To Indian eyes, what stands out about Donald �հ��ܳ���’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education is the apparent element of choice that US universities have in whether to sign up to it.

�հ��ܳ���’s to an initial nine universities on 15 October, now open to the entire sector, is that if they “want to quickly return to the pursuit of Truth and Achievement”, they will receive “”, which could include “increased overhead payments…substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal partnerships.” Returning to the pursuit of Truth and Achievement involves committing themselves to a , ranging from a five-year tuition freeze for domestic students and clamping down on grade inflation to dismantling DEI, restricting international student recruitment and “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”.

So the president’s electoral base, sceptical of scientific research, including on environmental degradation and economic realities, is now a “Golden Age of Academic Excellence in Higher Education” untarnished by ideology. The French philosopher Bruno Latour once pointed out the irony of the American right using social constructivism, a leftist methodology used primarily to describe identities such as those of gender and race, to erode the credibility of inconvenient scientific truth. �հ��ܳ���’s compact is a harsh reminder that the ideological character of knowledge-methodologies is always adjustable to the needs of the time and the mood of the electorate. In the real world of collective human behaviour, politics too often trumps science (and the pun is impossible to avoid).

The precise benefits of signing the compact currently seem unclear and, as with most things with the Trump administration, unpredictable. Yet although the restrictions on academic freedom that some of its clauses seem to threaten may be thought quite un-American, the offer of financial rewards to autonomous institutions for toeing �հ��ܳ���’s ideological line has the appearance of being much more within American capitalist tradition.

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Looking at all this from a country where politically motivated and ideologically driven administrative and bureaucratic decisions are imposed unilaterally by state authority, it is striking that seven of the original nine universities to which the compact was offered , while the other two kept silent. These rejections are also symptomatic of the values of free inquiry, plurality and diversity that shape American universities.

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Similar rejections of a government proposal are hard to imagine from Indian universities. No doubt part of the explanation is the lack of large endowments and significant institutional power enjoyed by many of their US counterparts but it is also true that in the socialist landscape of Indian higher education, most institutions are structurally dependent on the state or central government, not only for funds but for staff appointments. Hence, they instinctively respond to administrative carrots and sticks exactly the way the state wants.

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Nor are there any attempts to hide the sticks. Politicians are fairly direct about appointing administrative leaders who align with their vision – notably, vice-chancellors, who are constitutionally required to be appointed by local state governors. Faculty appointments are also regularly made in recognition of loyalty to parties in power. Even the requirement for candidates to pay direct bribes to the party in power to get such appointments is a known reality, particularly in rural and provincial institutions, away from the glare of metropolitan media.

It is also difficult to deny that in an inherently hierarchical society such as India’s, kowtowing to authority comes much more naturally and quickly than it does in cultures set up on foundations of individual liberty, free thought and enquiry.

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This is exactly why I think the compact is well positioned to take administrative control of US universities to a whole new level – and could be copied in other countries where political compliance comes less naturally than in Asia. It is a departure from Republicans’ bitter and intense face-offs with universities over the issue of antisemitism on campus, which saw Trump large amounts of federal funding for universities deemed to have permitted antisemitism, and set out sweeping demands for control over hiring and curricula whose acceptance, according to Harvard president Alan Garber, would have amounted to a surrender of institutions’ independence and constitutional rights.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” he wrote, in an rejecting the administration’s demands.

Although��the compact’s terms enter similar territory, its voluntary nature removes the sense of extortion and appears to offer a degree of fairness and support for mainstream American values and interests, which is particularly likely to appeal to �հ��ܳ���’s support base. Some of its provisions could even win him some new supporters. A significant part of mainstream opinion worldwide has increasingly become disenchanted – indeed, antagonised – by what it sees as the domination of left-liberal views on campus. This explains why the bullying of universities has not drawn significant outrage beyond the academic world, and it might well lead many to see the compact’s idea of a fair political marketplace on campus as a useful corrective – even though there is little doubt that this call for fairness actually aims to swing the ideological pendulum to the other extreme.

Moreover, the compact’s five-year tuition freeze for American students could resonate with a population that has become exhausted with astronomical sticker prices on college degrees, of whose value they are increasingly unconvinced.

“The increasing costs of higher education are weakening domestic popular political support for higher education,” former Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff recently told��the Going Global conference in London. “It becomes easier and easier for populist politicians to attack higher education as a kind of elite luxury that the taxpayer pays for.”

Ignatieff knows the bitter reality of populist attack; he was rector of the Central European University (CEU) from 2016 to 2021, an institution that, for the most part, was forced to leave Hungary for Austria by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the pioneer of “illiberal democracy” in Europe and sometimes called “Trump before Trump”.

