MIT Rejects Trump’s Rowan-Backed University Funding Compact (2)

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology rejected the Trump administration’s latest effort to reorient higher education toward its policy priorities, spurning a proposal that calls for universities to accept a series of demands in exchange for preferential access to federal funding.

MIT’s practices already “meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent,” President Sally Kornbluth said in a letter Friday to Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Other parts of the deal, which Apollo Global Management Inc. co-founder Marc Rowan helped formulate and has championed, would endanger scientific freedom, Kornbluth said.

Sally Kornbluth

Photographer: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

The Trump administration sent letters to a ...