Campus Compact: A Higher Education Compact in Action

Posted by Campus Compact on October 21, 2025

Like many others in higher education, we’ve spent the past few weeks learning and hearing about the Administration’s proposal for a new higher education compact. Like many other organizations (including our partners at AAC&U and the American Council on Education), we at Campus Compact are greatly concerned about the proposed conditions that threaten academic freedom, institutional independence, and higher education’s ability to advance opportunity for all.

We have been operating as a higher education compact for 40 years, but our goals are different. Campus Compact was founded in 1985 by presidents from campuses across the country who agreed that collective goal-setting and action was necessary for higher education to live up to its responsibility of teaching students to be active and engaged community members and for institutions themselves to be more responsive partners in their communities.

Today, we find ourselves in another moment where collective action is vital. Higher education is in crisis. As Danielle Allen said in her April 2025 article in The Atlantic, “The future of the nation’s universities is very much at stake. This is not a challenge that can be met with purely defensive tactics. We must do what should have been done long ago: find our way to a new social contract between universities and the American people.”

The value of higher education is under question. While it is tempting to dismiss the loss of public confidence as partisan, narrow-minded, short-sighted, or just a messaging issue, we need to take it seriously.

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