Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance"

 

 

 The AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Committee on College and University Governance just announced release of a report that takes a hard line against the Trump Administration, its principles. objectives and actions as they relate to universities.  It is entitled "Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance" (July 2026). The AAUP's media release nicely summarized its text, politics and content:

Today we are releasing a major new report—"Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance"—exposing how the Trump administration has extended its pay-to-play approach to governance into higher education. From Columbia University to Cornell University to Brown University, the report shows that colleges and universities are being forced to pay millions for federal research funding they are already owed.

The report is the first comprehensive account of how the administration has taken the same playbook it's used on law firms and foreign governments and turned it on American universities—pressuring institutions into so-called compliance agreements that strip them of control over admissions, hiring, curriculum, and campus discipline. It also highlights the administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," offered first to nine hand-picked universities and then to every college in the country, which the report calls a document that "can be said to summarize the Trump program for higher education."

The findings are blunt: "US higher education has, in effect, become a target of a massive extortion racket."

Prepared by a joint subcommittee of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Committee on College and University Governance, the report also finds that in dozens of cases, the people who were supposed to stop this type of federal overreach—university boards and administrations—have failed to protect academic independence. Examining the response at Columbia, Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Northwestern, the report finds that most trustees and administrators "have at best been caught flat-footed, and some appear even to have welcomed governmental intrusion." As cases such as the continued fight between administrators and students and faculty at Yale illustrate, the compliance of administrators in these demands for obedience remains a key part of the federal administration’s strategy in forcing universities’ hands.

"These findings spotlight the enormous breadth with which the Trump administration is trying to shake down institutions of higher education," said Henry Reichman, member of the Committee on College and University Governance and the joint subcommittee who prepared the report. "What’s made clear in this report is that the Trump administration's efforts to upend higher education institutions builds upon a larger series of assaults on higher education by congressional committees, state governments, and feckless trustees and entitled donors. The administration’s effort consolidates and intensifies in a single coordinated campaign these disparate assaults on institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and shared governance."

It's the faculty, not the people running these institutions, that the report credits with the only real wins. "If there has been a silver lining to the cloud that is the Trump compliance campaign," the report emphasizes, "it has been the mobilization of the faculty." Litigation led by AAUP's own Harvard University chapter forced Harvard itself to join a suit that restored billions in frozen funding. A parallel effort by the AAUP, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, and campus unions led a federal judge to bar the government from conditioning further support on new payments. As the report concludes, "Resistance has been, and will be, most effective—indeed, it may only be effective—when faculty members mobilize and take independent action."

Many will agree with some or all of the Report; a few others in the academy maybe not so much. Responses are likely to parallel what has been widely reported as the distribution of political leaning within the university (here, here, and here for instance and in the greater society here), one in which supporters of the Trump Administration generally, and of its policies against universities in particular may be somewhat harder to find.  This is not to suggest any view, but rather the political context in which this report emerges. Certainly given the force and persistence of the Trump Administration's effort top rectify higher education for all sorts of reasons that they have  made quite public, it ought to come as no surprise that a counter offensive of equal vigor would emerge.

At the core of the debate, as framed in this report is the exercise of state power.  The exercise of state was much praised when it was used to advance objectives and suppress conduct and actions that those who supported projections of state power into the academy found good, valuable, useful and in accord with their own beliefs. It seems that state power otherwise used will produce a distinct reaction and a very different framing. This, at any rate might be the way that some who do not share the  Committee's politics might be tempted to view the foundation of the Report. This from the opening of the Report:

 The Trump administration’s effort differs dramatically from that of previous administrations, however, and not only in its severity and scale. Its aggressively extortionate deal-making, preemptive cutoffs of funding, and cross-departmental enforcement efforts are both novel and largely illegal. Moreover, as the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure wrote, “[T]here is no doubt that the Trump administration has wielded Title VI with the goals of discrediting institutions of higher education, undermining academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and unmooring the Civil Rights Act from its foundational commitments to addressing structures of discrimination that prevent or limit educational
access.”4 It is increasingly obvious that the administration seeks to use its compliance agreements to redefine not only its own relationship with higher education institutions but also the very nature of higher education itself. The draft “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” initially circulated by the Department of Education to nine institutions presumably considered open to such appeals and then “offered” to all higher education institutions, suggests that future funding may depend not on conformity to federal law or even administration policy but on loyalty to those in power.5 Hence, this effort by the
government consolidates and intensifies in a single coordinated campaign the disparate assaults on institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and shared governance recorded above.

