I am ever watchful for Trump Administration ethical and legal overreach. We know this man by now (though he is still full of surprises, some good, some frightening) , and if any leader has ever been prone to get cocky when flushed with success, leading him to breach rules, laws, ethics and common sense, Donald Trump is. So when I read in some Axis news source that university professors are “up in arms” over Trump pressing colleges and universities into signing a “loyalty oath,” my ethics alarms imitated Big Ben. Oh-oh. Loyalty oaths are anathema to democracy and the United States of America, but it sounds like something Trump might find appealing.
But upon research that took me about 15 minutes but that the members of the public this lie is aimed at deceiving won’t do, there is no “loyalty oath.” The unethical academics and activists trying to ensure that American universities remain leftist indoctrination camps came up with that label because they knew it was inflammatory and would make the Trump Deranged, their tending-toward-Trump Derangement family, friends and co-workers, and the intellectually lazy and gullible certain that a fascist takeover is approaching.
My first clue was that the Association of American University Professors chose, of all places, the Move-On.org website to post its manifesto. There are more unethical far left activist organizations than Move-On, but that’s the best thing I can say about it. If you’ll recall, the group started with the unethical theory that it was time to “Move-On” from holding Bill Clinton accountable for his lies in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, his sexual harassment and his obstruction of justice to bury it, because he was a Democrat and deserved the King’s Pass. My second clue was the fact that the AAUP was joined in its fake “Loyalty Oath” claim by the American Federation of Teachers and its Ethics Villain President Randi Weingarten, for whom no lie is too big if it serves the partisan goals of her members.
The final and decisive clues was what these militant ideologues were calling the “loyalty oath.” There is nothing about loyalty in it, for one thing. The so-called loyalty oath is the compact the White House is pressuring universities and colleges to agree to in order to justify receiving federal grants. The objective of the compact is to stop institutes of higher education from discriminating, using their degrees to promote leftist ideology indoctrination in their students, deliberately limiting conservative viewpoints among the faculty, charging obscene amounts for tuition, and other toxic practices that have been allowed to take over academia. The full list:
- Ban consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions processes
- Freeze tuition for a five-year period
- Limit international undergraduate enrollment to 15 percent of the student body
- Commit to institutional neutrality
- Require applicants to take standardized tests, such as the SAT or ACT
- Clamp down on grade inflation
- Ensure a “vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus”
- Restrict employees from expressing political views on behalf of the institution
- Shut down departments that “punish, belittle” or “spark violence against conservative ideas”
- Anonymously poll students and employees on compact compliance and publish the results
No loyalty oath. In fact, those are all reasonable requirements. Any university that wants to keep discriminating against whites, Asians, and conservatives while only hiring progressives, socialists, Communists and America-haters to teach their students while soaking them for all they are worth are still free to do so, as a completely private university receiving no federal funds. That sounds fair to me.
Sure, the “compact” looks like it can be abused: who defines what a “vibrant marketplace of ideas” is? On the whole, however, these guidelines are reasonable, in the best traditions of pluralism and scholarship, and long overdue. That academics are opposing them at all is strong indication, as if we needed another, that U.S. education has gone wildly off-course. That the AAUP is resorting to flagrant public misrepresentation to oppose them is signature significance. Liars should not be teachers.
[Gee, it would be nice to have Curmie around to weigh in on an issue like this…]
Ethics Alarms 
I guess hitting the academy in the pocketbook is the only way to penetrate their arrogance. When I was at my 50th college reunion, the president went out of his way to assure the assembled (mostly lefty fellow travelers, shockingly, or not) that the college had joined a consortium of colleges which had hired lawyers to advise them on how to work around and continue business as usual despite the recent Supreme Court case ending discrimination against Chinese American kids. It was breathtaking. The president was a lawyer. Had he been advising himself, I assume he would have said, “Uh, Pres. Are you sure you want to say that kind of thing out loud and build the plaintiff’s case?” The academy is impregnable. I’m pretty convinced the faculties at these places will literally riot if administrators try to do anything to rein them in. The faculties are in total control of their sandboxes and have been for upwards of fifty years.
Professor Turley weighs in: Johns Hopkins Professor Argues Against Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education – JONATHAN TURLEY
He’s looking to parents of students and donors to bring the schools around. But so many of the donors are lefties.
Nah, not a loyalty oath at all. The problem is, of course, that the Democrats and their allies in the news media and the entertainment industry (and, yes, academia) have been given the power to define and redefine words to make reasoned debate difficult. Newspeak, indeed.
Freeze tuition for a five-year period
Limit international undergraduate enrollment to 15 percent of the student body
If you put the DEI and other political neutrality stuff aside, the combination of these two will make this a non-starter for most universities that emphasize technical education (BTW, these are NOT necessarily known as the more prominent “woke” universities)
I taught at U Oregon (which IS quite woke, and not a tech school, also doesn’t have a med school) which currently has about 4% international students. So it wouldn’t have a problem with the 15% cap. Those 4% are an important revenue stream, however!
Occasionally an American undergrad would express the opinion to me that these slots should go to Americans instead. They generally changed their attitude upon learning that these students are helping to finance the education of Americans, ESPECIALLY in-state students from Oregon, as the U loses a non-trivial amount of money on every in-state student (their tuition is set by the state legislature). Out of state students (thank you California!) pay their way, plus a little more, and international students (who have the highest tuition and often end up paying steep additional fees for ESL support) make the tuition balance out.
