Elite universities are foolish to refuse President Trump’s offer for a dialogue about improving performance, campus environments and public confidence about their value.

In October, President Trump asked nine universities to comment about a compact to improve performance and in return, receive preference in competition for federal funds. Those are strategically important for their scientific research.

These institutions were Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, Brown University, MIT and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Texas, Arizona, Southern California and Virgina.

The compact includes some requirements that are unnecessarily severe. For example, freezing tuition for five years and free tuition for students in STEM disciplines.

Others are badly aimed. Faculties are too woke and unbalanced in favor of progressive ideologies, but shutting units that attack conservative ideas won’t solve the deeply rooted prejudices among humanities and other faculties.

Still, rejecting the president’s request for feedback or failure to respond in any positive way by all but Texas and Vanderbilt were tragic mistakes.

The president is offering an opportunity to discuss the compact—it’s not a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. If they had engaged in dialogue and suggested revisions, the document could have been improved.

But instead, university presidents snubbed the American people by rejecting any form of accountability.

The American people pay the tuition and taxes that underwrite student loans and research grants.

They should expect universities to prepare students for life—equip them with empathy, tolerance, critical thinking skills and the ability to earn a living. And to undertake leading-edge research.

According to a Pew Trust poll, 70% of the American public view higher education as headed in the wrong direction.

Fifty-five percent believe universities do a good job advancing science, while the majority assign poor marks for exposing students to a wide range of opinions and providing opportunities to express opinions, develop critical thinking skills and an affordable education.

That’s a grade of F, or at best D, in all classes except science.

Hiding behind platitudes about academic freedom, constitutional rights and excellence, academic leaders fail to recognize they have very dissatisfied customers.

The declining relative value of a college education—as measured by the ability of graduates to think critically and get jobs that really require a college degree—indicates the customer is right and universities are wrong.

The president’s compact offers the opportunity for improvement in several areas.

• Abide by the laws concerning discrimination on race, for example by requiring incoming freshmen to take the ACT, SAT or an equivalent exam, and correct the bias in favor of progressives and against conservatives in enrollment and staffing.
• Embrace more open cultures and speech codes and enforce civility.
• Transparent grading and recruitment to ensure high standards
• Refrain from taking institutional positions on political issues—universities should be neutral on matters that don’t concern their operation, but faculty could still say what they pleased if they don’t cultivate lawlessness.
• Address costs and affordability by tackling administrative bloat.
• A reasonable cap on international student undergraduate enrollment and caution when taking money from foreign governments.
• A system of accountability.

His details on many of these reflect the naivete often exhibited by business leaders about what’s wrong with universities and how to fix them. But hiring independent auditors and requiring that faculty and students be polled about campus climates are hardly threatening unless you are insincere about wanting genuinely inclusive environments.

Most alarming is the compact would empower the Justice Department with enforcement authority.

The failing grades American universities receive from their customers would seem to indicate the seven university presidents who rejected a dialogue should be fired.

Not really. The Trump administration ignores that these presidents only serve as long as their boards allow and progress is only possible if their faculties will follow them.

A mutiny is easy to incite among tenured professors, and the threat of less funding for the physics lab is hardly a weapon feared by Trump-deranged, radical humanists.

President Trump endangers what American universities do best—advance science—by now offering the compact and preferential access to grant money to less capable institutions.

His ongoing war with wokeism at Harvard endangers important medical and other scientific research.

The leading role of universities goes back to a report published by Vannevar Bush who ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. It stressed that scientific research was essential to national security and public welfare, and the U.S. government should support basic research at colleges, universities and institutes.

From Gatorade to mRNA we have delivered, and the president should send Harvard researchers grant money.

University presidents should view his request for feedback as an opportunity for dialogue with both their customers, the American people through their president, and faculties who clearly need to clean up their act.
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Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.