This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. A version of this article first appeared at Balkinization. 

The Trump administration last week attempted to make universities an offer we can’t refuse. With great fanfare, the administration announced that a short list of prestigious universities were being invited to adopt a “compact” with the entire federal government. An extremely credulous mainstream press quickly reported that this was a new tactic: instead of the heavy stick of suspending and terminating federal grants in the guise of enforcing Title VI, the new approach was all carrot, “offering a competitive advantage to those that sign on.” “The biggest difference” with the new approach, NPR opined, “is instead of threats, if you agree to these demands, it would provide a reward.”

Any lawyer — really, any careful reader — who makes it through even the first paragraph of the document can see that this is incorrect. The “compact” is quite explicit: Universities that do not sign on to this thing thereby “elect[] to forego federal benefits.” What benefits? Well, that same first paragraph lists quite a few specific “benefits”: “(i) access to student loans, grant programs, and federal contracts; (ii) funding for research directly or indirectly; (iii) approval of student and other visas in connection with university matriculation and instruction; and (iv) preferential treatment under the tax code,” which means 501(c)(3) status. This compact is a “reward” in exactly the same sense that it is “rewarding” to purchase protection from the Mafia. The compact is an open, explicit threat.

It nonetheless does represent a tactical shift on the part of the Trump administration. The Trump team’s goal has not changed. They want an unprecedented — and flagrantly unconstitutional — degree of government oversight and control over American universities. So far they are having some trouble obtaining it. Their initial strategy, to roll up the sector from the top, starting with Harvard, through bespoke negotiated dealmaking with individual schools, has turned out to be slower going — and I suspect, simply more labor-intensive — than I am guessing they expected. (I use the roll-up metaphor to evoke how a monopolist takes over a sector by buying out one firm after another, gaining more leverage over holdouts as they go. So far it has not worked.) Meanwhile, federal district courts have dealt a series of significant blows to the government’s ability to, for example, arbitrarily withdraw federal scientific research grants. 

So the administration is pivoting to a new tactic, which seems to be to roll up the higher ed sector from what you might call the upper middle. Instead of starting at the very top with the high-stakes confrontation with Harvard and working their way down, the new tactical approach is to start with whichever prestigious schools seem likeliest — for various reasons — to be amenable to the government’s overtures. It is no accident that many of the schools the administration’s team first approached about this “compact” have interim presidents, who are inherently weak, sometimes because a prior president was successfully forced out through political agitation by the right.

In the remainder of this article I’ll do two things at once. First, as a correction to some of the coverage of the “compact” so far, I think it’s important to lay out a few simple bullet points about what it does, and why the spin adopted by so many mainstream reporters is incorrect. In reality, the “compact” is a maximalist document, demanding a........

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