Local elected officials urge Penn to reject Trump administration compact

Susan Snyder, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Oct 4, 2025

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PHILADELPHIA — A local state representative and Philadelphia City Council member are urging the University of Pennsylvania to reject signing on to a compact that would give President Donald Trump’s administration influence over the university’s core operations.

State Rep. Rick Krajewski, a Democrat, and Councilmember Jamie Gauthier called the compact “a thinly veiled play at extortion in pursuit of his authoritarian agenda.”

Penn president J. Larry Jameson and his administration have not responded to a request for comment on the proposed compact unveiled by the Trump administration this week. The proposal made to nine colleges asks the schools to adhere to certain principles in exchange for preferences in receiving federal grants.

Those principles, laid out in a 10-page document, would give Trump wide-ranging influence over the private university’s hiring, admissions, tuition pricing, and even curriculum to some extent — in effect influencing the entire education enterprise.

“As leaders representing Penn, as well as hundreds of thousands of West and Southwest neighbors, we demand President Jameson and the rest of the University of Pennsylvania stand firm and reject this disastrous plan,” Krajewski and Gauthier wrote in a statement.

Krajewski and Gauthier also were among local officials critical of Penn after the university scrubbed its websites of diversity initiatives in February in response to a Trump order.

The national American Association of University Professors, as well as the Penn AAUP chapter, and the American Federation of Teachers also have condemned the compact.

“Whatever the consequences of refusal,” Penn’s AAUP chapter wrote in a statement, “agreeing would threaten the very mission of the university.”

Gauthier and Krajewski said the price for accepting the compact is too high for a private university that prides itself on academic freedom.

“Accepting these dollars would mean unprecedented policing and control of the curriculum and campus culture of universities like Penn,” they wrote. “This is not a peace offering, this is a hostile takeover.”

The nation is watching how the universities respond, they said.

“Long after President Trump is gone, Black and Brown Philadelphians will still be here,” they wrote. “We will remember how Penn navigated this moment.”

The proposed compact marks the latest demand from the White House as Trump works to exert authority over elite universities like Penn, which this summer reached a deal with the administration after $175 million in federal funding was paused due to the past participation of a transgender athlete.

Other colleges that were sent the memo, called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” are Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia.

Only one of the nine colleges has responded enthusiastically to the proposal.

Kevin Eltife, chairman of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, told The Washington Post the system was honored that the school was included.

“We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” he told the Post.

Several other schools told the Post they were reviewing the document and the University of Virginia said it had formed a working group.

May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House, told the Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report on the compact, that the colleges were selected because there was a belief they would be “good actors.”

“They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education,” Mailman told the Journal.

In the agreement Penn struck with the administration in July, the university agreed to apologize to team members of transgender women’s swim team athlete Lia Thomas, retroactively give Thomas’ individual Penn records to swimmers who held the next-best times, and adhere to a Trump executive order’s definition of male and female in regard to athletics.

In the compact rolled out this week, the administration is asking the colleges to agree to ban the use of race and sex in hiring, admissions, and financial support for students; limit international undergraduate enrollment at 15%; and require applicants take the SAT or other standardized admission tests. It also says the schools should freeze tuition for American students for five years, prevent grade inflation, and make conservative students feel more welcomed on campus.

Colleges also would have to commit to “defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes,” the compact states. In effect, the move would spread what Penn agreed to for women’s athletics across the entire university operations.