Statement of PA-AAUP on Trump Administration “Loyalty Oath” Compacts

We join with education, professional, and civic organizations across the country in opposition to the Federal Government’s recently-proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The PA-AAUP Conference is a Pennsylvania-wide organization that works to advance AAUP policies and goals. It includes advocacy and collective-bargaining chapters whose members come from 55 institutions of higher education.

The proposed compact would extend government control over once-independent universities more in line with authoritarian countries such as Hungary than that of a free society. Giving partisan groups control over hiring, admissions, and curriculum in higher education would narrow what students can learn, divide communities, and erode the educational foundation that supports an informed and united country.

The federal government’s ten-point memo to a select group of colleges and universities (including the University of Pennsylvania) to embrace measures that would imperil the foundational tenets of higher education. These include imposing controls over admissions, policing the intellectual and political views of faculty and students, and creating quotas on the number of international students. The government now threatens that failure to adhere to this compact could prompt the withholding of research funds and other punitive measures.

As AAUP President Todd Wolfson and AFT President Randi Weingarten noted, “The federal government should not, under any circumstances, dictate who goes to college, what can be researched, or learned, and what can or can’t be the subject of critical academic inquiry. . . .[The] compact would turn a university administration into a weapon of the executive branch.” We oppose such a threat to our higher education system that helps to build civic values and is at the forefront of global learning.