“They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education.”The nine are: Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia.Cornell William Brooks, a professor of public leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, decried the compact as a “weapon to exert command and control”.Writing on X, Brooks pointed to the paradox that the “same administration that terminated federal grants to punish diversity groups at Harvard is now using federal grants to reward colleges for favoring conservative groups”.Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education which represents university and college leaders, told the Wall Street Journal that the implications on free speech were “horrifying”. He said: “Who decides if the intellectual environment is vigorous and open-ended? This is not something the federal government should be involved in.”