This podcast is supported in part by the New England Innovation Academy in Marlborough, Massachusetts,

where today's students become tomorrow's innovators by discovering their passions and purpose while preparing for what's next,

reimagining education with a future-focused curriculum, entrepreneurial mindset, and real-world application,

currently enrolling grade 6 through 12, day and boarding students. Learn more at

NEIacademy.org. A number of colleges and universities are pushing back on pressure from the Trump

administration. Earlier this month, the president offered nine schools priority access to federal

funding if they signed a deal called the Compact for Academic Excellence

in Higher Education. It includes demands like eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion

policies, prohibiting anything that would, quote, punish, belittle, or even spark violence

against conservative ideas, shrinking foreign student enrollment, and freezing effective

tuition rates for five years. But so far, the foreign student enrollment, and freezing effective tuition rates for five years.

But so far, the University of Arizona, USC, Brown University, Penn, Dartmouth College,

MIT, and the University of Virginia have all rejected the deal. The University of Texas at Austin

and Vanderbilt University haven't yet publicly weighed in.

For a closer look, I'm joined now by Ted Mitchell.

He's president of the American Council on Education.

That's a nonprofit U.S. Higher Education Association.

Ted Mitchell, welcome to the NewsHour.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Let's just begin with your reaction to the Trump administration's decision to send out this letter.

What did you make of it and the terms that it entailed when you saw it?

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