The U.S. Department of Education invited 9 eminent universities to join a “compact” in which they would adopt Trump priorities in exchange for assurances of future federal funding. Trump priorities include abolishing any efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion; assuring that rightwing views are accorded equal time; and agreeing that students would be admitted solely by merit (i.e. test scores). This “compact” means intrusion of the federal government into the internal decision-making of the university.
The first institution to respond was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its president Dr. Sally Kornbluth, a cell biologist, wrote this letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, a wrestling entrepreneur:
Regarding the Compact
October 10, 2025
Sally Kornbluth, President
Dear members of the MIT community,
The U.S. Department of Education recently sent MIT and eight other institutions a proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” along with a letter asking that MIT review the document.
From the messages I’ve received, I know this is on the minds of many of you and that you care deeply about the Institute’s mission, its values and each other. I do too.
After considerable thought and consultation with leaders from across MIT, today I sent the following reply to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth
Dear Madam Secretary,
I write in response to your letter of October 1, inviting MIT to review a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” I acknowledge the vital importance of these matters.
I appreciated the chance to meet with you earlier this year to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education.
As we discussed, the Institute’s mission of service to the nation directs us to advance knowledge, educate students and bring knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges. We do that in line with a clear set of values, with excellence above all. Some practical examples:
- MIT prides itself on rewarding merit. Students, faculty and staff succeed here based on the strength of their talent, ideas and hard work. For instance, the Institute was the first to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic. And MIT has never had legacy preferences in admissions.
- MIT opens its doors to the most talented students regardless of their family’s finances. Admissions are need-blind. Incoming undergraduates whose families earn less than $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Nearly 88% of our last graduating class left MIT with no debt for their education. We make a wealth of free courses and low-cost certificates available to any American with an internet connection. Of the undergraduate degrees we award, 94% are in STEM fields. And in service to the nation, we cap enrollment of international undergraduates at roughly 10%.
- We value free expression, as clearly described in the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. We must hear facts and opinions we don’t like – and engage respectfully with those with whom we disagree.
These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission – work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law.
The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.
As you know, MIT’s record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America’s research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.
Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth
cc
Ms. May Mailman
Mr. Vincent Haley
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“assuring that rightwing views are accorded equal time; and agreeing that students would be admitted solely by merit (i.e. test scores)”
Trump clearly wants to control the message and have the power to censor any messengers who do not agree with what he things.
When it comes to Trump, who is an extreme micromanager, it is what he things; what he wants, that counts most.
Neither right-wing nor left-wing views can be said to dominate the news outright, as the influence of each side differs greatly depending on the type of media and the audience it reaches. The media landscape is highly polarized, with different audiences consuming and trusting different news sources.
Multiple topics, rather than a single one, dominate political discourse on college campuses, with the most dominant issues differing across left- and right-wing perspectives. A common theme underlying many of these topics is the widespread concern over free speech, viewpoint diversity, and the political environment on campus.
Test scores are an incomplete and often misleading measure of merit because they do not account for a student’s background and context, and many institutions are increasingly using holistic review processes that consider a wider range of factors. Standardized tests can have biases related to socioeconomic status, race, and gender, and factors like grades, extracurriculars, essays, and a student’s personal circumstances offer a more comprehensive view of their potential. Many colleges now have test-optional policies, and some are even awarding merit aid without considering test scores at all.
Over 2,000 colleges and universities of nearly 6,000, offer test-optional or test-free admissions for the 2025-2026 academic year, a trend that includes many highly selective schools, though some, like several Ivy League institutions, have returned to requiring test scores. The exact number can fluctuate as schools update their policies.
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In other words, ‘We know what merit and freedom truly mean and we’re doing great as is, so we’re not buy into this phony deal’ (with the devil)
VERY well written!
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cx: s/b buying (not buy)
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I’m sure you noticed my typos. Thing for think. I correct them if the option is available and ignore them after I’ve posted a comment and can’t edit.
There’s too much I want to get done each day to worry about typos in comments I make that I can’t correct.
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Thanks, Lloyd. It’s really frustrating to me when it happens because I noticed the error and went to fix it, but my cursor then jumps to reply and the post gets sent prematurely. (I’ve worked on fixing my cursor so it’s actually a little better now but still problematic, so it drives me nuts!)
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The devil has a fan club of religious fanatics that thinks he is their Messiah.
‘Anointed by God;’: The Christians who see Trump as their saviour.
The German Nazis also cultivated a powerful personality cult around Hitler that portrayed him as a messianic, savior-like figure who could redeem Germany from its problems.
The world has been down this brutal, horrible bloody road before, and to stop Hitler, it cost 50-55 million civilian deaths and 21 – 25 million military deaths, which included about 5 million prisoners of war.
They didn’t have nuclear weapons until the end of World War II, which the United States used to end the war in Japan, but dropping two A-bombs.
I think Trump is itching to use nuclear weapons.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump reportedly asked a foreign policy advisor three times why the U.S. should not use nuclear weapons if it possessed them.
According to reporting in Michael Schmidt’s book Donald Trump v. The United States, in 2017, Trump discussed using a nuclear weapon on North Korea and blaming it on another country.
In 2019, it was reported that Trump had suggested exploring the use of nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States.