 The semiotics of the Report, like its politics is clear. Not necessarily objectionable--that is a values determination, but clear. And ironically the semiotics of the Report is one that is shared by the Trump Administration but in mirror reverse--again grounded in a different values based cognitive starting point for what is good, what is bad and how one can vest text with those values while remaining true to text. Much more interesting is the substantial negative reaction to the fundamental operating and cognitive style of the present administration--its merchant transactional cognitive core--in the context as as a basis for the arguments it makes. The authors who appear to be much more aligned with classical Anglo-European bureaucratic/institutionalist managerial cognitive frameworks find this distressing and suggest it approaches in the context of the Trump Administration's approach to education, extortionate. 

Having come to prominence in part for his purported mastery of “the art of the deal,” President Trump has in his second term made deal-making central to governance. This has been evident in his approach to foreign trade, for example, in which he has sought
to compel individual countries to bargain over tariff rates, with the United States demanding what it wants from each country separately. * * * As Kim Lane Scheppele writes, “There is no general policy, only particular extortion agreements. And we can expect that the regulation by deal will not end there. * * * It thus is hardly a surprise that Trump has applied a similar approach, centered on large and prestigious research institutions, to higher education.(Report, p. 9).

The rest follows. This makes perfect sense--not in itself, but as evidence of the passions that may be raised when incompatible cognitive systems collide in the presence of power that affects their relative positions within human collectives. And it stands to reason that in the face of fundamental incompatibility each would be tempted to reduce the other to a a flattened fetish; in this case with the suggestion of a connection between the Trump Administration and the habits or characteristics of illiberal authoritarians  (see Report, p. 36).

As with all things Americans, this is a preliminary round, and a supplement to, contests for the control of the common language, narratives, and expectations that in the aggregate produce the sort of collective meaning making at the heart of the solidarity project of a polity. Those contests will be decided in some form or another, in (and not ultimately by) the courts it will continue to invoke an even larger contest between these opposing forces--the value of what to some appears to be the increasingly political role of the courts, a concept that has been embraced  along virtually the entirety of the political spectrum.

Anyway lots of quite valuable insights, arguments, politics, and facts for the interested reader to consider and decide for themselves. And it may be possible to detach the politics embedded in the Report from its insights respecting the use of state power in the management and control of education, whether or not institutions take public funds with regulatory strings attached. 

Again there is much to chew on here, an exercise I leave to readers. The Report's conclusion follows below.  

 

 VI. Conclusion
It has often been noted that illiberal authoritarians
always seek to undermine and ultimately control
autonomous institutions: the judiciary and the bar,
the media, and colleges and universities. In its first
year the second Trump administration has assaulted
all three. In each case, the targets have been tarred as
“elitist” and unresponsive to “popular” will. But as the
AAUP’s founders recognized, if universities are to serve
the common good in a democracy, they must remain
autonomous, unbeholden to the vagaries of popular
opinion and political winds. To be sure, the agreements
discussed in this report and the proposals advanced by
the Trump administration’s proposed compact claim to
affirm academic freedom and promise not to interfere
with the curriculum. But such promises ring hollow.
“If universities can be subject to drastic financial
penalties anytime the federal government decides ‘in
its sole discretion’ that the university is not comply-
ing, it is difficult to believe there will not be strong
incentives for administrators, faculty, and students
to avoid any speech or conduct that might attract
negative attention from the Trump administration,”
two commentators on the agreements warn. “Whether
explicit or implicit, such federal control cuts to the
heart of the freedom of inquiry that allows universities
to contribute to the innovations, economic prosperity,
and creation of knowledge that have made American
higher education the envy of the world.”145
In that light, we recall the words of the AAUP’s 1956
special report on the abuses of the second Red Scare:
We cannot censure the justified public interest
in colleges and universities, or be unmindful of
the extremely difficult task confronting academic
administrations that seek to preserve educational
and research opportunities in order to serve the
general welfare in spite of the suspicions of a
public which, at times, has been confused by com-
plicated issues or led astray by demagogic appeals.
The temptation to yield a little in order to preserve
a great deal is strong. . . . Yet to yield a little is, in
such matters, to run the risk of sacrificing all. . . .
[W]e deem it to be the duty of all elements
in the academic community—faculty, trustees,
officials and, as far as possible, students—to stand
their ground firmly even while they seek, with
patient understanding, to enlarge and deepen
popular comprehension of the nature of academic
institutions and of society’s dependence upon
unimpaired intellectual freedom.146
In those dark days colleges and universities were
called upon to stand against the tide of public opin-
ion. Today the threat comes from a government that,
although it has gained some support for its efforts, is,
we are convinced, increasingly alienating the public.
The danger today is much greater than in the past
because the power of the state has been ruthlessly
unleashed to an unprecedented degree, yet opportuni-
ties to resist exist and support is not difficult to muster
if the will to act is there. As the Concerned Faculty
Group at Northwestern put it, “[P]rincipled leadership
must defend academic freedom, protect political dis-
sent and resist participating in federal efforts to chill
speech, punish protest and weaponize antisemitism for
political ends.” There is no alternative.