American Council of Learned Societies Statement on White House "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education"
NEW YORK, Oct. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has released the following statement in response to the proposed "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education":
On October 1, the White House proposed to nine leading American universities that they agree to a list of demands in exchange for receiving preferential access to research funding. The "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education" undermines the long-standing independence of American academia. It works against the best interests of colleges and universities and of every one of us who has benefited from the knowledge they produce. We call for its immediate rejection by all institutions of higher education.
Universities and colleges have one mission: to advance knowledge. Faculty carry out the mission by conducting research and teaching students. The knowledge they produce and circulate is independently assessed by professional peers. Interfering with that process by forcing knowledge to pass through a political filter is a tactic adopted by the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states. The White House is dressing up its compact as a reasonable corrective to what it views as problems in campus culture. Let no one be deceived. This proposal imposes government censorship on academia. It is anti-American, and it weakens our democracy by devaluing academic expertise.
As an organization devoted to advancing the humanities and social sciences, ACLS stands firmly against this latest White House effort to divide faculties by giving special privileges to students in "hard science programs" and its demand that institutions abolish "units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas." Humanists and social scientists have a long history of advancing civil rights, environmental activism, and ethical inquiry that make this nation great. We know that STEM at its best is undergirded by humanistic thought. Scholarship is part of democratic public discourse, and no presidential administration or political party has the right to silence it for its own convenience.
The White House is offering these nine universities a Hobson's choice: give up privileged access to the public funding that supports vital research or make the university into an arm of the federal government. Under financial and political pressure, university leadership, trustees, and regents may be tempted to sign and try to mitigate the damage later. We exhort them to see the truth beneath the administration's pretext of encouraging ideological diversity and affordability. No institution that is committed to the free pursuit of knowledge should submit to the degradation of autonomy and academic freedom contained in it.
Formed a century ago, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations. As the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, ACLS upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. In supporting its member organizations, ACLS expands the forms, content, and flow of scholarly knowledge, reflecting its commitment to diversity of identity and experience. ACLS collaborates with institutions, associations, and individuals to strengthen the evolving infrastructure for scholarship.
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SOURCE American Council of Learned Societies