On Friday President Bienen informed the Northwestern community that he had signed an agreement with the Trump administration. Early reports and news media on “the deal” have focused on the $75 million payment the University will make, with little attention to parts of the deal that are of much greater concern to many of us across the university. President Bienen claimed that under the agreement, “Northwestern runs Northwestern. Period.” That claim rings hollow. The deal infringes academic freedom and threatens student welfare, as we will detail below.
We acknowledge that our Board of Trustees extended bridge funding that has kept research afloat and protected graduate student careers during the long suspension of grant reimbursements to the University. We also note that the university has agreed to pay the tribute demanded by the Trump government to restore the delayed funds. At the same time, we lament that many activities within funded research, and indeed whole grants, were terminated by the government on political grounds. Generally, those grants intended to benefit the health, well-being, education, or workforce development of underrepresented groups–a core part of what Northwestern is.
Controlling Admissions. Nothing could be more central to a university running itself than selecting its students. The deal requires Northwestern to implement a strictly “merit based” admissions process. This mandate is followed by a discussion of race and racial proxies, in case its target was not clear.
The deal requires Northwestern to turn over to the government a host of quantitative information about its applicant pool and admissions process. But as admissions officers are well aware, decisions are best when based not exclusively on attributes such as test scores and class rank, but also on applicants’ written expression, activities, and interests, and on a holistic assessment of whether they will thrive at Northwestern.
The government’s plan is clear, and malicious. If our admissions decisions do not align with their numbers-only measure of “merit” they will allege illegal racial preferences. In fear of renewed penalties, Northwestern can be pressured to admit fewer students of color, first generation students, and others who have less benefit of prior educational privilege.
Placing students at risk. The University has long recognized that student protest is part of learning and claiming voice. The deal removes our community’s ability to debate and adjust policies as the University and our students negotiate the fraught constitutional tension between expression and disruption.
The deal requires NU to “cooperate with local, regional, and federal law enforcement … to prevent and investigate violations of law or Northwestern’s policies and … to intervene in violations while they are occurring … so that violators can be apprehended and face appropriate discipline.”
Universities have been rocked and shaped by student protest across the decades. Dissent is a fundamental right within a democracy. Confrontations with police put our students in danger. Northwestern running Northwestern would allow us to balance policy enforcement with safety considerations. Requiring police intervention to enforce our rules is acceding to the harsh and often violent disciplinary impulses of the Trump government.
The deal specifically calls out and reneges on the Deering Meadow agreement, a signed internal-to-the-University pledge to our own students, that ended the 2023 Deering Meadow encampment for Gaza without police involvement. Northwestern’s home-grown prohibition on “3d speech” (tents) — except for one at the Rock — now cannot be changed by Northwestern without DOJ approval. It’s hard to believe, but the deal makes Northwestern’s policy about tents on campus literally a federal issue. Multiple aspects of student speech, student discipline, and student-university relations now require an OK from the federal government.
Targeting transgender healthcare. The deal includes that the University will prohibit hormonal interventions or transgender surgeries on anyone under 18 years of age. We have witnessed with horror how our government has sought to prevent gender-affirming care across the country. It is unconscionable that Northwestern now agrees to be an enforcer of that cruelty, not under any law but as part of a transactional accommodation to recover withheld funds.
This part of the deal presumably targets gender-affirming care provided by MDs in NU’s Feinberg School of Medicine, including the Gender Pathways program for adolescents. Northwestern may “run” what care is left in the wake of these prohibitions, but it is far from the autonomy that President Bienen claims we retain. The medical care of trans youth, like the medical care of anyone, should be determined by patients and their providers–not by the federal government.
Governance of faculty hiring. In his November 28 email, Bienen expressed that “As an imperative to the negotiation of this agreement, we had several hard red lines we refused to cross: We would not relinquish any control over whom we hire, whom we admit as students, what our faculty teach or how our faculty teach.” However the deal insists that NU may no longer require a diverse set of candidates in faculty hiring. Also the deal undoes the Deering Meadow agreement’s hosting of Palestinian visiting scholars. If Northwestern runs Northwestern, we can formulate our own hiring procedures consistent with law, invite and host our own visiting scholars, and keep our promises to our students.
The issues highlighted above stand out to us as among the most blatant examples of how the agreement denies Northwestern the institutional autonomy to which it is legally entitled. There are more. “Northwestern runs Northwestern” is an empty claim to those of us in the University community—staff, faculty, students, and alumni—who have watched Northwestern so quickly abandon its principles in the face of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education, with so little discussion or consultation with the many of us who work every day to improve, build, care for, create, and run the University at all levels, and who remain committed to the values that should define Northwestern.
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