Regarding the Compact

Overview of the Compact and MIT’s stance

• Commenters link and parse the Compact directly; many say it is written to sound moderate while embedding broad new federal controls.
• MIT’s letter is seen as a polite but firm rejection: it claims MIT already exceeds many standards, but opposes federal intrusion into pricing, speech, governance, and merit-based research funding.
• Some readers think MIT “basically agrees” with the values but rejects the mechanism; others argue MIT clearly opposes the whole project.

Government power, funding, and precedent

• Long debate over whether there is precedent for this level of unilateral executive conditioning of university funding.
• Comparisons are made to Biden-era Title IX guidance and Obama “Dear Colleague” letters: some see continuity (funding tied to civil rights enforcement), others see the Compact as far more ideological and constitutionally suspect.
• Several liken the current push to McCarthy-era attacks on universities and to textbook authoritarian attempts to seize cultural institutions.

Academic freedom, speech, and protest

• Major concern: the Compact invites compelled monitoring and censorship of faculty and students, with DOJ-controlled determinations of violations and harsh clawbacks.
• Clauses on “lawful force” against disruptions and “heckler’s veto” raise fears of criminalizing even nonviolent protests, especially by minors.
• There is a linked side debate on compelled pronoun use, First Amendment limits, and what counts as protected vs punishable speech.

Ideology, diversity, and “conservative ideas”

• Critics highlight explicit protection of “conservative ideas” as a one-sided ideological carve‑out, incompatible with neutral academic standards.
• Hypothetical consequences are raised: pressure to hire creationists, flat‑earthers, or other fringe views to satisfy “viewpoint diversity”; protection for bigoted speech; suppression of Islamic or anti‑war groups under broadened “terrorism” or “hostility to America/allies” language.
• Supporters argue universities already operate as left‑wing monocultures that punish conservatives, and the Compact merely rebalances and enforces existing civil rights norms.

Federal funding, endowments, and independence

• Some insist “he who pays the piper” applies: taking large federal research funding necessarily reduces institutional independence, and conditions are normal.
• Others stress grants are contracts to buy research, not gifts; universities can be substantively independent while performing funded work.
• MIT’s finances are dissected: in principle it might survive without federal money, but endowments are restricted and not easily convertible into general operating funds.

Elite universities, resentment, and culture war

• A substantial subthread fixates on elite undergrads, high salaries (e.g., quant firms, top AI labs), and perceptions of an entrenched upper caste.
• Some non‑elite graduates express intense resentment and infer universal elitism and contempt from elite peers; others push back, calling this projection and noting wide income variation and luck.
• Several tie this resentment and anti‑“coastal elite” sentiment to the political appetite for cracking down on universities, describing the Compact as a culture‑war weapon rather than a genuine reform.