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Megan McArdle
Washington Post
In the golden decades that stretched from the end of World War II to the 2010s, there was almost no better business to be in than higher education.
What’s that you say? A university is not a business? Well, I take the point, but just the same, universities were certainly operating more and more like businesses, with glossy marketing campaigns, sophisticated plans to ensure more admitted students actually enrolled and elaborate price discrimination schemes designed to squeeze every last dollar out of students. Increasingly, they also adopted that classic business maxim: “The customer is always right.”
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For the good of the Nation, university leadership must seize this occasion to drive essential reforms—a process some began by adopting positions of institutional neutrality and improving policies related to campus protests. Before the end of 2026, I call on every postsecondary institution to describe to the American public your commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service—commitments that make our universities a bedrock institution of the American republic.
Now the administration is back with Compact 2.0, formally titled "A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards." It includes some rhetorical flourishes intended to make it seem less threatening to teaching, learning and research. But make no mistake: It once again asks colleges and universities to align themselves with a far-right agenda at the expense of students’ education and the public’s well-being.
