on this, but I don’t support what President Trump is doing vis-a-vis this school and interactions with Pennsylvania, Columbia, other schools. But I will say that even if he fails on every single one of those fronts, and even if none of the nine schools or no school at all in the United States takes him up on this proposed list of ten terms, I think he has fundamentally changed the conversation that is happening at universities And I’m not sure that that’s necessarily for a bad thing. And so while I would reject the proposal, I welcome some of the conversations. And I think that that some people might be a little alarmed by that. The idea that President Trump, even in failing, failing, has succeeded in maybe provoking some of this reform or at least more people to be talking about, hey, what’s up with universities? Are these still the universities we want?
Archon Fung: Yeah, I very much agree with that. And thank you very much, Danielle, for the excellent post, for your thoughtfulness and contribution, as always. As promised, we never talk more than thirty minutes. It’s been thirty three. So we’re at time.
Stephen Richer: That was my fault. It’s great.
Archon Fung: As a reminder, if you have comments or feedback or suggestions, email us at info at ash.harvard.edu.
Stephen Richer: And thanks as always to Evelyn, Courtney, Sarah, and Colette for helping us put this together. And you can watch this on YouTube or stream it on any of your Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Archon Fung: Thanks for tuning in. And huge thanks to our production team, which is Sarah, Colette, Evelyn, and Courtney. And hope to see everyone next week.
Thank you.
Danielle Allen: Thank you.
