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.
On “student equality,” it fixes the definitions of “male,” “female,” “woman,” and “man” to reproductive function and builds single-sex spaces and sports atop that biology. Administrative recognition becomes substantive exclusion for many trans and gender-diverse students – taxonomy dressed as justice.
On international students, it caps foreign undergraduates at 15% (no more than 5% from any one country), requires selection on “extraordinary talent,” screens out perceived ideological “hostility,” mandates civics instruction, and directs universities to share discipline records with DHS and State upon request. The global university is remade as checkpoint.
And the financial back end is recoded into bank-style oversight: Know-Your-Customer and anti-money-laundering programs, designated compliance officers, suspicious-activity reports, and training obligations for personnel. Enforcement culminates in annual certifications by the president, provost, and head of admissions; mandatory public climate surveys; Department of Justice review; clawbacks of federal money for violation years; and even donor refunds on request. In a dispute, legal enforceability sits with the government, while the university has already rendered its soul.
What results is not excellence but eligibility – the art of staying maximally fundable. The canals appear as glossy renderings in a development deck; the swamp is renamed “innovation”; the bloom is a bullet point in a federal report. Like Faust, the university is invited to confuse the devil’s staged satisfactions with real achievement, to declare itself “happy” precisely when it has ceased to strive.
The price will not arrive as spectacle but as sedation. Scholarship narrows as neutrality hardens into doctrine and risky projects are quietly deferred. Talent homogenizes as standardized inputs reward polish over difficulty. Trust thins as self-censorship becomes the safest habit. Community cools as equality is reduced to definition rather than practice. The Infinite Corridor will not be dragged to hell; it will be gently anesthetized into compliance.
MIT need not choose that end. Faust’s lesson is not that desire is wrong; it is that certainty is a trap. He is lost when he mistakes the staged moment for the work itself. The Institute still has time to decline the performance. Excellence has never been secured by compact. It is a freedom exercised: to pursue inquiry that unsettles power, to admit the candidate who does not scan cleanly, to host conflicts that cannot be scripted in advance, to hold a community capacious enough to be interesting and generous enough to be whole.
In the end, the devil never delivers what he promises; the “works” are a chimera. So, too, with this compact: the promises are discretionary and revisable, while the obligations are binding and enforceable. The right answer for a university is constant – choose the work over the rendering, freedom over the counterfeit. If MIT resists, it may keep the one thing no contract can bestow and no audit can certify. If it signs – well, the devil is very patient.
