Washington Asked Every University for a Statement of Principles. Two Had Already Written One.

Three charters rewritten in one summer, and now the covenant itself is out for signatures.

I closed a higher ed piece a couple of weeks ago saying, “That’s a pincer, whatever the philosophy says. And it’s not the only one closing around higher ed right now.”

Well, ummm, here’s…another arrow on that war map. There are a lot of arrows in this pincer, friends.

On Monday, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon sent a letter to every university president and governing board in the country. It calls on each institution to publish, before the end of 2026, a statement of principles describing its “commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service,” posted prominently on its website, addressing seven questions the Department has helpfully supplied. Bloomberg reports that several university presidents helped draft it. As John Sailer noted within the hour of its release, it reads like an invitation rather than a set of demands.

An invitation to what, exactly? To sign the new compact. It is the first federal document to treat the renegotiation as a negotiation, and it arrived with the counterparty’s draft already public. I’ve been covering the pieces one at a time since June. Monday was the morning they assembled into a single picture.

Three charters, rewritten in one summer. American higher education has run for decades on three mid-century deals. None of them was ever written down as a deal, of course.

The teaching one: federal money flows to students through the Higher Education Act of 1965, and the government takes the university’s word that the education is worth it. The research deal ran on federal money flowing to campus laboratories through the architecture of Vannevar Bush’s Endless Frontier report of 1945, and the government takes the scientists’ word about what deserves funding. The legitimacy deal left it to accreditors, membership organizations of the universities themselves, to decide who counts as a college at all, and the government took their word too. All three rested on the same load: deference.

And all three were rewritten between the last week of June and the last week of July.

The teaching deal went first. The earnings-accountability rule, final June 29, replaces the university’s word with the IRS’s records. Program-level median earnings against a state high-school baseline, two failures in three years, federal loans off, no alternate-earnings appeal. The research deal followed on July 21, when the White House published Science: A New Golden Age, presented to Congress the next day as the first comprehensive rethink of the enterprise since Endless Frontier itself, alongside a plan to steer the $200 billion federal research portfolio toward AI and individual scientists, with universities described as infrastructure to be minimized. The legitimacy deal is still mid-rewrite. The AIM committee reached consensus in May on outcomes-based accreditation and easier entry for new accreditors, the proposed rule is expected any day with a short comment window, and the final version is targeted to take effect on July 1, 2027. The same day as the earnings test. Two regimes, one switch date.

None of this stayed theoretical for very long though. The earnings rule authorized parts of itself to take effect the day it was published, a maneuver GAO flagged and nobody else read. (Reading these turns out to be my beat now, I guess? When did that happen? Yeesh.)

Eight days after the Golden Age report, NSF launched a pilot program that places industry co-advisors on dissertation committees, outside traditional competitive scientific merit review, through a funding channel where institutional overhead has nowhere to attach. At a House hearing in July, members displayed a leaked NSF workflow chart annotated “coordination with DOGE and WH take place outside of workflow.” In every theater, practice has run ahead of law. The paperwork follows, when it follows at all.

The university side has been writing too. Without this half, the letter reads as an ultimatum; with it, the letter reads as a reply.

In April, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education reported that its own university had helped erode public confidence through diluted standards, opaque admissions, and a political monoculture. In June, a committee chaired by Paul Boghossian, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University, documented what it called a substitution of political for scholarly criteria across six humanistic disciplines. And on July 29, Vanderbilt made public The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles, a charter its Board of Trust had adopted a month earlier, on June 29, the same day the Department finalized the earnings rule. It runs on three core purposes, its term. Pathbreaking research, transformative education, and “the covenant between universities and society.” It concedes the outcomes premise, pledging that programs will demonstrate “a real and measurable economic and societal return.” It also pushes back, and pushes back exactly where the summer pushed hardest, insisting that research funding stay competitive and peer-reviewed and that sponsors “cannot control or influence the outcome of research.” The board wrote that three weeks before the Golden Age report proposed something close to the opposite, which is either good instincts or a well-briefed committee.

Now read Monday’s letter with those documents beside it. McMahon cites the Yale report by name. She cites the Boghossian report twice and names it once. She asks every institution for “statements of principle” posted on institutional websites, and says she hopes to see “landmark declarations of purpose.” She asks for commitments to “rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service.”

