The Unimpeachable and the Empty
Higher education's latest moral compact shows how far it has drifted from real inquiry.
Earlier this fall, the president of Sarah Lawrence College shared that the school had signed the Higher Education's Compact with America: Shared Principles for the Common Good, a new declaration released by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and Phi Beta Kappa with barely 50 other presidential signatories.
The message was polished and earnest - the kind of prose that now defines higher education's administrative voice. Sarah Lawrence, she wrote, "remains committed to collective engagement in guiding the future of higher education," and the Compact's ideals of opportunity, freedom, and excellence reflect "Sarah Lawrence's mission and values." It was, in tone and structure, nearly impossible to argue with.
And that is the problem.
The Compact is built on language so broad and agreeable that it invites assent instead of scrutiny. Its seven principles - opportunity, affordability, excellence, freedom, security, partnership, and prosperity - are the rhetorical equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. Who could object? Yet precisely because they are unimpeachable, they are also untestable. The document asks nothing of its signatories except to declare what they already believe.
In that sense, it represents the current pathology of higher education: a system that has learned to perform virtue instead of pursuing truth. The Compact gestures toward moral seriousness while avoiding intellectual risk. It promises renewal without requiring reform. And by signing it, colleges and their presidents are collectively able to present themselves as engaged without confronting the uncomfortable realities that have eroded public trust - spiraling costs, ideological homogeneity, violence, and the disappearance of open inquiry from too many classrooms.
The AAC&U, which authored the Compact, has perfected this style of moral grandstanding. Earlier this year, it released another sweeping statement, "A Call for Constructive Engagement," warning of "unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education." The rhetoric was soaring, the details nonexistent. No specific cases were cited. No remedies were proposed. It was a plea for autonomy disguised as courage: a declaration that managed to say everything and nothing at once.
This is what higher education now calls leadership. Faced with declining confidence and soon enrollments because of the impending demographic cliff, its presidents and associations respond with letters and compacts that celebrate values no one disputes and evade the questions that might advance understanding. The language of inquiry - the testing of claims, the willingness to be proven wrong - has been replaced by the language of affirmation.
But the point of a university is not to affirm. It is to argue, to test, to measure, to expose assumptions to evidence and reason. Academic freedom, properly understood, is not freedom from discomfort but freedom to pursue truth through contestation. Yet the Compact never mentions debate, intellectual pluralism, or even disagreement. It speaks of harmony, unity, and "shared purpose" - the vocabulary of consensus, not scholarship.
And because the Compact never defines what success looks like, it cannot fail. How does one measure "opportunity"? By lowering tuition? By increasing enrollment? By ensuring that low-income students graduate at the same rate as their wealthier peers? Silence. What about "freedom"? Through viewpoint-diversity surveys? Through the number of controversial speakers invited to campus? Nothing. "Excellence"? No criteria. "Prosperity"? Undefined.
In the absence of metrics, every college gets to declare itself a success. Signing the Compact becomes the proof of virtue; the act of reflection becomes the substitute for change. The AAC&U has created the perfect administrative product: a statement that everyone can sign and no one can fail.
The tragedy is that higher education does not need more affirmations of principle. It needs self-examination. Colleges could measure affordability honestly by publishing full data on student aid, debt, and outcomes. They could measure intellectual openness by surveying students and faculty about whether they feel free to express unpopular views. They could define excellence by the quality of teaching and the rigor of scholarship rather than by branding and sentiment. That would be testing, arguing, and advancing.
Instead, institutions sign documents like the Compact and call it leadership. They outsource their language to associations that have perfected the art of saying nothing beautifully. It is easier to sign a declaration of virtue than to live up to one.
The Compact was supposed to restore public confidence in higher education. In reality, it reveals why that confidence has collapsed. The problem is not that the sector lacks ideals; it's that it no longer knows how to pursue them. The university once modeled the habits of skepticism, evidence, and argument. Now it models the opposite: consensus without curiosity, virtue without verification.
The words of the Compact are lovely. They are also hollow. And that is what makes them so dangerous. A statement that cannot be tested cannot be trusted. A sector that no longer measures itself by the standards of evidence and argument has ceased to be academic at all.
Until higher education regains the courage to test its own ideals, it will keep performing virtue instead of pursuing truth—and the public can see just how shallow that performance has become.
