Penn 'seeks no special consideration,' President Jameson says in response to Trump proposal

Susan Snyder, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Oct 5, 2025

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University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson said the school will evaluate a proposed compact from President Donald Trump’s administration based on the school’s values and mission.

Those include “freedom of inquiry and thought, free expression, non-discrimination,” the law, the U.S. Constitution, and Penn’s own governance, Jameson said Sunday in his first public comments since the Trump administration last week asked Penn and eight other colleges to agree to set a of principles in exchange for preferences for federal grants.

The compact would give the Trump administration influence over key core university operations, including hiring, admissions, tuition, and to some extent even curriculum.

But Jameson in the statement to the Penn community Sunday afternoon said plainly that the university “seeks no special consideration.

“We strive to be supported based on the excellence of our work, our scholars and students, and the programs and services we provide to our neighbors and to the world,” he said.

The Trump administration has given the university until Oct. 20 to respond to the proposal. He said he will seek input from the Penn community, including deans, the faculty senate, university leaders, and the board of trustees in deciding how to respond.

The proposed compact already has drawn strong criticism from those in and around the Penn community, who see it as infringing on academic freedom at a private university.

The national American Association of University Professors, as well as the Penn AAUP chapter, and the American Federation of Teachers have condemned the compact.

“Whatever the consequences of refusal,” Penn’s AAUP chapter wrote in a statement, “agreeing would threaten the very mission of the university.”

State Rep. Rick Krajewski (D., Philadelphia) and City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier called the compact “a thinly veiled play at extortion in pursuit of his authoritarian agenda.”

The proposed compact marks the latest demand from the White House as Trump works to exert authority over elite universities like Penn, which this summer reached a deal with the administration after $175 million in federal funding was paused due to the past participation of a transgender athlete.

Other colleges that were sent the memo, called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” are Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia.

Only one of the nine colleges, the University of Texas, has responded enthusiastically to the proposal. Several other schools told the Washington Post they were reviewing the document and the University of Virginia said it had formed a working group.

May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House, told the Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report on the compact, that the colleges were selected because there was a belief they would be “good actors.”

“They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education,” Mailman told the Journal.

In the agreement Penn struck with the administration in July, the university agreed to apologize to team members of transgender women’s swim team athlete Lia Thomas, retroactively give Thomas’ individual Penn records to swimmers who held the next-best times, and adhere to a Trump executive order’s definition of male and female in regard to athletics.

In the compact rolled out last week, the administration is asking the colleges to agree to ban the use of race and sex in hiring, admissions, and financial support for students; limit international undergraduate enrollment at 15%; and require applicants take the SAT or other standardized admission tests. It also says the schools should freeze tuition for American students for five years, prevent grade inflation, and make conservative students feel more welcomed on campus.

Colleges also would have to commit to “defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes,” the compact states. In effect, the move would spread what Penn agreed to for women’s athletics across the entire university’s operations.