Here is what every institution is being asked, in the Department’s own order:

1. Admissions. How will you make criteria transparent, and decisions based on merit and educational purpose?

2. Free speech. How will you protect open inquiry, and guarantee that unruly and violent protesters do not disrupt classes, research, or operations?

3. Intellectual pluralism. How will you encourage it in all academic units, and ensure hiring and evaluation take all relevant perspectives seriously?

4. Affordability. How will you contain costs, improve pricing transparency, and ensure every program equips students to repay their loans?

5. Rigor in the age of AI. How will you incentivize rigor, combat grade inflation, and prioritize excellence in teaching?

6. Foreign influence. How will you protect programs and safeguard the integrity of the research enterprise?

7. American interests. How will your campus advance security interests, meet workforce needs, and contribute to national prosperity?

Pathbreaking research is not a phrase plucked from the air, and the trail runs back further than five days. It is worth being precise about which document is which, because there are two of them from the same two campuses, and they are nearly two years apart.

The first is the Vanderbilt-WashU Statement of Principles, adopted by both boards in the fall of 2024 and published on both universities’ sites under both logos. Three principles: excellence free of political criteria, academic freedom and free expression, growth and development. It commits both universities to institutional neutrality. Its closing line looks ahead to “providing our students with a transformational education, conducting pathbreaking research.” Vanderbilt’s board wrote the same commitment into its bylaws that December, and its chairman used the same pairing in the announcement. Diermeier and Martin made the case for it together in a Chronicle op-ed titled, with no ambiguity about the target, “Universities Must Reject Creeping Politicization.” The doctrine McMahon’s letter praises by name has been a two-campus joint venture, in public, for two years.

The second is Vanderbilt’s Declaration, alone, nearly two years later, which promotes those phrases from a closing flourish to the architecture. Pathbreaking research becomes the first core purpose. Transformative education becomes the second. The covenant with society becomes the third.

Then the letter. Rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, national service, requested of every institution in the country as a statement of principles posted on its website. Two of those phrases have been sitting in Vanderbilt and WashU governance documents since 2024. The third has an address too, and it isn’t a federal one.

On April 30, the AAU published its own statement of principles, America’s Leading Research Universities: A Mission to Serve the Nation. Five commitments, and some of the list will sound familiar. Merit and excellence, cost transparency and affordability, free expression and civil discourse, service and integrity, self-evaluation and correction. Three of those answer questions the Department would not ask for another three months. The statement also concedes the premise the whole letter rests on, that “the trust placed in us by the American people must be earned and renewed by every generation,” and then goes one better. “We welcome this scrutiny.”

The AAU also drew a line, in the same document, that the letter walks straight past. Under a second heading on academic freedom and institutional autonomy, the statement insists universities must decide what to teach and study “based on evidence, reason, and merit, not ideology or external pressure,” and warns that if inquiry is restricted by politics or special interests, “innovation stagnates.” Intellectual pluralism in faculty hiring, grade inflation, foreign influence. The Department asked three things the AAU had not volunteered, and had nothing to say about the one thing it had.

On Monday, in a joint statement, the AAU’s president and its two board officers said the questionnaire “affords our universities the opportunity to honor” that April commitment. It does, for the parts they wrote.

And this time we know who held the pen. Bloomberg’s Liam Knox reports that the letter was developed in partnership with the Association of American Universities, through a channel opened when Jenna Storey of the American Enterprise Institute brokered a meeting between administration officials and AAU leadership earlier this year. Four campus leaders helped draft it and plan to support it publicly: Chancellor Andrew Martin of Washington University in St. Louis, Michael Crow of Arizona State, Doug Girod of Kansas, and Ronald Daniels of Johns Hopkins. Girod chairs the AAU’s board; Daniels is its vice-chair. Martin runs the university whose board adopted that 2024 statement of principles alongside Vanderbilt’s. He co-commissioned the Boghossian report the letter cites as its warrant. He is, alongside Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier, the most prominent advocate of the institutional neutrality the letter singles out for praise. Statement, report, doctrine, and request share a short list of names.

