Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down

[Celerity]

How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

https://newrepublic.com/article/201376/trump-compact-academic-excellence-university-virginia

https://archive.ph/QdHj8


The Rotunda on the Lawn at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Robert Knopes/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

If the University of Virginia agrees to the terms dictated by a memo sent last Wednesday by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, then this essay you are reading could cost the university all of its federal support—research funds, financial aid, everything.

“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,” states the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that McMahon sent to Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia.

I am purposefully “belittling” a “conservative idea.” Or maybe I am not. I’m not really sure what the legal threshold of “belittling” is, and while I have a pretty good idea which ideas should be considered “conservative” (I studied American conservatism in graduate school with one of the premier historians of the subject), I am pretty sure McMahon does not.

So let’s run this “belittlement” experiment: The policies and goals of the “compact” McMahon proposed to nine university presidents is silly. It’s written by a team of people who have no idea how higher education is run or funded. It’s a petty effort at federal, centralized control of a collection of private and state-run institutions.

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