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Opinion by From the Community
Standford Daily
Excerpt: The Trump administration’s new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is a trap.
Presented last week to a group of nine universities that doesn’t yet include Stanford, the compact proposes a list of policy changes the administration hopes universities will agree to in exchange for preferential access to federal grants. Several of the proposed reforms respond to legitimate concerns about higher education and identify real challenges that elite universities have faced in recent years. As White House advisor May Mailman put it, “Our hope is that a lot of schools see that this is highly reasonable.”
Anna Krylov
Heterodox at USC, Substack
Excerpt: On October 1st, nine schools—including USC—received a letter from the US Secretary of Education inviting them to proactively join the effort to improve “higher education for the betterment of the country.” The letter announces plans to offer a Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, an agreement that universities will be invited to sign.
Tyler Coward, Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression
Excerpt: Freedom thrives when the people, not bureaucrats, decide which ideas are worthy of discussion, debate, or support. As FIRE has long argued, campus reform is necessary. But overreaching government coercion that tries to end-run around the First Amendment to impose an official orthodoxy is unacceptable. And the White House’s new Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education raises red flags.
The compact includes troubling language, such as calling on institutions to eliminate departments deemed to “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Let’s be clear: Speech that offends or criticizes political views is not violence. Conflating words with violence undermines both free speech and efforts to combat real threats.
Angel Eduardo
FIRE
Excerpt: If you’re a believer in free speech, the past two weeks have been one of the longest years of your life. In fact, this might have been the worst fortnight for free expression in recent memory.
The difference between words and violence – and the civilizational importance of free speech – couldn’t have been more stark in that moment. No matter how hurtful, hateful or wrong, there is no comparing words to a bullet. To preserve that distinction, we must have the highest possible tolerance for even the ugliest speech. But that notion has landed on largely deaf ears, because what followed was a cacophony of cancellations.
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression
Excerpt: If America’s colleges could earn report cards for free speech friendliness, most would deserve an “F”— and conservative students are increasingly joining their liberal peers in supporting censorship.
Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: College students—particularly those who identify as conservative—are less likely to tolerate controversial speech than they were last year, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual survey.
For the 2026 edition of its free speech rankings, FIRE surveyed over 68,000 students from 257 colleges and universities in the U.S. In a question about six hypothetical speakers—three with what are widely considered conservative views and three with traditionally liberal beliefs—the share of students who said the speakers should be allowed to speak on campus dropped by at least five percentage points in all six cases.
