Get Your Dirty Hands Off Our Education

Get Your Dirty Hands Off Our Education

It doesn’t start with a bang. 

It starts with silence.

You walk into class and something feels off, not loud, just careful. The syllabus looks thinner, the discussions shorter. The protests that once filled the courtyard are gone, and so is the professor who taught you to question everything. There’s a new rulebook no one remembers agreeing to, yet everyone follows.

Welcome to the new American university under The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.

On October 1, 2025, the White House under Donald Trump sent the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education to nine universities, including MIT, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, University of Southern California , the University of Virginia, the University of Texas at Austin, and Vanderbilt University. 

On paper, it promises fairness: tuition freezes, ideological diversity, safety from protest. In practice, it is a blueprint for control, a contract designed to tame thought itself. The Compact’s guidelines ask universities to transform or abolish any department that “belittles conservative ideas,” cap international enrollment, and privilege the sciences over the humanities. It sounds orderly, even patriotic. But order is the language of obedience, and obedience is the death of learning.

The compact sends a message with a clear narrative to spread: STEM is worth more than the arts and humanities. This isn’t a bias; it is a plan. By cutting back on the subjects that teach us to question, think critically, and understand life, perception, and how humans interact, including critical race theory, it chips away at the heart of education. If we are never taught to question what we are told, would we ever? The compact does not just punish ideas, it punishes curiosity. It rewards compliance and punishes questioning. Federal funding is tied to a narrow vision of what counts as valuable learning, and anything outside that vision feels risky. Asking difficult questions, exploring uncomfortable truths, challenging authority — all of it becomes dangerous. Education becomes a series of boxes to check, not a journey of discovery. When classrooms are treated as controlled spaces instead of laboratories of thought, we stop learning about the world and start learning only what someone else wants us to know. Free inquiry dies when the government decides which ideas are allowed. Free speech on campus becomes a checkbox, not a practice. Calling in the National Guard for anything disruptive is not safety; it is fear, it is control. 

Then there are the international enrollment caps. This is not about numbers. It is about shutting doors on ideas, experiences, and perspectives that challenge the comfortable narratives we are fed. By limiting who can sit in our classrooms, the compact decides whose voices matter and whose do not. If America were truly what it was founded to be, we would not be calculating quotas. We would be opening arms, inviting students whose eyes, stories, and questions stretch us, disrupt us, make us think. That is how education should feel: uncomfortable, expansive, alive. Strip that away, and you do not just limit classrooms — you limit minds, imagination, and the courage to see the world as more than a single story.

When this compact takes hold, it is not just the classrooms that are diminished. The questions we ask, the doubts we allow ourselves, the perspectives we consider — all of that dims. Learning is not memorizing or following rules; it is the first spark of freedom, the spark that lets you question, push back, and see the world in ways no one else has imagined. If we are never given that spark, do we even know it exists? Take that away, even a little at a time, and you lose more than knowledge; you lose the tools to shape your own life, your own world.

This is not just about classes. It is about how we learn to be human, how we listen, how we challenge, how we imagine someone else’s life, and how we push against the limits of what we are told is possible. The Compact does not just diminish education; it diminishes curiosity, empathy, and courage. If we ignore it, if we act like it does not touch us, we let the walls of someone else’s making close in around us.

This is exactly what the Trump Administration wants: a world where thinking differently feels risky, where questioning feels dangerous, where classrooms are transformed into factories for obedience. Students are measured not by curiosity or courage, but by how well they follow instructions, how quietly they sit, and how little they challenge. Every limit, every cap, every “rule” is designed to cage minds, to punish imagination, and to turn learning into repetition instead of discovery.

But this is not Trump’s future we should fear — it is ours. The future belongs to us, to the students, the teachers, the thinkers who refuse to accept a world where curiosity is punished. We cannot allow universities to become breeding grounds for minds trained to obey blindly, to serve a government rather than their own judgment. Education is meant to spark freedom, not conformity, and the moment we hand it over is the moment we hand over ourselves.

To the nine universities invited to join this compact: continue saying no. Follow suit of MIT, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia, Dartmouth College, and the University of Arizona. 

 Protect your students. Protect your mission. Protect the spark.

And to Trump: Get your dirty hands off our education and our country.