00:00MIT is pushing back against the White House's plan to reshape higher education, the school rejecting a proposal that would tie federal funding to strict limits on tuition, hiring, and admissions.
00:09Let's bring in Bloomberg's education policy reporter, Liam Knox, in Washington.
00:13Liam, tell us how MIT responded and what its path forward now is.
00:19Sure. MIT's response was a pretty definitive, if polite, rebuff of the Trump administration's invitation to sign this compact.
00:28They said that it was basically inconsistent with their belief that merit and merit alone should warrant, should govern federal funding for research.
00:42It sets a real precedent for the other eight schools on the list, which include places like Dartmouth and Vanderbilt, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, University of Virginia, who are all still weighing their responses ahead of an October 20th deadline.
00:55Okay. So MIT, the first to respond here.
00:58What I find fascinating, and you point this out in your story that you wrote, is that this White House plan is something that Apollo's CEO, Mark Rowan, helped formulate.
01:07How did he get involved here?
01:09That's right. It's not entirely clear.
01:11If you'll remember, Rowan was one of the names put forward as a possible Treasury Secretary before Scott Besant was appointed.
01:18He's been kind of in some of these circles for a while.
01:23Rowan is the chair of the Wharton School of Business's Board of Advisors.
01:28Back a couple of years ago, he played a pretty instrumental role in leading to the resignation of then-Pen President Liz McGill after uproar over her congressional testimony following campus protests,
01:39and has circulated similar documents at the University of Pennsylvania, has kind of been thinking about this for a while now.
01:49Penn is one of the universities that received the compact, putting them in a difficult position, a fraught position of having to respond to their own Wharton board chair and prolific donors document here.
02:04All right. Very quickly here, Liam, we still don't have a settlement between Harvard and the White House, do we?
02:11No, we do not. It's unclear when that'll happen.
02:13Just last week or a week and a half ago, Trump said that all they had to do was paper it up, were his words.
02:21It seems that hasn't happened yet, but he's indicated that it'll be a half-a-billion-dollar deal,
02:26and we'll see when any news breaks about that, but this is certainly a development in the ongoing campaign to reshape higher ed here.
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