(RNS) — In October, President Donald Trump’s education department asked nine universities to sign a compact to save higher education in the United States.
Oakwood University, a historically Black Christian university in Alabama, wasn’t on the list, but its president volunteered anyway.
“We share the Compact’s vision of student success and institutional accountability, and we embrace its call to ensure that all graduates are equipped to make meaningful contributions to our nation, wrote Gina Brown, president of the Huntsville school, in a Nov. 18 letter to the Department of Education.
Like several of the major universities that have rejected the proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, Oakwood, affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventist Church, doesn’t share many of the compact’s goals, but it does want to share in the compact’s promise to give cooperating schools ready access to funding.
Schools that sign the compact would agree to a five-year freeze on tuition, ban trans students from participating in women’s sports and agree to reform or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
The compact’s rules also require schools to cap the number of international students at 15% of enrollment, end diversity as a consideration in admissions and limit protests, such as the ones that roiled campuses after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Faith-based schools would be able to consider religion as part of admissions and hiring.
Of the nine schools asked to sign the compact, which included MIT, Vanderbilt, the University of Southern California and Brown, none has formally accepted, according to The Wall Street Journal. Some are in the process of finding out more from the administration.
Oakwood’s objections to the compact, according to the letter, relate to its mission as a faith-based school. “While we strongly support the Compact’s overarching goals, several provisions of the draft framework raise important concerns that, if left unaddressed, could unintendedly hinder HBCUs’ ability to participate fully or effectively,” wrote Brown in her letter to the Department of Education.
Since Oakwood, like other historically Black colleges, is dedicated to serving Black students and other underserved groups, Brown wrote, “Absent a mission-based exemption, HBCUs would face an untenable choice between compliance and fulfilling their congressionally mandated purpose,” she wrote.
Oakwood has a long history of accepting international students and currently serves students from more than 30 countries. While less than 16% of its student body is from overseas, Brown said, the compact would limit its ability to accept overseas students in the future. She said in an interview with Religion News Service that America’s colleges have always attracted some of the world’s best and brightest students and wants that to continue.
Brown, who became Oakwood’s president this past summer, was also concerned about the limits on tuition hikes. She said Oakwood has frozen tuition for this academic year but plans an increase next year because of inflation. The only way the school would agree to a freeze would be if the federal government made more funding available, Brown told RNS.
The school ran multi-million dollar deficits from 2022 to 2024, according to its 990 financial filings wit the RNS.
Brown did say the school agrees with the gender-based limits in the compact. “We don’t have any gender confusion here,” she said, saying the school also does not allow men to participate in women’s sports.
She said that the college has long focused on quality education and high moral character. She hopes that any changes the Department of Education makes will help further that mission.
“We are educating good, Godly people,” she said.
In an interview and in the letter, Brown said that she hopes the administration will see the important role that schools like Oakwood could play in improving higher education.
“We stand ready to collaborate with the Department in refining the Compact so that it embodies our nation’s highest ideals of equity, rigor, and inclusion,” she wrote. “Together, we can shape a new chapter in American higher education—one that honors diversity as a source of strength and advances excellence for every student and community we serve.”
