Students rally against Trump administration’s higher education compact

Around 20 people gathered on Library Mall Friday afternoon to demand that University of Wisconsin-Madison leadership reject the Trump administration’s plan to give institutions preferential federal funding who agree to policy changes aligned with addressing their critique of higher education. 

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, offered to universities nationwide during the week of Oct. 13, would require universities agree to a five-year tuition freeze, a cap limiting international students to 15% of the undergraduate population and the enforcement of strict gender definitions.  

Two universities publicly signed on to the compact so far.

The compact was initially offered to nine major universities, who were encouraged to provide “limited, targeted feedback” to the Trump administration by Oct. 20.  UW-Madison was not one of the nine universities to receive a letter. 

Mnookin previously promised to defend shared governance in the event the university received a federal compact in an Oct. address to the Faculty Senate. “Any higher ed compact must include a commitment to shared governance,” she said.

Organized by Sunrise Movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the protest was one of hundreds taking place at schools across the nation as part of the “Students Rise Up” National Day of Action. The coordinated demonstrations seek to unite students and workers against assaults on higher education.

“[The compact] is anti-DEI, it’s anti-trans, it’s anti-immigrant. It’s everything we’re against as Students for a Democratic Society,” Luca Motivala, co-chair of SDS, told The Daily Cardinal.

The rally was endorsed by the College Democrats of UW-Madison, Jewish Voice for Peace Madison, and both the faculty and graduate student’s unions. 

Andrea Seipel, co-founder of UW-Madison’s chapter of Sunrise Movement, spoke to the crowd about the recent shift in democratic power with the passage of Proposition 50 in California and New York City’s mayoral election, in which democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was named the city’s first Muslim mayor. 

“Gen Z is getting to the ballot boxes, flooding the streets and making sure they know that this generation is going to fight for something new, something different,” Seipel told the Cardinal.

UW-Madison sophomore Nick Bostedt spoke about federal budget cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the importance of research at UW-Madison. 

“We make life changing impacts across the state, across the country and across the world,” Bostedt told the Cardinal.

Speaker Cavin McNulty spoke about how the Trump administration affected him personally. Because of EPA regulation rollbacks, steel mills 20 minutes away from his home in Munster, Indiana are no longer being regulated.

“But even though it's bad, there are people coming together, and there are people fighting for their communities and fighting for what's important, and that's their lives, that's their children, that's their families and that's their workers as well,” McNulty told the Cardinal.

This protest was just the first of a series of protests planned for the start of each month leading up to May Day 2026, when Megan Walker, co-founder of UW-Madison’s chapter of Sunrise Movement, said a mass student strike will take place to demand that higher education prioritizes students.

“We are here and we're not backing down. Every time we meet, every time they see us protest, it's another signal to them that we're fed up,” Seipel told the Cardinal.

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