A couple months back, I wrote and published an article entitled “The Duty of the Christian According to Bonhoeffer.” There is a section where I discuss how Pastor Bonhoeffer saw his beloved church align themselves with a government that claimed to know God and professed that He was blessing their actions. These actions included spreading fear and terror to anyone that was deemed unworthy and disposable and driving out intellect and critical thinking in the name of patriotism and redemption. He witnessed the institution of the embodiment of God’s love agree to ignore the very rhetoric God despises in order to be left alone.
Recently, a news article shared that Oakwood University, a Seventh-day Adventist institution and the denomination’s sole HBCU (historically Black college or university), is open to joining with President Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, provided that there are some changes made. First sent out on Oct. 1, 2025 to nine universities, this document lays out new policies pertaining to a number of areas within academic institutions that would be changed in order to receive federal funding for research. The biggest incentive for students would be that these universities would freeze tuition for five years. However, many of the policies do not align with the core values found in academia, much less the Seventh-day Adventist church.
This compact highlights how diversity and inclusion would not be permitted to be factored in to the admissions process, stating: “Treating certain groups as categorically incapable of performing — and therefore in need of preferential treatment — perpetuates a dangerous badge of inferiority, destroys confidence, and does nothing to identify or solve the most pressing challenges for young people.” The compact also discusses how universities need to cut “unnecessary funding” in order to save money, as well as freeze tuition to keep costs from rising for students.
Oakwood was “founded by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1896 to educate the recently-freed African-Americans of the South.” To the first point, it’s hard to comprehend how an institution built upon diversity would be open to entertaining this proposition that clearly rejects it or has a very different definition of the word. According to initial reports, Oakwood’s president Gina Spivey-Brown stated that, “Absent a mission-based exemption, HBCUs would face an untenable choice between compliance and fulfilling their congressionally mandated purpose.”
I’m slightly confused as to how she expects the compact to be amended, specifically because diversity and inclusion is the first issue that is addressed and one that is continually mentioned throughout the rest of the document. It’s also worth noting that big-name universities, such as Vanderbilt, the University of Southern California, and MIT were asked to sign the compact but declined. Oakwood was not on the initial list, and is instead volunteering their participation in the hopes of receiving federal funds.
The compact also places limits on admissions for international students, stating that “no more than 15 percent of a university’s undergraduate student population shall be participants in the Student Visa Exchange Program, and no more than 5 percent shall be from any one country.” This would also directly affect Oakwood’s student population as the institution receives many international students each academic year. Along with Oakwood, Andrews University also has a large international student population which would be an issue if it were to go along the same route. When The Student Movement reached out to President Taylor to ask if he and the administration have had any considerations to pursue Trump’s compact, he shared, “We do not have any comment at this time.”
In regards to placing limits on tuition, Brown stated that Oakwood has frozen tuition for this academic year but plans to increase it next year due to inflation, which feels incredibly counterproductive. The compact states that:
"Universities have a duty to control their costs, including by eliminating unnecessary administrative staff, reducing student tuition burdens, engaging in transparent accounting and regular auditing for misuse of funds, and cutting unnecessary costs. Signatories acknowledge that universities that receive federal funds have a duty to reduce administrative costs as far as reasonably possible and streamline or eliminate academic programs that fail to serve students."
As the Department of Education is being dismantled and funding has been cut substantially, it’s interesting that this would be asked as there is already no money for the department to disperse to begin with.
There are other points that may be explored with this issue but for now, I would like to implore Dr. Brown, to question why the administration would alter the compact when they have made it abundantly clear that these are their values and that they are determined to ensure that institutions bow to them. Values that are not those of Oakwood or the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Other Adventist institutions, like Andrews University, may be compelled to consider such choices also, between pursuing federal funds for the sake of potentially compromising our values and what Andrews University President John Wesley Taylor V stated was our “biblical foundation” for understanding diversity.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.