Another Nobel Prize That Trump Will Never Win: Economics

MIT, you probably heard, is in the news because on Friday it became the first to reject Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which was sent to nine research universities: Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, and the University of Arizona.

The compact is Mokyr’s worst nightmare. It conditions future federal funding on limiting foreign students to 15 percent; allowing the federal government to dictate criteria for admissions, curricula, grading, hiring, gender identity, tuition, and student protests; agreeing, at the wealthier universities, not to charge any tuition to students in the hard sciences (except for “families of substantial means”); and remaining silent on “societal and political events.” 

In her reply, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said that to the extent the compact is intended to reward merit in admissions, open doors to students who can’t afford to pay tuition, and encourage free expression, MIT already does that. But “the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” as opposed to an institution’s willingness to “restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution.”