There are many ways for a university to lose its soul. Some do it slowly, by trimming values until only the trimmings remain. Others do it quickly, with a pen. MIT, standing before the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, now faces the latter.
This is a Faustian bargain. In Goethe’s story, Faust trades his soul for diabolical favors – youth, knowledge, power – and the devil does not collect by force. He collects by staging satisfactions, moments that look like fulfillment. Faust believes he has cut canals, drained swamps, recovered land for the common good. Convinced at last that this is the pinnacle of his striving, he wants to hold the moment still. And that was the bargain: the instant Faust no longer seeks to advance, the devil claims his soul. At that very instant of literal blindness, Faust mistakes illusion for achievement – and damnation is sealed.
The parallel to MIT is uncomfortably close. Mephistopheles, now in a gray suit, offers rivers of funding, expedited visas, favorable tax treatment, and the imprimatur of national prestige. In return, the Institute would pledge political “neutrality,” adopt a tests-first, standardized admissions regime, and accept what the compact calls an “intellectually open environment” that, in practice, empowers administrative policing of thought while fitting diversity into a straitjacket – identity flattened at selection, revived for reporting, and sex narrowed to biology. On the brochure this reads as prudence; in substance it is a quiet transfer of independence.
Why does the compact fall on such fertile ground now? Because the ground has been tilled by the very hand that offers the bargain. Since January, universities have been squeezed by federal policy: the new tiered endowment excise tax puts schools like MIT in the top 8% bracket; moves to cap reimbursement of indirect research costs at 15% have slashed the funds that keep labs, libraries, and compliance running; and grant rules and agency actions have tightened across the board. The same administration that tightened the screws now extends a “compact” as relief – preferential pathways to federal funds if institutions accept its terms. Desperation is part of the design, as in Faust, where the devil arrives when the scholar is most depleted.
Read the compact closely and the target comes into focus: academic freedom – the soul of a university. The document name-checks academic freedom, then immediately limits it as “not absolute,” pairing the nod with disciplinary machinery and institutional neutrality rules that move political speech off departmental homepages and into segregated spaces. It bans the “heckler’s veto,” authorizes “lawful force,” and promises “swift, serious, and consistent sanctions,” all while requiring neutrality “at all levels.” However one feels about each provision in isolation, together they shift the locus of judgment from faculty culture to administrative enforcement, and from scholarly independence to governmental review. That is not a garden for freedom; it is a greenhouse for compliance.
On admissions, the compact bars consideration of sex, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, and religion, requires universal standardized testing (or program-specific equivalents), and mandates public reporting of admitted and rejected cohorts’ academic data by race, national origin, and sex. The appearance is symmetry; the effect is flattening difference at the moment of selection and reanimating it for audit.
