As university administrators escalate their opposition to the Trump administration‘s oversight, funding reductions, and executive actions related to campus diversity, equity, inclusion, and illegal immigration, they appear to be overlooking a critical precedent: it was former President Barack Obama who introduced the framework for aggressive federal intervention through more than 20 controversial Dear Colleague letters aimed at reshaping the culture and curriculum of campuses nationwide.
The Trump administration’s current strategic use of its Compact for Excellence in Higher Education to reshape campus policies by tying federal funding to compliance with specific reforms is simply taking a page from the Obama playbook. Throughout Obama’s two terms, his administration sent Dear Colleague letters to colleges and universities tying federal funds to compliance with his new federal guidelines on for example, Title IX and sexual violence, racial discrimination, bullying, gender equity in athletics, access for English language learners, pregnant and parenting students, and finally the momentous transgender student rights mandating bathroom access on campus.
While the Obama-era Dear Colleague letters were considered “significant guidance documents,” the truth was that they mandated new campus policies and procedures. Many of them caused chaos on campus. This was especially true with the arrival of Obama’s Dear Colleague Title IX letter of April 4, 2011, which required new procedures in investigating and punishing those with campus sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations. Hundreds of schools were placed under federal investigation for failing to treat allegations of sexual assault more vigorously. Schools responded quickly by building campus kangaroo court systems that venerated victims, villainized the accused, and sometimes disallowed evidence pointing to the innocence of the accused.
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Demanding that colleges and universities comply, Obama’s Office of Civil Rights threatened to withdraw federal funds from schools that failed to set up elaborate Title IX bureaucracies. At one time, Harvard University had 55 Title IX coordinators, and Wellesley College set up a full-time Title IX coordinator to oversee sex discrimination on its all-female campus. Under the federal mandates, the deck was quickly stacked against the civil rights of the accused by discouraging cross-examination of witnesses and, in many cases, refusing legal representation for the accused. A lower standard of evidence was created to determine guilt. As a result, the civil rights of an entire class of individuals, mostly males, were ignored. Hundreds of lawsuits from innocent students were later filed and were successful because these campus courts failed to provide due process to the accused.
Worse, there was a documented concern that race played an important role in the denial of due process. A 2015 article by Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gerson, published in the New Yorker, found that “in general,” the administrators and faculty members she spoke with who worked on sexual misconduct cases indicated that “most of the complaints they see are against minorities.” In 2017, the Atlantic asked, “Is the system biased against men of color?” It was.
In early 2017, President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, promised to “end the era of rule by letter.” She did, but in 2020, former President Joe Biden reinstated the Obama Dear Colleague legacy by deepening the scope of federal involvement in higher education governance. Biden’s letters were part of a broader effort to reassert mandates surrounding DEI. Signaling a reversal of the Trump-era stance and promising regulatory changes in June 2021, Biden reaffirmed that Title IX protections extended to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Biden also proposed an unsuccessful Title IX rule rewrite before he left office that would have expanded legal protections for LGBT students.
Today, the Trump administration is using the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education as a strategic tool to reshape campus policies by tying federal funding to compliance with specific reforms. The compact outlines 10 key policy commitments that universities must adopt to receive preferential access to federal research funding. These include a commitment to freeze tuition for five years, ban transgender women from female locker rooms and athletic teams, eliminating race and sex considerations in admission, capping international student enrollment at 15%, promoting viewpoint diversity and protecting conservative speech, defining gender based on biological sex, prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors in university health systems, and using merit-based admissions policies.
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In exchange for adopting these policies, universities would receive priority access to federal grants, higher overhead allowances, and restoration of previously withheld funding. But citing threats to academic freedom and institutional autonomy, several universities, including MIT, Brown, Penn, Southern California, Dartmouth, Virginia, and Arizona, have all declined to sign.
It is a striking reversal of roles as the very institutions that once embraced federal mandates as instruments of progress now find themselves resisting a new set of directives, revealing how swiftly the politics of compliance can shift when the power behind the pen changes hands.
Anne Hendershott is a professor of sociology and director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville.