by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The University of Virginia has declined to sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” proposed by the Trump administration.

In exchange for agreeing to a long list of terms, institutions signing the contract were offered “allowance for increased overhead payments where feasible, substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal partnerships.”  (The terms of the compact are discussed at length here.)

In his letter to the Secretary of Education, Interim President Paul Mahoney stated that the institution agreed with many of the principles outlined in the compact and that UVA “leads in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them.”  However, with regard to receiving favored treatment on grants in exchange for agreeing to the compact, he stated, “We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals. The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship. A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.”

The administration had originally extended this opportunity to eight other institutions, in addition to UVA: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, Darthmouth University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, and the University of Texas at Austin. 

UVA joins MIT, Brown, Penn, and USC in rejecting the compact so far. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration has now invited Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Kansas and Arizona State University to a meeting to discuss the compact.