“The premise of the document,“ Kornbluth continued, ”is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”
It marks academia’s clearest response yet to a 10-point document President Donald Trump sent last week asking schools to limit international student enrollment, freeze domestic tuition rates for five years, hew to certain definitions of gender, and prohibit activities that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
The federal government is still awaiting responses before its Oct. 20 deadline from the eight other schools, chosen in part because the Trump administration considers them “good actors” in higher education. They include Brown, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, and the University of Arizona.
MIT faculty are “relieved” by the school’s position, said Ariel White, a political science professor and vice president of MIT’s American Association of University Professors chapter. But they expect to see Trump employ his whole-of-government approach against the university in response.
“This offer looked like an invitation, but it wasn’t,” she said. “It was a ransom note. Now there is some risk that we will face reprisal.”
What form that reprisal could take is not immediately clear. But White House spokesperson Liz Huston said Friday that “any university that refuses this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform higher education isn’t serving students or their parents – they’re bowing to radical, left-wing bureaucrats.”
“The truth is, the best science can’t thrive in institutions that have abandoned merit, free inquiry, and the pursuit of truth,” Huston’s statement continued. “President Trump encourages universities to join us in restoring academic excellence and commonsense policies.”
MIT’s response comes as a growing coalition of university faculty and staff — in Cambridge and beyond — are encouraging their leaders to stave off Trump’s push to assert control over American higher education.
“This compact tries to treat all institutions like public state universities and have that level of oversight that states may have, but the federal government does not,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
In the last week, faculty and students at MIT said agreeing to Trump’s“Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” would betray the institution’s values. More than a dozen student groups also urged MIT to refuse the offer, and at least two academic departments penned letters to Kornbluth outlining their concerns.
There has been activism at other campuses sent the compact, too. More than 500 Dartmouth faculty members signed a petition this week urging their college leadership to reject the offer, and students and faculty at Brown rallied on Thursday for the same reason.
Most schools to receive the compact have said little so far. The board chair of the University of Texas said its leaders “enthusiastically look forward” to reviewing the deal, while the University of Virginia has created a committee.
At Brown, president Christina H. Paxson made her first public comment on the compact Friday, in a letter shortly before MIT’s letter came out.
“In this moment, I feel strongly that it is most helpful to hear from members of our community,” Paxson wrote. “We need to decide, as a community, how or whether to respond to the invitation to provide comments.”
She also noted that last spring Brown affirmed “a set of university values” that include upholding academic freedom, openness and diversity of ideas. The school also reached a $50 million deal with the Trump administration in July to restore its lost research grants.
At Dartmouth, which has kept quiet since a brief statement last week, history professor Bethany Moreton said Friday that she hoped the school would follow MIT’s lead.
“MIT has distinguished itself as the first of these institutions to categorically reject an unconstitutional and unlawful attempt at exerting power over higher education,” she said. “It’s heartening that at least one of these campuses has risen to the moment to say no, American higher education is not for sale.”
Meanwhile, Harvard University remains in negotiations over a deal of its own. Citing broad concerns about the climate on campus, the Trump administration has temporarily pulled millions of dollars in research funding from Harvard, threatened the school’s tax-exempt status, and even said it could revoke the university’s accreditation, an independent stamp of approval schools need to receive federal financial aid.
MIT could now face similar threats, said Kelchen, the higher education expert.
“They’ve got resources to withstand for a while, and they have public perception at least within their community on their side. Those are the best possible set of conditions,” he said. “But on the other hand, the federal government can use the hammer of pulling out federal funding.”
That could prove costly for MIT. Last year, the federal government awarded MIT $648 million for sponsored activities, including research — among the largest sums of any university in the country. The potential loss of some of those funds, combined with the newfound 8 percent endowment tax, has MIT bracing for $300 million in budget cuts, the Globe reported. Since January, the university has already frozen much hiring cut departmental budgets by 5 percent.
It is also challenging some of the federal cuts in court.
In her letter Friday, Kornbluth wrote that MIT already complies with many of the compact’s conditions.
The university “never had legacy preferences in admissions” and instituted the SAT/ACT test score requirement for students after the COVID-19 pandemic — a sign that it “prides itself on rewarding merit.” It already waives tuition for all students whose families earn below $200,000, and MIT’s undergraduate population is roughly 10 percent foreign students. (The compact set a limit of 15 percent.)
Kornbluth in her Friday letter said that she hopes the long-running, mutually-beneficial relationship between the MIT and the federal government endures.
“Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America’s research universities and the US government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people,” Kornbluth wrote. “We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.”
And even if the Trump administration raises the stakes, there is no path forward without unity across universities, said Carla Garcia, a PhD candidate and president of MIT’s Latinx Graduate Student Association.
“While the compact began with this proposal to nine universities, it almost certainly will not end here,” Garcia said at a rally on campus Friday afternoon. “All nine universities must take this critical moment to join MIT and stand united against the compact and refuse to acquiesce or negotiate. It is the only way we get through this.”
Alexa Gagosz and Amanda Gokee of the Globe Staff contributed to this story.
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.