White House discusses higher-ed compact as UVA declines to sign

The White House on Friday held a private call with leaders of five universities still weighing a proposed higher education compact from the administration, even as one of those schools, the University of Virginia, announced it would not sign. The compact, circulated earlier this month to nine institutions, offers preferential access to federal research funding in exchange for commitments on admissions, campus speech and other policies.

White House officials invited Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University to join the call. By late Friday the University of Virginia informed Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other White House officials that it would decline to participate. The university's interim president, Paul Mahoney, wrote that "providing federal money based on anything but merit would undermine the integrity of research and further erode public confidence in higher education," and said the school looks forward to working on alternative approaches.

Five of the nine originally invited institutions have already declined the compact: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University,...