I was unable to get a breakdown of UG versus Grad enrollment, but when I looked at which Unis have the highest percentage of international students, the link to math/sciences/tech jumped out. Here are some examples of high percentages:
Carnegie Mellon 43.6%
Illinois Institute of Technology (IoT) 36.1%
California IoT 33%
Georgia IoT 29.3%
MIT 32.9%
Johns Hopkins (big med school) 27.8%
U of Rochester (another big med school) 34.4%
Some not so obviously tech heavy schools (as far as I know) but located in cities attractive to international students:
U Chicago 36%
Boston U 29.4%
Northeastern 32.1 (Boston)
Brandeis 32.6% (Boston)
NYU 42.2%
WIth grant money revenue drying up as grants are cancelled and/or frozen for no discoverable reason (i.e., not officially cancelled, no communication from the government granting agency, maybe the people who administer the funds got DOGE’d?) the tuition revenue from these international students will be more important than ever, and if these schools put a smaller quota in place (or intl students stop coming because of the current political climate) then raising tuition is one of the ways to balance the books.
Another way is eliminating excess administration and “the edifice complex.”
Alas, adminstrators seem to be extremely averse to firing themselves… in universities and everywhere else…..
And therefor…?
and therefore the solution is “creative destruction.”
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2025/06/09/vedders-case-for-creative-destruction/
Ten times the administrators. Sheesh.
I was talking to a guy with very smart children over the weekend. One is well out of college (Columbia), the other is just applying. He said college can run a hundred thousand dollars a year all in. Nearly half a million dollars for an undergraduate degree. Jeeze, parents will have to be investment bankers to afford that. And where’s the ROI?
Digression:
I wrote this here a few months ago and I’ll write it again.
Nobel Laureate Theodore W. Schultz wrote, long ago, about the role international students play in transferring ideas, skills, attitudes, and customs to their home country.
I believe this is in _Investing in people_, 1982. It’s a dry book, but written for a general educated audience.
https://www.amazon.com/Investing-People-Economics-Population-Quality/dp/0520047877
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The issue is a complex one. Rich countries “poach” nurses from poor countries.
It often seems to me that the USA is ending up with South Asian doctors who stay here even though they would do more good back home. But the money is better here, and their kids can grow up here. Let the kids go back to India if they want, but meanwhile they grow up here as citizens…
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I recall a book by the modern historian Walter Laqueur (probably _A world of secrets_, 1985) in which he noted that it sounded like the Soviet Union was sending exchange students/scholars to the US for science studies with military applications, while meanwhile the USA was sending its students to the USSR to study (say) Russian poetry or arcane topics in cultural anthropology.
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Trump, in his heavy handed fashion, has seized on an issue of the utmost importance and approached it in Trumpian fashion, with a mixture of acuity, bombast, exaggeration, and hare-brained suggestions.
I could go on indefinitely about the problems of our colleges and universities, but there’s so much material better than what I could provide.
Suggestion: old but still analytically powerful: _Going broke by degree_ by Richard Vedder. He has two newer books on the same general topic since then.
also John M. Ellis _the breakdown of higher education_ –sassy and with verve!
and a slightly older book by Warren Treadgold, _the university we need_.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Thanks for the reading list.
Sometimes, the main thrust of an ethics post can obscure a more significant ethics failure.
The President and the top officials of his administration have all sworn an oath to uphold and support the Constitution. A part of that is abiding by the laws, not making things up on the fly to appease a vocal minority. So far as I know, appropriations, including grants to colleges, are the prerogative of the Legislative Branch (a better representative of “We the people” than the Executive Branch). If an administration can muster sufficient votes to layer conditions on top of such grants, then there is no overreach and no ethical failure. But, for this President, or the next, to layer conditions on top of appropriations already approved is an unethical overreach. (It’s politically stupid, as well, because it’s so easily overturned by the next administration. c.f. Executive Orders, January.) So, it is proper for college officials to reject that overreach.
As to the main thrust of this post, it really would be encouraging if (presumably) knowledgeable, intelligent college officials would focus on actual, as opposed to perceived, Constitutional insults.
But HJ: the Executive Branch is in charge of grants from the Executive Branch. Congress authorizes the funding, but not individual grants. The bidding process, etc, is all handled by the particular department or agency. I know this because I applied for such grants.
“[A]ppease a vocal minority?” How about “deliver on a mandate?”
Heaven help us if MAGA ever produces a mandate. If you take away the Harris believers and the anti-Trumpers and those (among those remaining) who vote mindlessly, there are not enough remaining votes to constitute anything like a mandate.
There have been three real mandates in my time on Earth: Johnson in ’64, Nixon in ’72, and Reagan in ’80. All because of really week opposition from a party in flux, and all dissipated quickly. We’re due, and I think the GOP will have to screw up badly not to get a mandate in ’28. Which is not to say that that they won’t…
I have no problem with shutting down those who punish conservative viewpoints, or call for violence against them. But “spark violence” may be too vague a phrasing, as political opportunists have always been quick to claim any sort of criticism invites violence against its target. What’s more, to shut down departments that belittle conservative viewpoints seems to me too hard to distinguish from silencing dissent. You should be able to say an idea is wrong, but you should also be able to say it’s reprehensible, or point and laugh at its stupidity. All are valid forms of discourse.
“We’re due”? Surely an impartial ethicist is not publicly acknowledging being part of an extremely partisan group.
“WE” as in “The USA” are “due”for a mandate, as in there hasn’t been one in 45 years, a record since 1900. The comment had no partisan content whatsoever. Confirmation bias on your part, I fear.
Lincoln had the only “mandate” before 1900, and I’m inclined not to count it, since half the country wasn’t voting.