Author: Sharon Strauss

This article was written and submitted by Lucy Conger, C.W. ’68.

The Trump administration proposed a deal last fall to nine leading universities: if you restrict academic freedom, cap admission of foreign undergraduate students and freeze effective tuition rates for five years, your school will get preferential treatment for federal funding.

Students, faculty and alumni groups came together to contest this challenge to university autonomy. The deal was rejected outright by seven of the schools. Trump’s proposal, the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, consists of  ten demands, including:

• eliminate consideration of sex and race in admissions,
• define sex identity by reproductive functions,
• ensure that academic departments and faculty include a mix of ideological perspectives and programs, and
• ban political and social statements by employees on behalf of the university.

The document was issued on October 1, 2025, universities were asked to provide feedback by October 20 and the final deadline for responding to the government was November 21.

How Universities Responded

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology led the wave of rejections with a strong No sent to Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Oct. 10.  MIT President Sally Kornbluth said the Compact “includes principles with which we disagree,” adding MIT policy is guided by “a clear set of values” that include “rewarding merit” and “free expression, as clearly described in the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.”

Brown University President Christina H. Paxson followed, expressing concern that the Compact “would restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance.”

Penn was next to turn down the Compact. “We are committed to merit-based achievement and accountability,” University President J. Larry Jameson said in his reply on October 16. He pointed out that his statement was informed by consultations with faculty, alumni, trustees, students and staff “to ensure that our response reflected our values and the perspectives of our broad community.”

Penn’s rejection was significant as Pres. Trump is a graduate of Wharton (68). Another Penn grad, billionaire financier Marc Rowan (W85), Co-Founder, CEO and Board Chair of Apollo Global Management, was a leading influence in drafting the Compact.

The University of Southern California, University of Virginia, Dartmouth College and University of Arizona also turned down the Compact.

Vanderbilt University and University of Texas at Austin are hold-outs. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said the university would provide feedback on the proposal in the future, adding, “We have not been asked to accept or reject the draft compact.” UT at Austin has not responded publicly to the Compact.

Penn Students, Professors and Alumni Take a Stand

At Penn, several groups acted quickly to the[LC1]  perceived threat to academic freedom and defend the University’s integrity. The Penn chapter of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) issued a sharp response the day after the Compact’s release.  The AAUP-Penn statement  said Penn must uphold “its self-determination” and denounced the “attempt at coercion” as an example of “intensifying political interference into higher education.”

GET-UP UAW and RAP-UP UAW, unions of graduate student research and teaching employees and research associates and postdocs respectively, endorsed the faculty statement and called on the Penn community to sign a petition demanding the Compact’s rejection. By October 15, that petition had been signed by 1,920 Penn community members, including more than 670 faculty, 440 students, 410 alumni and 250 staff. The next day, Jameson issued the official thumbs down to the Compact.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro then expressed his “full support” of the University’s decision. In an Instagram post, he said the  Compact “would limit freedom of speech, the freedom to learn, and the freedom to engage in constructive debate and dialogue in campuses across the country.”

Several groups of Penn activists have come forward to defend the University’s academic integrity and autonomy, including Alumni for Freedom and Democracy and Quaker Courage[LC2] .

Alumni for Freedom and Democracy  (AFFD), a group of Wharton Grad alumni, was formed in April 2025 as a cross-partisan community committed to preserving the essential freedoms that sustain an open society – freedom of thought, civil dialogue, democratic principles and economic opportunity.

Led by Chris Malone (W. ’91), also an officer of his class, AFFD took on academic freedom as its first initiative and launched a statement in support of Penn’s signing of AAUP’s Call for Constructive Engagement last May. “We’re focused on taking principled action in defense of liberty for all. As Wharton alumni, defending academic freedom was a natural starting point,” says Malone.

Ritika Arora (Med ’99), a member of the Quaker Courage executive committee, stated, “The universities in Texas succumbing to Trump’s demands are now not allowed to teach Plato and have eliminated women’s studies programs.” Arora spurns the premise of the Trump-proposed Compact, saying, “Democracy doesn’t work with bribery.” 

