Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi said Thursday the university will not endorse the “compact” President Trump has asked universities to sign.
The topic came up during the university’s “State of State” event Thursday. The hour-long event included comments from Bendapudi along with other university administrators and responses to pre-submitted questions.
Trump’s "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education" calls for eliminating race and sex from admissions decisions, ensuring “institutional neutrality,” limiting international enrollment of undergraduates to 15% and freezing tuition for five years, among other things. In exchange, universities that sign off on it could get “favorable access to federal funding.”
While the Trump administration initially sent the 10-page document to nine universities, he later posted on social media that other institutions could agree to it. Most of the nine institutions asked directly to sign the compact have not, according to Inside Higher Ed.
Bendapudi got applause when she said Penn State would not sign it.
“We have not been approached, as you know, and if we were, we would not sign it," she said. "And that’s because of a number of reasons we could go into, but we would not sign it.”
Bendapudi did not elaborate on those reasons during the event. When reached for comment, a Penn State spokesman said the university had nothing more to add at that time. But Bendapudi did address it while speaking to student media after the event.
"As we look at it, for us the notion of merit being the reason for why you would get grants or not is important," she said. "Academic freedom is a very important principle."
The Penn State chapter of the American Association of University Professors came out against the compact. In a letter to Bendapudi dated Oct. 13, the chapter writes that supporting it "would render Penn State’s mission impossible and destroy academic freedom and free expression of ideas."
Nationally, the American Council on Education together with more than 30 other institutions issued a statement opposing it. They said the compact "offers nothing less than government control of a university’s basic and necessary freedoms.”