Which raises a question the coverage has not asked. Bloomberg reported Monday morning that AAU president Barbara Snyder would call on member universities to support the letter. By Monday evening she had backed up a step, telling the Chronicle the association was never asked to endorse it and has not, and that she had encouraged presidents only to approach it in whatever way works for their institution. The AAU’s own newsroom, as of Tuesday morning, carried nothing about the letter at all. So the sector’s opening position was negotiated over months by four campus leaders and an association’s officers, and the rest of the sector read the terms in the news. Whatever you think of the terms, nobody voted on the negotiators.

There is a complication to note: Diermeier is not among the four. So the tidiest reading, that a template was commissioned to order, doesn’t survive contact with the record.

Two chancellors spent two years building a vocabulary in public, in a joint statement of principles, in a commissioned report on scholarly standards, in a board-adopted declaration. Then one of them spent months in meetings helping the administration write a letter asking everyone else to speak it. Call it coordination or call it a very small world with a shared dialect. I lean toward the second, which is less satisfying and probably more accurate.

Either way, the sector was inside the drafting of its own homework assignment.

The letter’s genealogy explains what kind of document this is. In July 2025, Christopher Rufo’s Manhattan Statement declared that “the university and the state are bound together by compact” and asserted “every right to renegotiate the terms,” through a contract written into every grant and accreditation, punishable by revocation of all public benefit. In October the administration tried something close to it, the Compact for Academic Excellence, offering preferential funding to nine hand-picked universities. None signed. Seven rejected it outright, and Vanderbilt neither accepted nor rejected, offering feedback instead, which is its own kind of tell. A few institutions outside the invited group volunteered. Dartmouth’s Sian Beilock spoke for the consensus when she said no compact with any White House was the right vehicle, “but I’ve also been very clear that I think we have work to do.” Ten months of meetings later it is back, the coercive clauses sanded off, renamed a call to action, co-drafted by the AAU’s own leadership, citing the universities’ own committees, requesting a document one campus had already published. The Department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs, Jonathan Pidluzny, told Bloomberg the earlier document did the work. “I don’t think we would be there without the compact. It created a road map for reform and opened a dialogue.” He told Higher Ed Dive that Monday’s letter was a separate effort. Both can be true. So, I guess neither side lost? A settlement is taking shape, clause by clause, with nobody using, you know, the word “settlement.”

By Monday night the shorthand had hardened. Compact 2.0, the Chronicle in its headline, the AAUP and the AFT in statements calling on boards to reject it. It’s an accurate name for what the administration filed off. It says nothing about the two years the sector spent writing the answer.

What the settlement trades. Here the terms get interesting, because on paper there aren’t any. Last year’s compact offered something concrete in exchange for signing: preferential treatment in federal contracts and grants, in a research economy where the pie is shrinking.

Monday’s letter drops the incentives along with the harder demands, the international-enrollment cap and the tuition freeze. It offers nothing and asks for less. Snyder said the AAU got that in writing before it would engage at all. “We got assurances that there would be no carrots and no sticks. That was critical.”

The assurance lasted about a news cycle. Pidluzny told Bloomberg there is no plan to penalize institutions that decline to answer, and told Higher Ed Dive there would be no direct penalties, before adding that for universities who refuse to engage, “silence will speak volumes, right?” A White House official told Bloomberg, anonymously and in the same news cycle, that institutions announcing reforms “could be more likely to be involved in discussions around reshaping the roughly $200 billion federal research funding apparatus.” Asked about that by the Chronicle, Pidluzny said it “would only be natural for the government to partner with the institutions that are most committed to gold-standard science.” The Department did not tell POLITICO what happens either way.

So the pledge costs nothing and buys nothing, formally. The seat at the table where the research compact gets rewritten is the entire consideration, and it exists in a hedge from an unnamed official rather than anywhere in the document. The Justice Department’s civil-rights investigations, meanwhile, continue on their own track, with no plans to ease up. The invitation is real. The campus weather it arrived in is not mild.

To sum it up, Washington has pretty much stopped taking the university’s word (about earnings, about research priorities, about what counts as a college) and the university, in exchange for staying inside the federal money and the federal conversation, publicly adopts the state’s questions as its own.

