Time will tell if the new letter is just the Compact by another name, but I suspect the feedback they got from pro-reform university leaders on the Compact is that there were a couple of poison pills and the idea of "preferred" status for schools agreeing to perceived ideological statements was bad. So, the administration came back with a call to address general issues, with the poison pills removed, drafted in collaboration with university leaders, and, importantly, gave universities the latitude to draft their own plans that fit their institution. It could all be a ruse, of course, but to my eye it seems much more constructive than many of the other actions. Time will tell, I guess.
That's the most plausible read available and the piece tries to leave room for it. The drafting history supports you. Storey brokered the channel, the AAU gave feedback across multiple drafts, and Snyder says she got explicit assurances of no carrots and no sticks before she'd engage at all. The wrinkle is that the assurance and its contradiction arrived the same day. Pidluzny told Higher Ed Dive there'd be no penalties, then said silence would speak volumes, and a White House official told Bloomberg that institutions announcing reforms could be more likely to be in the room when the research money gets rewritten.
Ya, fair enough. On the other hand, I think whether sticks and carrots are inappropriate depends on which part of "reform" we're referring to. A lot of what they're asking for boils down to "follow federal non-discrimination laws" and "take student outcomes seriously". These seem reasonable things for governments to enforce with carrots and sticks, if necessary. https://guidedcivicrevival.substack.com/p/if-academics-want-respect-for-shared
My problem with the research end is that we have been talking about the problem for at least the last 40 years. "Who decides what research gets done?" I will tell one story.. a researcher called me as a "user" of research and asked "what climate problems do you want studied?" I said "we have all these current problems that need to be studied." The researcher said "we only got climate money, so.."
There are so many issues with federal R&D- so much overlap between agencies, so many holes we don't know about. We basically don't take that investment seriously, shovel out money and hope for the best (with some mission-oriented exceptions like DOE and USDA). Just switching political orientations of research pickers goes nowhere near the deeper questions that need to be asked. IMHO.
The piece takes the allocation system as given and argues about who's holding the levers and how durably they'll hold them.
You're pointing at something more uncomfortable, which is that the levers were never well designed, so a fight over who operates them is a fight over the wrong thing. The Golden Age report actually gestures at exactly this, the agency overlap and the portfolio incoherence, before landing on "fund individuals and AI." Diagnosis partly right, treatment mostly unexamined. Forty years of not asking sounds about correct.
"Intellectual pluralism. How will you encourage it in all academic units, and ensure hiring and evaluation take all relevant perspectives seriously?"
Tricky, because the ideological uniformity is the result of culture shift rather than specific policies. Universities can't just flip a switch to fix it—they're going to have to make a bunch of small policy adjustments with the aim of gradually steering themselves towards a more pluralistic stance. Fortunately, universities already have a paradigm for this sort of long-term institutional nudge: it's called DEI.
The last sentence made me laugh for one moment only...:)
It's the only institutional technology the sector has actually built for this problem: slow, cumulative, embedded in hiring rubrics and evaluation criteria and cluster hire design. Which means an institution answering question three in earnest has to reach for machinery it spent the last two years dismantling, at the request of the administration now asking the question.
I don't have a clean thought about that yet...but yours is one of the funniest thoughts about the seven.
Dropping the international student caps makes a lot of sense. Very very few universities, and no flagships, reach the threshold the admin put in the first compact. I do not think it is due to being hard to get out of universities. Most are already practicing it.
Thank you. I read the cap coming out as the administration sanding a poison pill off the compact. Your numbers say it was also a pill that would have bound almost nobody, which makes it a cheap concession to hand over. Cheap concessions are how you signal good faith without spending anything...
Time will tell if the new letter is just the Compact by another name, but I suspect the feedback they got from pro-reform university leaders on the Compact is that there were a couple of poison pills and the idea of "preferred" status for schools agreeing to perceived ideological statements was bad. So, the administration came back with a call to address general issues, with the poison pills removed, drafted in collaboration with university leaders, and, importantly, gave universities the latitude to draft their own plans that fit their institution. It could all be a ruse, of course, but to my eye it seems much more constructive than many of the other actions. Time will tell, I guess.
That's the most plausible read available and the piece tries to leave room for it. The drafting history supports you. Storey brokered the channel, the AAU gave feedback across multiple drafts, and Snyder says she got explicit assurances of no carrots and no sticks before she'd engage at all. The wrinkle is that the assurance and its contradiction arrived the same day. Pidluzny told Higher Ed Dive there'd be no penalties, then said silence would speak volumes, and a White House official told Bloomberg that institutions announcing reforms could be more likely to be in the room when the research money gets rewritten.
Constructive and leveraged aren't exclusive.
Ya, fair enough. On the other hand, I think whether sticks and carrots are inappropriate depends on which part of "reform" we're referring to. A lot of what they're asking for boils down to "follow federal non-discrimination laws" and "take student outcomes seriously". These seem reasonable things for governments to enforce with carrots and sticks, if necessary. https://guidedcivicrevival.substack.com/p/if-academics-want-respect-for-shared
My problem with the research end is that we have been talking about the problem for at least the last 40 years. "Who decides what research gets done?" I will tell one story.. a researcher called me as a "user" of research and asked "what climate problems do you want studied?" I said "we have all these current problems that need to be studied." The researcher said "we only got climate money, so.."
There are so many issues with federal R&D- so much overlap between agencies, so many holes we don't know about. We basically don't take that investment seriously, shovel out money and hope for the best (with some mission-oriented exceptions like DOE and USDA). Just switching political orientations of research pickers goes nowhere near the deeper questions that need to be asked. IMHO.
That researcher's line does a lot of work.
The piece takes the allocation system as given and argues about who's holding the levers and how durably they'll hold them.
You're pointing at something more uncomfortable, which is that the levers were never well designed, so a fight over who operates them is a fight over the wrong thing. The Golden Age report actually gestures at exactly this, the agency overlap and the portfolio incoherence, before landing on "fund individuals and AI." Diagnosis partly right, treatment mostly unexamined. Forty years of not asking sounds about correct.
"Intellectual pluralism. How will you encourage it in all academic units, and ensure hiring and evaluation take all relevant perspectives seriously?"
Tricky, because the ideological uniformity is the result of culture shift rather than specific policies. Universities can't just flip a switch to fix it—they're going to have to make a bunch of small policy adjustments with the aim of gradually steering themselves towards a more pluralistic stance. Fortunately, universities already have a paradigm for this sort of long-term institutional nudge: it's called DEI.
The last sentence made me laugh for one moment only...:)
It's the only institutional technology the sector has actually built for this problem: slow, cumulative, embedded in hiring rubrics and evaluation criteria and cluster hire design. Which means an institution answering question three in earnest has to reach for machinery it spent the last two years dismantling, at the request of the administration now asking the question.
I don't have a clean thought about that yet...but yours is one of the funniest thoughts about the seven.
Dropping the international student caps makes a lot of sense. Very very few universities, and no flagships, reach the threshold the admin put in the first compact. I do not think it is due to being hard to get out of universities. Most are already practicing it.
https://www.collegetowns.org/p/no-international-students-are-not
Thank you. I read the cap coming out as the administration sanding a poison pill off the compact. Your numbers say it was also a pill that would have bound almost nobody, which makes it a cheap concession to hand over. Cheap concessions are how you signal good faith without spending anything...
Adding your piece to the pile.