MIT Rejects Trump’s Bid to Institute Trans Bathroom, Athletics Ban

“A government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow.”

Photo by Ana Garnica on Unsplash

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has rejected the Trump Administration’s latest bid to bribe the university into compliance with its discriminatory and far-right initiatives, including an anti-trans bathroom ban.

The Department of Education offered preferential funding to MIT and 8 other major universities if they signed on to the so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The demands would evidently bar trans students from the restrooms, locker rooms, housing spaces, and sports teams aligned with their gender identity.

The Compact would also target international students, seeking to cap their acceptance rates; eliminate DEI efforts; and dismantle academic freedom and free expression, or as the DOE branded the matter, “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

“The premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” said MIT President Sally Kornbluth, in a letter sent to the Department of Education and released to the public earlier today. This makes MIT the first university to publicly reject Trump’s Compact.

“In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education,” Kornbluth said.

MIT students and faculty have been urging Kornbluth to reject the proposal since news of its existence first broke. Nearly 20 MIT student organizations signed an open letter saying the agreement “would effectively enable unprecedented control by presidential administrations over admissions, research, and classroom discussion” and open the door to further repression of marginalized groups, including immigrants and LGBTQ students.

The Compact was sent to 9 total universities that the White House seemingly viewed as being sympathetic to the cause, or otherwise willing to capitulate to Trumpian demands. A senior advisor to the President told the Wall Street Journal they believed these schools have “a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education.”

The other schools that reportedly received a version of the Compact include Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia—all on the same day.

Neither the full text, nor the rationale of the offer on a school-to-school basis, has been formally released by the Trump Administration, but The Washington Post published a version of it.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—a “free speech” organization that has, at times, been rather antagonistic towards trans people itself—warned that the deal would have a chilling effect on education.

“A government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow,” Tyler Coward, FIRE’s lead counsel for government affairs, said of the Compact. “That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy.”

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, called the maneuver a “Faustian bargain.”

“It’s not worth the compromises that they would have to make,” he said.

Dartmouth seemed to express similar reservations about the Compact as MIT did. “We will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves,” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock said in a public statement, although it did not go as far as MIT did in its condemnation, and it remains unclear whether it will agree to the Compact’s terms.

Other universities indicated they were still reviewing the document, but most did not offer much more insight than that. A statement from administrators at the University of Texas at Austin was by far the most spirited.

“We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the Compact immediately,” UT System Board of Regents Chair Kevin Eltife said.

The Compact is part of the Administration’s escalating attacks on higher education across the country. Many university health care systems have also found themselves at the crosshairs of conservatives’ war on trans rights.

Earlier this year, Brown agreed to cease gender-affirming care for trans minors, including surgery, puberty blockers, and hormone treatments, in order to appease the federal government. It also adopted rigid, right-wing, and unscientific definitions of sex and gender, promising to push trans students out of sex-segregated housing, bathrooms, and athletics programs. Columbia, too, has agreed to some level of anti-trans capitulation, including a ban on trans girls in women’s sports.

The University of Pennsylvania has also, at least in part, bowed to the White House, agreeing to discriminate against trans athletes and retract the awards won by swimmer Lia Thomas due to anti-trans backlash. It further agreed to withhold some gender-affirming procedures to trans people, including some adults, as it set the age minimum to 19. (However, Penn is pushing back in other ways—it is among health care systems resisting the Department of Justice subpoenas of transgender youth and their health care providers.)

Harvard, which is a stone’s throw from MIT in Cambridge, gave up its campus LGBTQ student center as one of several identity-based organizations replaced with groups supporting faith-based communities and students in the military.

MIT’s rejection could pave the way for other universities to boldly stand up to the Administration. Institutions will have until Nov. 21 to sign the Compact.