PEN America and the Alliance for Higher Education announced Monday that they are jointly organizing higher education leaders around a “Call for Unity” in response to a letter Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to college presidents and governing boards earlier this month, arguing the letter is designed to fracture the sector rather than genuinely reform it.
McMahon’s letter asks the roughly 4,000 colleges and universities under the Department of Education’s purview to publicly commit by the end of the year to a set of positions on seven topics: admissions transparency, campus free speech policy, ideological diversity in hiring and scholarship, cost and loan repayment outcomes, grade inflation, foreign influence on research, and how institutions serve national interests.
The two organizations argue the letter functions as what they call a disguised “carrot”: institutions that align with the administration’s preferred positions could be prioritized for federal research funding, while those that don’t risk being left financially exposed. In materials accompanying their response, PEN America and the Alliance describe this as an attempt to split the sector into compliant and non-compliant camps rather than a genuine invitation to reform.
“We need to be clear about this coercive and corrosive letter from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon,” said Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms Managing Director, U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America, in a statement. He compared it to the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” the White House proposal sent to nine universities last fall that offered preferential funding access in exchange for adopting administration-aligned policies. Seven of those nine schools, including MIT, Brown and Dartmouth, ultimately rejected it.
Mike Gavin, CEO of the Alliance for Higher Education, framed the joint response as a call for the sector — from community colleges to Ivy League institutions — to unify around “the freedom to teach, learn and research,” while still leaving room for engagement with the government. “We can, collectively, mobilize for a better future through coalitions, and we hope the government will be part of that coalition,” he said.
The two groups released a toolkit alongside their statement offering colleges suggested language and talking points on the seven topics McMahon’s letter raises, along with recommendations for how institutions might respond collectively rather than individually. The guidance encourages schools to publicly affirm commitments to free speech, merit-based hiring, and research independent of political influence, while pushing back on what the organizations describe as the letter’s mischaracterization of problems as sector-wide when they say the issues are more limited.
Compared with last year’s Compact, McMahon’s letter is notably less prescriptive: it does not include a cap on international enrollment, a tuition freeze, or an explicit funding incentive for compliance, and the Department has not specified consequences for schools that decline to participate. Higher education groups, including the American Council on Education, have described the letter as more of an invitation to dialogue than an ultimatum. Universities that rejected the Compact, such as the University of Arizona, have said they are reviewing the new letter through their shared governance processes.
Whether the softer approach yields different results than the Compact, which found no takers among its original targets, remains an open question.
