The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is unlike other large universities, and not just because, according to its inexplicably ebullient president, Sally Kornbluth, the football players “thank you for coming to the games.” (Yes, MIT has a team. Division III. So MIT does not play Texas Tech.) MIT’s nature and governance suggest that the Trump administration was not at its most lucid when it made the school a target of its blunderbuss animus against elite universities.

In October, MIT was one of nine such that the Education Department ordered to sign the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Ms. Kornbluth made MIT the first to refuse to do so. She was at Washington recently trying to mitigate the damage that can be done to America’s meritocracy by policies motivated by hostility toward institutions vital to it.

The compact mandates promoting “equality in admissions” by having “all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test,” such as the SAT and ACT. After pausing this requirement during the pandemic, MIT in 2022 became the first university to restore it. MIT has never had legacy admissions. And two years ago, in Ms. Kornbluth’s second year as president, MIT ended the practice of requiring applicants for faculty positions to submit political statements pledging allegiance to diversity, equity, and inclusion orthodoxies.

The compact correctly says that “too many young adults have become saddled with life-altering” student debts. MIT admissions decisions are “need-blind,” and students from families with annual incomes under $200,000 pay no tuition. Almost 88 percent of the graduating class in 2024 left MIT with no debt, according to Ms. Kornbluth. Enrollment of undergraduates from other nations is capped at 10 percent.

Ninety-four percent of MIT undergraduate degrees are in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields. This explains the university’s astonishing economic multiplier effect: MIT graduates have founded companies that have generated almost $1.9 trillion in annual revenue (a sum almost equal to Russia’s GDP) and 4.6 million jobs.

MIT sits alongside Boston’s Charles River. Sixty years ago, the Charles was said to flow into the Potomac River because, beginning in the 1960s, many academic luminaries (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and more) moved south to Washington. Perhaps the most consequential single move came, however, more than 80 years ago.

Vannevar Bush, with an electrical engineering joint doctorate from MIT and Harvard, was an MIT professor and dean before he was blown to Washington by the winds of World War II. There, he became crucial to laying the foundation for science-based modern warfare and national security. Having reviewed a 1942 Bush memo urging acceleration of a particular program, Franklin Roosevelt sent this memo: “V.B.: OK — returned — I think you had best keep this in your own safe.” The Manhattan Project was born.

This Trump administration originally favored the elimination of the Education Department, a defensible fate for something created in 1979 by Jimmy Carter as a gratuity for the National Education Association, the teachers union, which in 1976 gave him its first presidential endorsement. Now, however, President Trump’s Education Department is even more muscular toward universities than President Obama’s was in 2011.

Then, a menacing “Dear Colleague” letter pressured schools, under the threat of financial punishment, to adopt policies regarding sexual harassment accusations that eviscerated due process protections for the accused. Many people who today oppose financial threats coercing schools into compliance with Mr. Trump’s priorities applauded Mr. Obama’s actions.

The 8 percent tax on MIT’s endowment will cost the university $240 million annually that will not be available to make up for reductions in government research grants. Universities’ endowments fuel upward mobility and combat the stagnation of elites. Taxing endowments mocks conservatism by enfeebling private sector alternatives to government’s domination of social resources.

Finally, it is almost sublimely hilarious that Trump’s compact forbids universities to “belittle” — wait for it — “conservative ideas.” Such as? Civility? Free trade? Fiscal continence? The separation of powers? The rule of law? Keeping the public and private sectors distinct by not conscripting corporations (Intel, United States Steel and others) into the public sector? Government too modest to decree that universities must be “safe spaces” for conservatives (who used to be proud of not being snowflakes)?

The Trump administration is today’s comprehensive belittler of conservative ideas. Its solicitude for “conservative ideas” will not encompass this one: Many things are beyond government’s proper scope and actual competence. Watching today’s politics toy with an institution of MIT’s complexity and importance is like watching a toddler play with Sèvres porcelain.

The Washington Post