OPINION
President Donald Trump recently offered nine universities a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that offers preferential treatment for federal funding if they enact several reforms.
The proposal is in its initial stages and the administration seeks feedback to refine the compact’s provisos.
Among the requests: a five-year tuition freeze, forbidding the use of race or sex in hiring and admissions, institutional neutrality, limiting foreign enrollment to 15 percent, adopting the traditional definition of male and female, reforming grade inflation, ensuring no single ideology controls campus, and enforcing civility.
The compact has drawn criticisms from both the Right and the Left. But one of its architects, Marc Rowan, chief executive of Apollo Global Management, penned an op-ed Oct. 10 in the New York Times explaining why it’s needed:
…the system is broken. Over the past year, I have spoken with countless university presidents, directors and advisers; scholars and academics; and lawmakers, policy experts and activists. The one thing they all agree on is that our university system, which was once one of the nation’s greatest strategic assets, has lost its way.
The evidence is overwhelming: outrageous costs and prolonged indebtedness for students; poor outcomes, with too many students left unable to find meaningful work after graduating; some talented domestic students and scholars have been crowded out of enrollment and employment opportunities by international students; and a high degree of uniformity of thought among faculty members and administrators, which can result in a hostile environment for students with different ideas.
Critics have argued that it is not the place of the federal government to solve these problems. But without government involvement, reform will be difficult. Many colleges and universities, and especially some of the oldest and traditionally prestigious schools, are burdened with archaic governance structures that make self-reform all but impossible. This means that course correction must come from the outside.
Given the enormous investment of taxpayer money, it is appropriate that the federal government be involved. The government should not be using public funds — tens of billions of dollars annually in research funding, to say nothing of student aid — to prop up a system that purports to educate American students and serve the public good but is all too often doing nothing of the sort.
Read the full piece at the New York Times.
