Emma Green

You know, I think there's that sort of usefulness aspect, wanting to actually game the system and get ahead.

In terms of the cultural piece, though, I think we're in this really unsettled moment about –

What the humanities as a sort of set of disciplines can do about campuses being biased, about them only presenting very particular points of view, and the university not being a place where these great clashes of ideas can happen.

I think it's really unsettled how universities will respond to that and what kind of structures they'll put in place to try to answer that.

They care about prestige, which this certainly has been a hard thing for prestige, but also and especially they care about money.

And that's where the leverage was, was the science money.

Some of that is coming from a kind of different motivation within the administration, which is Doge.

They mostly did keyword searches and they found, you know, grants for things that they thought were woke and canceled those grants.

Some grants have been canceled through the administration trying to change universities or influence universities to comply with what they see as federal law.

Hard to say because it's playing out right now.

They just unveiled this at the beginning of October, and they selected a handful of schools to consider this compact on excellence in higher education.

The compact is this 10-page letter that they sent out.

And they basically say, if you agree to not use race in admissions, if you agree to have ideological diversity, institutional neutrality, all of these different things that matter to them, we will give you preferred access to federal funds.

It's the carrot to the carrot and stick, arguably.

And the idea is that they're trying to incentivize universities to sign on to this vision of

culturally of what they should be like, the kinds of standards they should uphold in order to get access to the federal funds that they need to be competitive, to do research, to advance scientific agenda.

So there's a lot of conversation happening right now about what these universities are going to do.

There have been strong statements by, for example, organizations that represent professors against signing on to any such compact.

And the concern is that it's basically manipulation, that it's the federal government trying to tell these universities,

independent institutions how to pursue truth and pursue knowledge.