The “compact” MIT was invited to sign, along with eight other universities, is flawed, to put it mildly. Setting aside the issue of conditioning “priority for grants” on compliance with the Trump administration’s agenda, the compact is incompatible with free speech principles, despite at some points paying lip-service to them. The compact’s proposal to “freez[e] the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years” might well have regressive effects, reducing the amount of support that universities can offer students most in need. And so on – no doubt every flaw will be painstakingly enumerated in this special issue of the FNL.
Still, the compact does recognize some real problems. Americans have amassed a staggering amount of student debt (although MIT students are fortunate exceptions). Even worse, this financial strain is sometimes imposed by universities that do not prepare students to succeed in the labor market. Grade inflation is rampant at Harvard and elsewhere. Unclear and poorly motivated notions of “diversity” have long been deployed in admissions and hiring. University presidents often signal support for fashionable causes, forgetting that the university “is not itself the critic.” In some parts of the academy there is a stifling political and intellectual monoculture, leading to mediocre research. Academic freedom and free expression on college campuses are nowhere near as healthy as they should be; self-censorship is reportedly common among both students and faculty.
The compact as drafted should not be signed. Among the MIT faculty, that is probably uncontroversial. The important question is whether MIT’s response should be constructive or dismissive. Should we reject the very idea of a compact and repel any attempts at reform?
Pulling up the drawbridge and threatening interlopers with boiling oil implies that they have no reasonable concerns: that inside the ivory tower, all is well. But it is obvious to many people, both inside and outside universities, that there is much room for improvement and innovation. Recent years have seen the founding of Heterodox Academy, the Academic Freedom Alliance, the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, and MIT’s own Council on Academic Freedom, among others. These organizations were formed in response to disturbing trends on campuses. And universities cannot count on a majority of the public to support a refusal to engage, or to be outraged by the government’s demands: One survey found that six in ten Americans think that “the higher education system is going in the wrong direction.” If MIT pulls up the drawbridge, that will only reinforce the perception that the Institute is complacent about its own shortcomings.
MIT and other American universities already operate under an agreement with the federal government, and by extension with the American public that the government represents. Under that agreement, federal funds flow to universities – in the form of grants, student loans, etc. – if in return universities adopt certain policies and provide certain benefits to the public. The policies tend to be those demanded by justice – universities are not to engage, for example, in wrongful discrimination. Less salient to the conversation are the already-existing obligations universities have to benefit the public, obligations that go beyond “provide a high-quality education.” Land grant universities, for example, are required to provide education, and produce research, of a particular kind – in the agricultural sciences. This is not seen (nor should it be) as tyrannical interference with the operations of those universities. A president of a land-grant university who said their school intended to get out of the business of agriculture research, but was still entitled to all the federal funds it had been receiving, would have misunderstood the compact under which they were operating.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, former Vice President of MIT and Dean of the School of Engineering, wrote a report for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Science: The Endless Frontier. That report was the blueprint for the extraordinarily productive post-war partnership between the American state and its research universities. But it has been 80 years since that report, and in that time, universities, and the world around them, have been transformed. Among other things, the cost of research and teaching, the path for the commercialization of science, and the international competition for talent, have changed dramatically. Thus revisiting and revising that partnership now is an excellent idea.
Harvard’s Danielle Allen has argued that the compact “introduces a chance to establish a much-needed fresh relationship between America and higher education.” In effect, an invitation to take a leading role in this effort has dropped into MIT’s lap. One of the compact’s initial architects has suggested that it is an opening bid, which “remains subject to further input and discussion, including from campus leaders.” President Kornbluth should lead now, as Professor Bush led before. A coalition of all or some of the universities asked to sign the compact could frame a new compact, with no compromises to academic freedom or other fundamental principles, but which would help restore public trust. The executive and legislative branches would both be involved, with the ambition of producing bipartisan support for amendments to the Higher Education Act (last amended, as Allen points out, in 2008).
This is a moment for MIT to seize the initiative, to the potential advantage of higher education and the country. Naturally such an effort could easily fail. But as the President – Trump, not Kornbluth – has advised, “if you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.”
