(Tyler Mathur | Student Life).

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon released a letter calling on U.S. universities to publicly commit to reforms in several areas — including free speech, affordability, foreign influence in research, artificial intelligence, and merit in admissions — by the end of 2026. 

Bloomberg initially reported that WashU Chancellor Andrew D. Martin was among four university leaders to help draft the letter. Martin denies this and said that, while he has met in the last several months with the administration about issues related to higher education, he did not help draft the letter. 

“Like many of our peers, we are now reviewing the letter at WashU,” Martin wrote in a statement to Student Life. “Our response will reflect WashU’s own mission, values, policies, and practices.”

Martin wrote in an email to students and faculty on Thursday that he would work with Provost Mark West and the chair of the Faculty Senate Council Tonya Edmond on a “faculty-led process for reviewing the letter and developing WashU’s response.”

The letter says its reforms are needed to restore trust in higher education. It specifically praises a WashU-commissioned report on the politicization of the humanities, calls on universities to adopt institutional neutrality, and says they should ensure “unruly or violent” protests do not disrupt normal campus functioning.  

Unlike the Trump administration’s compact for higher education that WashU rejected last fall, the letter does not promise preferential funding to universities that agree. However, a White House representative told Bloomberg they would be more likely to engage in discussions with universities willing to make changes. 

The executive committee of the WashU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote in an email that the letter “carefully uses unobjectionable rhetoric about ‘serving the American people.’” Yet, the AAUP wrote they cannot take it in good faith.

“Does Secretary McMahon wish to discuss the many faculty who suffered consequences for expressing views critical of Trump’s immigration policy, or the vital medical research being defunded … Of course not. This is just a pretext to escalate Trump’s disastrous and unpopular war on education,” the committee wrote. 

Michael O’Bryan, the secretary of the WashU AAUP, was glad to hear Martin deny that he helped draft the letter. Yet he believes many faculty and students want Martin to stop working with the Trump administration altogether. 

“I want WashU to be a leader in the profession of higher education. But the duty of the leaders of elite institutions is to band together … to resist lawless and illegal and nakedly ideological attacks, not to figure out the ways that they can collaborate with those attacks,” O’Bryan said.

The Association of American Universities, which counts WashU and 70 other research universities as members, worked closely with the administration to develop the letter. The presidents of Arizona State University, the University of Kansas, and Johns Hopkins University were specifically involved in drafting the letter, according to Bloomberg. 

Martin wrote in the email Thursday that the University would share more about its response to the letter in the coming weeks.