Now, some of the seven are questions universities should have been answering anyway; affordability and admissions transparency have bipartisan pedigrees, and the earnings machinery itself was built under Obama before this administration extended it to everyone. Question five asks how each institution will “incentivize rigor in the age of AI, combat grade inflation, and prioritize excellence in teaching and learning.” That is the signal problem I started this series on, now sitting on Department letterhead. Employers stopped trusting the transcript first. Washington has caught up. Some are pledges wearing the grammar of questions. “How will your institution encourage intellectual pluralism in all its academic units” already knows the answer it wants. Fair enough; a supervisor’s questions usually do.

One more thing about the seven. The letter is addressed to every postsecondary institution in the country and written for about seventy of them, which is the split I’ve been describing all year arriving in the mail. David Baime, writing for the American Association of Community Colleges, said as much on Monday, noting that selective admissions, free speech, ideological diversity, and research activity are not community-college problems. About 40 percent of degree-granting institutions, Inside Higher Ed notes, admit everyone who applies. Question one asks them how they will ensure admissions decisions are based on merit.

To my eye, one clause deserves more attention than it will get in the first news cycle. Whatever a university pledges this fall, it pledges into the apparatus, and the apparatus transfers. The discretion being built in 2026 (appointee-directed research priorities, outcome tests with no appeal, accreditation criteria that include ideological terms) hands itself intact to whichever party wins in 2028. Universities signing statements calibrated to this administration’s seven questions should ask what the same instruments look like in the other party’s hands, pointed at a different seven. Different questions. Same letterhead. The old deference system had one underrated virtue, which is that nobody had to renegotiate it every four years.

Inheritance is not the only possibility, though, and the other one cuts the opposite way. If the presidency changes parties in 2029, much of this simply gets undone, and the sorting of what survives will not follow anyone’s sense of importance. It follows the instrument. The earnings test implements a statute Congress passed last summer, so reversing it takes Congress rather than a memo, and Congress is slow on purpose. The accreditation rewrite is a regulation, which means it can be unwound the way it was made, through notice and comment, over a year or two. The research redirect lives in a report, a priorities memo, and a pending OMB rule, which is to say it lives at the pleasure of whoever runs OMB. And the statements of principle live nowhere at all. No statute, no rule, no enforcement, no expiration. They are the most reversible thing this summer produced, and they are the only thing universities are actually being asked to sign.

None of this rests on a purely invented crisis, much as we might wish otherwise. The trust decline is real; I’ve spent a year writing about it, and Gallup’s numbers are not an invention of the Department. Confidence sat at 38 percent in Gallup’s June survey, down from 42 a year earlier, and Gallup attributes almost all of the slide to Democrats, who fell from 61 to 50. McMahon is correct that the conversation is overdue. My objection is narrower and, I think, harder to answer. A statement of principles posted on a website is the old currency. It is the university asking, one more time, to be taken at its word. Every other instrument in this summer’s rewrite runs on verification instead, on tax records and audit trails and outcome tests. The state has stopped accepting professions of virtue from institutions even as it requests new ones. The pledges will be published, praised, and filed, and the machinery will keep running on the numbers. The verdicts, as ever, will precede the cases.

So, let me make three predictions, on the record.

First, Washington University responds within the month, as Martin told Bloomberg he would, and by December dozens of institutions have posted statements whose structure and language echo the Vanderbilt-WashU vocabulary closely enough to trace.

Second, the AIM proposed rule publishes before the pledge deadline. That half is nearly free, since the master calendar requires a final rule by November 1 for a July 1, 2027 effective date, and the Department has shown it will waive the master calendar when it doesn’t. The part I’m actually predicting is that at least one accreditation criterion rhymes with the seven questions.

Third, no statement of principles, however landmark, changes a single earnings calculation when the first ones run. The pledges and the machinery run on separate tracks, and only one of them has an off switch.

Eighty years to build those three charters. One summer to rewrite two and put the third in motion. The signature page went out to admin inboxes Monday.

Whatever else this summer was, it was not slow.

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This is the fourth piece in a series I keep expecting to finish. It began with the earnings test, continued through the research-money shift, and stopped to read the report nobody else read. The accreditation rule has not dropped. The pledges are due in December. The first earnings calculations run in 2027 and the first consequences in 2028. Comments open, as ever. And if watching the compact get rewritten in real time leaves you measurably better off, the coffee link requires no pledge of principles.