Throughout modern global history, academia has been among the first targets of rising authoritarians. Imprisoning political enemies, censoring the media and normalizing domestic militarization are useful tools for seizing power in the moment — but authoritarian movements understand that to extend their power into the future, they must control how young minds are shaped within academic institutions.

The Trump administration has deployed federal troops to America’s streets, has cowed media critics with licensure threats and is working to imprison political critics like James Comey and John Bolton. But most of America’s top universities have, so far, resisted President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to MAGA-tize every aspect of our nation’s civic life.

It’s urgent that they continue that resistance. Which is why it’s so laudable that Washington University in St. Louis has announced it will not sign onto the administration’s wildly misnamed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”

The compact is a set of principles that universities are being asked to accept if they want continued access to federal funding for medical and other research. It is a mix of seemingly neutral and blatantly ideological standards — but it wouldn’t matter if every word of it was reasonable. The very specter of a presidential administration linking research funding to that administration’s political agenda is unacceptable on its face.

Much of the compact’s language is so vague as to allow the administration to allege violation of it (and thus yanking funding, even retroactively) on purely subjective ideological grounds.

For example, one passage demands that universities foster “an intellectually open campus environment” — but then specifies that that includes “abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

What ideas would those be? Lots of traditional conservatives today would give a far different definition than would this president. And how can it be an “intellectually open campus” if protesters can’t even “belittle” ideas with which they disagree?

Another passage requires universities to prohibit “support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.” That might sound reasonable but for the fact that Trump has officially designated “antifa" as a domestic terrorist organization.

Of course, antifa isn’t an “organization” at all, but a loosely defined anti-fascism movement — and a label that Trump and his allies apply to pretty much anyone who opposes his policies, even peacefully. How hard is it to imagine this president leveraging that passage in the compact to yank research funding from any university that allows students to peacefully protest his presidency?

The compact demands that universities endorse this administration’s blatant xenophobia by arbitrarily limiting foreign visa students to 15% of the undergraduate population, with no more than 5% from any one country. This random quota limit could be devastating to universities like WashU, which depend largely on talented and well-heeled foreign students who pay full tuition rates.

That passage goes on to specify that universities must “screen out” foreign students who “demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.” So much for America’s vaunted principle of free speech.

Also, universities “shall share all known information about foreign students … upon request and as relevant,” with the administration. So now our universities are supposed to play Big Brother on behalf of an administration with demonstrated zeal to harass even legal immigrants.

Some might cheer the compact’s requirement that universities freeze tuition rates for American students at current levels for five years, but it’s a simplistic and unworkable solution to the complicated problem of tuition inflation. That problem is driven largely by state governments that have been reducing their financial support for higher education. Combined with the compact’s limits on full-tuition-paying foreign students, this is a recipe for guaranteed insolvency for many institutions.

WashU Chancellor Andrew Martin’s decision this week to reject the compact — even as he has diplomatically agreed to “engage constructively“ with the administration regarding the “future of higher education” — comes with risks. With typically mafioso-like menace, the White House notes that universities “are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forgo federal benefits.”

Today’s breathtaking advancements in medicine have been driven in large part by federal research support from agencies like the National Institutes of Health. WashU is among the top recipients in the nation of NIH funding, enabling breakthroughs in cancer treatment, infectious diseases and vaccines.

In other words, academia touches our lives in real ways, particularly in the realm of public health. For politicians to try to tie ideological strings to that funding presents real dangers not just to academic freedom but to real Americans. Kudos to WashU for rejecting this Faustian bargain.

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