Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff Urges Higher Ed Leaders to Reject Trump Compact 2.0
August 11, 2026
BOSTON, MA — Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), a membership organization spanning nearly 50 campuses throughout New England, urges our higher education leaders to stand together to reject and publicly repudiate the Trump Compact 2.0.
In a letter sent to university presidents and governing boards on August 3, the otherwise dismantled Department of Education issued a December 31 deadline to respond to a series of misleading and insulting questions. The very next day, the far-right Heritage Foundation released its own publication rehearsing similar talking points and inviting lawmakers to codify the Trump administration’s assault on higher ed.
“Just because the administration is asking rather than extorting doesn't make the substance of its demands any better,” said Harvard professor of government Steve Levitsky, whose books include How Democracies Die. “The federal government shouldn't be telling universities who to hire or how to discipline their students, and given its record of attacks on critics and the press, its calls for free speech ring hollow. Universities rejected this undemocratic intervention when Trump was stronger politically. They should certainly reject it now that he is weaker.”
The DOE letter, otherwise known as “Trump Compact 2.0,” is the latest phase of an ongoing pressure campaign to coerce universities to “align themselves with a far-right agenda at the expense of students’ education and the public’s well-being.” CJFS accordingly applauds organizations like the Alliance for Higher Education that reject the federal government’s divide-and-conquer tactics and urge a unified front to build the higher education sector that mulitiracial democracy requires.
The DOE letter claims to favor “an ethic of free speech” and a “collision of opposing viewpoints” on campuses but singles out “unruly and violent protestors” for blame. “The whole framing is bogus,” said Margaret Litvin, a Boston University professor and CJFS founding member. “Public trust in higher ed is doing just fine. The entity doing the most to ‘disrupt classes, research, public lectures, and campus operations,’ as they put it, is the federal government itself.”
Colleagues on other campuses echoed the criticism. University of Pennsylvania professors Serena Mayeri and Amanda Shanor, who have written about the Trump administration's attacks on knowledge institutions and constitutional democracy, called Compact 2.0 “legally and politically dangerous,” adding, “After faculty, staff, students and alumni around the country came together to defeat the unlawful and unconstitutional Compact 1.0, the government has tried to impose its ideological will on universities through threats and coercion, private agreements, and now Secretary McMahon's letter. When universities have united to oppose these efforts in and outside of court, they overwhelmingly have won."
Jonathan Feingold, a CJFS founding member who co-authored a key legal memo outlining the Trump administration’s unlawful attack on DEI, expressed disdain at the university administrators collaborating with the federal government. “How could it be,” Professor Feingold observed, “that among the university leaders aiding Trump Compact 2.0 are actual scholars of authoritarianism like Ronald Daniels, the President of Johns Hopkins University who in 2021 outlined ‘why authoritarian regimes attack independent universities’? History does not look kindly on those who collaborate with authoritarians.”
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Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff is a membership organization of Jewish faculty and staff from colleges and universities throughout New England. We represent a range of backgrounds and hold diverse views, but we are united in opposing the invocation of Jews and Jewishness — and misguided or cynical claims of antisemitism — to penalize Palestine solidarity activism, to stifle academic freedom, or to otherwise attack inclusionary commitments.
CJFS is a member of the National Campus Jewish Alliance, a national network of diverse groups of Jewish higher education workers united by our commitments to critical inquiry, freedom of expression, and multiracial democracy on our campuses and beyond.