In 2017, he made comments that suggested he would not take using a nuclear bomb in Europe off the table.
If Trump and his Nazi Klepto-Kakistocracy regime is not stopped and removed from the White House ASAP, I think he will go down in history, if anyone is left to write history, as the monster who murdered hundreds of million or billions of people.
Many still argue it’s wrong to call Trump and his regime Nazis. I thought that argument had some merit, that Trump was only a fascist, until I read the differences between fascist regimes and what type Nazis were.
“While Nazism is a form of fascism, its distinguishing feature was its virulent racial ideology, which elevated the Aryan race as superior and demonized others, particularly Jewish people. In contrast, other fascist movements, like Benito Mussolini’s in Italy, were primarily focused on ultra-nationalism and state supremacy, without an inherent racial doctrine.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism/Varieties-of-fascism
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Lloyd, You are essentially right about the differences between Fascists and Nazis. However, there’s actually a lot more to it than that, because Italy also passed laws that restricted Jews, just not quite as virulently at first as the Nazis did.
According to “Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi rule, 1922-1945:”
“During the years 1938–43, prior to the loss of Italian sovereignty, Fascist Italy waged a debilitating campaign against its Jewish population. The passage of anti-Jewish laws, introduced primarily before the Second World War and without German interference, dealt a sharp blow to the Italian Jewish community. Soon after the Manifesto of Racist Scientists appeared, which attempted to prepare the public and provide a theoretical justification for the coming anti-Jewish campaign, a law of September 5, 1938, declared that Jews could no longer send their children to public or private Italian schools or be employed in any capacity in any Italian school from kindergarten to university;7 a law of November 15, 1938, further decreed the immediate and permanent removal of all textbooks by Jewish authors from the Italian classroom.8
Two months later, the Council of Ministers passed a sweeping set of racial decrees. Signed by Mussolini, King Victor Emmanuel Ⅲ, the minister of justice and others, the Royal Decree Law of November 17, 1938 – titled “Laws for the Defense of the Race” – decreed that intermarriages between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” were henceforth illegal (Art. 1), a law that applied equally to Jews and blacks, or any other non-Aryan people, regardless of nationality, thus forming part of a larger racial policy in the wake of Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia;9 Jews could no longer perform military service in peace or wartime (Art. 10a); Jews were banned from being guardians of non-Jewish minors (Art. 10b); Jews were henceforth barred from any state employment and from owning or managing any business with more than one hundred employees or which received defense contracts (Art. 10c); Jews could no longer own land that had a taxable value of more than 5,000 lire or urban buildings worth more than 20,000 lire (Art. 10d, 10e); Jews were banned from employing domestic servants “of the Aryan race” (Art. 12); and Jews could lose legal parental control over children “who belong to a religion different from the Jewish religion, if it is demonstrated that they give them an education which does not correspond to their religious principles or to the national purpose” (Art. 11).10 In addition, Italian citizenship granted to Jews after 1919 was henceforth revoked (Art. 23) and all foreign Jews – with the exception of those over sixty-five years of age or those married to Italian citizens – were ordered to leave the country within four months or be forcefully expelled (Art. 24 and 25).
Additional regulations to the “Laws for the Defense of the Race” sought the complete segregation of Jews from Italian society. On June 29, 1939, a new law banned Jews from the skilled professions, affecting some 1,599 Jewish doctors, lawyers, architects, journalists, dentists, and engineers.11 Other additions included prohibitions on Jews frequenting popular vacation spots, on placing advertisements and death notices in newspapers, on owning a radio, on publishing books, on public lecturing, on having their names listed in telephone books, or on entering certain public buildings.12” (See link below)
After Mussolini was deposed and Hitler rescued and installed him as a puppet ruler, and the Nazis occupied Italy in 1943, Mussolini went along with Hitler and sent Italian Jews to concentration camps as well.
I think it’s not just nationalism that propelled both Italy and Germany, but also expansionism that were very serious concerns –as with our current Administration– and which drove them to war…
https://assets.cambridge.org/052184/1011/excerpt/0521841011_excerpt.htm
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You are also correct, Lloyd, that it’s truly outrageous that the person who is charged with carrying the nuclear codes with him everywhere he goes (“the nuclear football”) would have no understanding whatsoever of how the very powerful atom bombs, which were dropped only twice, were what caused the end of WWII with the Japanese, due to the massive destruction and radiation that resulted from them. And even worse, absolutely no concept of how much more powerful and devastating than those bombs were are the nuclear bombs that exist today.
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it’s pretty obvious what Trump and his crew of thugs are working towards. And the fact that they double and triple down on their lies and projections makes it that much more infuriating.
And his base is just as complicit.
Case in point: I was at the final playoff game for the Yankees last week. The Blue Jays are from Toronto. It’s been a tradition, for decades, for a performer to sing both the USA and Canadian national anthems before the game begins. Respect and honoring a neighboring ally.
A significant portion of the crowd booed throughout the entirety of that Canadian anthem. “USA! USA!” was chanted in unison from all areas of the stadium.
This is not “normal”. At all. If anything, “Yang-kees! Yang-kees!”. But even that would wait until after the anthem was sung. Definitely no boos, either.
Trump is emboldening and bringing out the worst in us.
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