Newsom threatens university funding over Trump’s education deal

By Esther Wickham
The Center Square

California Gov. Gavin Newsom warned state universities that signing the Trump administration’s education agreement would put them in direct conflict with his administration.

Newsom issued a statement responding to the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” proposal, which offered nine universities terms that would include a commitment to stop racial discrimination in admissions and raising tuition rates for the next five years in exchange for special access to federal funding.

MIT is the first university to refuse the demands.

During a news conference at Alexander Science Center School in Los Angeles, Newsom said California schools should not sign the agreement.

The University of Southern California is one of the nine universities.

“If any California University signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding — including Cal Grants — instantly,” Newsom said in a press release. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”

This proposal is “nothing short of a hostile takeover of America’s universities,” Newsom’s office stated.

The compact states that the universities are not required to sign the document, but would lose federal grants if they didn’t.

“It would impose strict government-mandated definitions of academic terms, erase diversity, and rip control away from campus leaders to install government-mandated conservative ideology in its place,” Newsom’s office said in a statement. “It even dictates how schools must spend their own endowments. Any institution that resists could be hit with crushing fines or stripped of federal research funding.”

The nine universities include: Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt University, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and the University of Arizona.