National Opposition to Government Intervention

The Compact sparked a national movement. As the deadline approached for responding to Trump’s Education Secretary McMahon, opposition mounted. On November 7, students, faculty and staff protested at 100 universities around the country to demand that their schools say No to the Compact. The organizers were Students Rise Up, a student movement, that was supported by labor unions, the AAUP, Public Citizen and other groups. “The attacks on higher ed are attacks on truth, freedom, and our future. We’re organizing to protect campuses as spaces for learning, not control—for liberation, not censorship,” said Brianni Davillier, a student organizer with Public Citizen, an advocacy group.

In New York City that day, the demonstration called for getting billionaires and their influence out of higher education, an allusion to Marc Rowan, the hedge fund CEO who aided the Trump administration in preparing the Compact. A faculty rally against Rowan was followed later in the day by a picket on 57^th Street outside Apollo Global Management headquarters.

Rejection of the Compact cannot be expected to close the door on Trump administration efforts to intervene in academia. On Feb. 3, 2026, President Trump demanded a $1 billion payment from Harvard University to settle an ongoing dispute that began with a cutoff of federal research funds and an effort to prevent the school from admitting foreign students. Today, campuses can claim a growing number of organizations dedicated to preserving academic independence and freedom of thought and debate.

Quaker Courage applauds Penn’s efforts to protect the privacy of Jewish faculty, staff, and students. Penn is fighting a subpoena demanding names, addresses, and other sensitive information about Jewish faculty, staff, and student workers on campus.

We encourage you to join our Penn Pens letter writing campaign and thank Penn President Jameson and Board Chair Raghavendran. You can also sign a petition that started on campus. Read on for details about the issue and the petition.

According to a November 18, 2025 complaint that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed in Federal Court against Penn, the school is not fully complying with a subpoena.

In the filing, the EEOC states that they opened an investigation December 8, 2023, alleging that Penn was “subjecting Jewish faculty (including tenured, non-tenured, and adjunct professors), staff, and other employees (including, but not limited to, students employed by the university) to an unlawful hostile work environment based on national origin, religion, and/or race.” As part of their investigation, the EEOC subpoenaed Penn to “produce information relevant to the EEOC’s investigation of potential unlawful employment practices.”

Four days after the EEOC filing, on November 21, the New York Times reported that “Hundreds of students and faculty and staff members at the University of Pennsylvania signed a petition this week in support of their university’s refusal to turn over to the Trump administration names, phone numbers and physical addresses for some Jewish employees.” According to the article, Amanda Shanor, Associate Professor at Wharton, was one of those coordinating the petition.

On January 13, 2026, the ACLU of PA filed a motion to intervene in EEOC v. UPenn, on behalf of 5 Penn orgs: American Academy of Jewish Research, Jewish Law Students Association of Penn law school, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Penn’s chapter of AAUP, and the Penn Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty.

Penn responded to the complaint with a January 20, 2026 filing. Penn affirmed that they complied with most of the subpoena. However, to protect the privacy of Jewish faculty, staff, and students, they were not including sensitive information with names, addresses, and other identifying information that the EEOC requested. In the filing, Penn wrote:

The issue presented in the EEOC’s application is narrow but exceptionally consequential. Penn has cooperated for more than two years with the EEOC’s investigation, producing nearly 900 pages of materials. The sole dispute is over the EEOC’s extraordinary and unconstitutional demand that Penn assemble and produce lists of employees that reveal their Jewish faith or ancestry, associations with Jewish organizations, affiliation with Jewish studies, participation in programming for the Jewish community and/or de-anonymized responses to surveys on antisemitism, alongside their personal home addresses, phone numbers, and emails. The EEOC insists that Penn produce this information without the consent—and indeed, over the objections—of the employees impacted while entirely disregarding the frightening and well-documented history of governmental entities that undertook efforts to identify and assemble information regarding persons of Jewish ancestry. The government’s demand implicates Penn’s substantial interest in protecting its employees’ privacy, safety, and First Amendment rights.

One January 21, 2025, one day after Penn’s court filing, over 150 Penn Jewish faculty filed a brief in support of the University’s response to the lawsuit.

The litigation is ongoing. The EEOC was not impressed by the privacy issues Penn raised, nor the support Penn has received from so many different sources. On January 27, 2025 the EEOC responded with a new court filing. Their filing states that,”Rather than comply with EEOC’s requests aimed at identifying possible victims of and witnesses to a hostile work environment based on religion, national origin, and race, Respondent has instead chosen to undertake an intensive and relentless public relations campaign against the EEOC.”