Secretary of Education Linda McMahon sent a letter Monday to college and university leaders asking them to post statements of principle on their websites detailing how they’ll prevent unruly protests from disrupting classes and foreign influences in their research, among other things. Bloomberg reported that four university presidents assisted with it, including Washington University Chancellor Andrew Martin. “The leaders of four colleges also helped draft the letter or its framework in meetings with senior administration officials, and plan to support the effort publicly,” the publication reported.
However, in a statement to SLM, Martin distanced himself from the letter’s authorship. “For several months, I have participated in broader discussions with the White House and other higher education leaders about issues affecting the sector,” Martin wrote. “I expect those conversations helped inform the administration’s thinking around their Monday letter. I was not involved, however, in the drafting of the letter.” He did not directly address a question asking if he felt the Bloomberg article accurately characterized his involvement with the letter.
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Martin also wrote that he is reviewing the letter and engaging with colleagues in discussions of it. “In the coming weeks, I will share more about how members of the WashU community will work together to determine the university’s response,” he told SLM. “Our response will reflect WashU’s own mission, values, policies and practices.”
Monday’s letter represents the Trump administration’s latest attempt to engage with higher education. Last fall, the administration proposed the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, a nine-page document that required universities and colleges to commit to a host of reforms in exchange for preferential access to federal research funding. The compact was widely rejected as an attack on educational freedom by higher education leaders.
When WashU’s student newspaper broke the news last fall that Chancellor Martin had met virtually with the Department of Education to discuss the Compact, 19 student groups publicly denounced the proposal and WashU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published a statement urging Martin not to sign it.
In response to the Monday letter, the national AAUP organization called it Compact 2.0 and said that it shows how their resistance to the original compact was effective, but that more resistance is needed.
Some WashU faculty have now seized on the Bloomberg article reporting that Martin helped with the letter, with one anthropology lecturer echoing the AAUP’s “Compact 2.0” label on X.
Martin has also taken criticism from some faculty members for the Report on the Humanities and Social Sciences co-commissioned by Vanderbilt University and WashU and published in June, which identified rising politicization in disciplines such as anthropology. Some WashU faculty denounced the report as “illegitimate.”
The Education secretary, however, is a fan. In Monday’s letter, McMahon praised the report, as well as a recent Yale Report analyzing why public trust in higher education has declined, as “courageous.”
