White House proposes pact tying federal funding to campus policy.

The White House on Wednesday sent a 10-page proposal to nine major U.S. universities offering priority access to federal grants and other benefits in return for a series of policy commitments covering admissions, tuition, campus speech and athletics. The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education was delivered to officials at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia, which were given until Nov. 21 to respond.

The document would require signatories to stop considering race, sex and a range of demographic factors in admissions and hiring, reinstate or require SAT or ACT testing for applicants, cap international undergraduate enrollment at 15 percent with no more than 5 percent from any single country, and freeze tuition for U.S. students for five years. Campuses with endowments above specified thresholds would be asked to waive tuition for students studying specified hard science programs. The compact also asks institutions to adopt the federal government’s definition of gender for...