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This summer, I saw the impact of the ongoing ideological struggle between the right-wing Hungarian government and the weakened CEU closely, during a stint as a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study on the university’s eviscerated Budapest campus. Orbán used the legal vulnerability of the CEU’s international charter to crack down on an institution supported by his arch-enemy, the liberal Hungarian-Jewish philanthropist George Soros. As Ignatieff pointed out, Orbán learned before anyone else that controlling the universities that train a country’s elite is the best way to gain eventual control of its political system.

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For his part, Ignatieff is not placated by �հ��ܳ���’s more mercantile approach to imposing ideological control on American universities, calling it “a “renationalisation” of America’s hitherto autonomous universities. For a political party that has always pushed for less, not more government, the Republican Party is certainly showing striking opportunism here, to bring what is possibly the greatest space for dissent, free thought, diversity and internationalism under its administrative and ideological control. But while no university has yet signed up to it, the New University of Florida has to be the first to do so. And where it leads, other institutions – particularly those with smaller endowments – seem likely to follow.

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Trump is also taking an odd approach to restoring America’s supposedly lost international prestige. Federal funding cuts and immigration controls are almost certain to have a negative impact on the condition of US universities – and particularly on its most tangible, if controversial, marker – global rankings. Harvard University, for instance, has already slipped to its lowest position for six years, joint fifth, in ̽����Ƶ’s latest World University Rankings – despite the fact that most of the indicators used in the rankings, such as citations, take several years to register the effect of contemporary events.

Across-the-board falls for��US universities might not manifest themselves until after Trump leaves office but they seem inevitable if universities are forced to trade their academic freedom for funding – not least because the positive effects of any extra compact-related funding is likely to be offset by the reputational effects of submitting to ideological control, hampering universities’ attempts to continue their tradition of attracting the best academics from around the world.

Of course, universities have never and can never be value-free. For many decades, wittingly or otherwise, they have been venues for the transmission of Western ideology, from British colonialism to American globalisation, even as they have also been venues to debate the merits of that ideology. Indeed, all of that – both the ideology and the freedom to debate it – is part of the soft power that universities have wielded for decades on behalf of their countries, particularly as they have become increasingly internationalised.

But none of that is likely to be a concern for the current administration. As noted in THE by Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, Trump is far less concerned with the soft power of education and research than with hard power: “economic competition, military prowess, military capacity”.

Perhaps, ultimately, a world dominated by hard power might ultimately be one in which academic freedom ceases to be a factor in the prestige and reputation of universities. After all, the near absence of academic freedom and ideological dissent has not held back Chinese universities. For many years, Chinese universities have been rising up the league tables, by virtue of the authoritarian Chinese state’s massive investments in science and technology research. Yes, the Chinese government has also sought global promotion of Chinese language, culture and soft power through programmes such as the Confucius institutes but when it comes to domestic universities, the country has focused on building the hard power of science and technology.

Of course, the importance of both academic freedom and institutional support are very different across disciplines. For instance, in India, sensitive questions about caste and religion are the very staples of social science research, in much the same way as race and immigration have been to these disciplines in the West. Freedom to explore politically sensitive issues is also of potential significance in the humanities, although perhaps is not as essential as it is in the social sciences – which is why Narendra Modi’s authoritarian government is such a threat to Indian social science, particularly when it points out facts or makes arguments about realities around caste, religion and national sovereignty that run counter to the ruling ideology. But while structures of scientific knowledge are not value-free, as science historians such as Thomas Kuhn have pointed out, the role of values in that structure is mostly invisible, and the scientific practice of most natural scientists is not shaped by such self-consciousness.

This largely apolitical character of scientific practice is doubtless part of the reason why there has been a recent trend in India to place science and technology academics in senior administrative positions, even in universities where the humanities and the social sciences have equal, if not larger presences. While there are always exceptions, most scientists are much less vocal about aberrant power relations in state and civil society than social scientists and humanists are. And it also happens that they tend to be more dependent on funding for their research, from business and industry but also, more crucially for the present, from the state. ��

This is why the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s decision to become the to reject �հ��ܳ���’s compact was such an act of radical courage and political responsibility. The “premise” of the compact, MIT president Sally Kornbluth said in her statement, “is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone”. But while merit in the social sciences might, to some extent, be in the eye of the beholder, it is perhaps less contested in the hard sciences – and China’s research excellence in those fields is undisputed. It is also worth observing that authoritarian support for massive research in artificial intelligence foretells a particularly gloomy climate for academic freedom in the long run, because AI tends to reflect the social, political and ethical values surrounding it.

Nor does ultra-capitalist Silicon Valley offer a reliable counterweight. US tech firms have accepted �հ��ܳ���’s implicit compact-style deal: political protection and government contracts in return for ideological conformity. And while universities have so far held back from signing up to the compact, the impossibility of research in science and technology without generous state funding suggests they will not be able to hold out forever.

As the global race for AI leadership, in particular, gets ever more frenzied, universities, too, might ultimately conclude that a profitable deal with a populist authoritarian is the most artful move they can make.

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is professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. He writes here in a personal capacity.