California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) threatened to cut funding for schools that align with the White House’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which calls for universities to agree to a list of policies or risk losing federal funding.
“If any California University signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding — including Cal Grants — instantly,” Newsom said in a press release. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”
According to the governor’s office, the compact “would impose strict government-mandated definitions of academic terms, erase diversity, and rip control away from campus leaders to install government-mandated conservative ideology in its place.”
The document states that the compact “represents the priorities of the U.S. government in its engagements with universities that benefit from the relationship.”
The document lists the following as part of the agreement:
- admissions equality
- marketplace of ideas
- nondiscriminatory faculty
- institutional neutrality
- student learning
- student equality
- financial responsibility
- avoiding foreign entanglements
- honoring religious instutitions’ preferences
- hiring an external party to conduct an independent review of the university’s compliance with the compact
“Signatories to this compact commit themselves to fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus. A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines,” the compact reads, explaining that schools involved in the agreement further “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.”
