Gov. Gavin Newsom 'confident' USC won't bow to White House pressure

Lia Russell, The Sacramento Bee on Oct 3, 2025

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday he was “confident” that California universities would reject federal attempts to condition educational funds, a day after the governor said he would block state funds to any California school that agreed to a White House compact in exchange for preferential funding treatment.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the White House had sent nine universities, including the University of Southern California, a 10-point “compact” requiring them to overhaul their admission and grading processes in exchange for preferential treatment in federal grant awards.

The memo would require the schools to adhere to strict gender role definitions, freeze tuition for five years, cap enrollment for undergraduate international students at 15% of the student body, and ensure conservative ideas were protected from attempts to “purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence” against them.

Earlier this week, the National Institutes of Health restored hundreds of cancer and other research grants to the University of California, Los Angeles per a judge’s order. The Trump administration had frozen the grants after the administration said the university facilitated an antisemitic on-campus environment.

Trump had previously demanded $1 billion from UCLA in exchange for restoring the frozen grants, which Newsom likened to extortion. On Friday, the government said USC should repeat the same playbook and said he was confident the university would prevail like UCLA.

“What’s the point of the university?” Newsom told reporters Friday at the University of California, Berkeley after signing legislation to shore up the state’s fusion and quantum technology sectors. “What’s the point of all of this if we don’t have academic freedom?”

He said the White House and Republican congressional leaders wanted to put “their thumb” on universities like Berkeley that produced technological advances: “They want to prescribe what that should or should not look like. And so I won’t be a part of that. And I don’t believe the Legislature will be part of that, and so we wanted to send a clear message, we will not be part of that.”

USC told its on-campus newspaper it was “reviewing” the compact, which the federal administration also sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas, Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia.

Newsom said Thursday in an all-caps Trump-emulating statement that any California university that signed the compact would “instantly” lose state funds, saying California would not “BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, AND SURRENDER ACADEMIC FREEDOM.”

Friday marked the third day of the ongoing federal government shutdown, after the Senate failed to pass two funding resolutions to reopen the government.

Democrats, including Newsom, are blaming the shutdown on Republicans’ refusal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, which fund in-state health care for low-income people.