OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
10:22 AM – Friday, October 3, 2025
California Governor Gavin Newsom has threatened to cut state funding to any universities that sign President Donald Trump’s proposed deal for “academic excellence.”
The president sent a 10-point memo, titled “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” to nine universities on Thursday. The memo offered preferential treatment to schools that complied with the following requests:
- Equality in admissions: “Treating certain groups as categorically incapable of performing — and therefore in need of preferential treatment — perpetuates a dangerous badge of inferiority,” the document says. It also calls out treatment based on sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religious associations, which reflects a “fundamental misunderstanding” of Civil Rights law and the U.S. Constitution.” Universities would “publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students.”
- A “vibrant” marketplace of ideas and civil discourse: Signatories that comply with this memo would commit to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas. Given the importance of academic freedom to the marketplace of ideas, signatories shall adopt a policy protecting academic freedom in classrooms, teaching, research, and scholarship.”
- Nondiscrimination in hiring practices: Trump’s compact stressed “A steadfast commitment to rigorous and meritocratic selection based on objective and measurable criteria in the appointment process.”
- Institutional neutrality: This directive “requires policies that all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events.” All university members “are encouraged to comment on current events in their individual capacities,” however.
- Student education: This point asks for a commitment to “grade integrity.” Grades “must not be inflated, or deflated, for any non-academic reason.”
- Student equality: Trump’s memo calls for students to be “treated as individuals and not on the basis of their immutable characteristics,” except in cases that require “sex-based privacy, safety, and fairness,” highlighting the need for single-sex spaces to achieve women’s equality. Signatories would commit themselves to defining and interpreting “’male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes.”
- Financial responsibility: To protect young adults from “life-altering debt,” universities that sign the compact would cut costs by removing unnecessary staff and “streamline or eliminate academic programs that fail to serve students.” They would also publicly report information such as audits for misuse of funds and statistics about average earnings from graduates in each program to better equip incoming students. The document goes so far as to ask institutions to “refund tuition to students who drop out during the first academic term.”
- Avoidance of foreign entanglements: Higher education institutions shall scrutinize foreign donations and vet foreign students for “anti-Semitism and other anti-American values.”
- Maintain preferential admissions for Americans: The only preferential treatments allowed by the deal are based on American citizenship. Religious institutions may also maintain preferential treatment in hiring and admissions based on religious affiliations.
- Enforcement: Universities must report their progress annually to show compliance. They must also hire an independent party to report empirical data to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ).
Failing to comply with the agreement after signing results in a loss of benefits for at least two years.
The benefits include access to student loans, grant programs, and federal contracts. The president also offers signatories funding for research, approval of student visas, and “preferential treatment under the tax code.”
Meanwhile, Newsom responded to the presidents proposal in a Thursday X post, declaring, “California universities that bend to the will of Donald Trump and sign this insane ‘compact’ will lose billions in state funding — IMMEDIATELY.”
Advertisement“California will not bankroll schools that sign away academic freedom,” the governor added.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded to the threat in a statement telling the governor not to “worry about the disaster he’s created in his own state,” referring to California’s allowance of transgenders in girls’ sports.
“By opposing the compact, Newscum is opposing efforts to cap wild tuition hikes and to protect free speech,” Jackson said.
The compact reportedly went out to both public and private colleges.
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