I mean, you're obviously right about this all. Which is why it's an easy decision. MIT chooses independence and so cannot agree to these terms. Separately, the

I mean, you're obviously right about this all. Which is why it's an easy decision. MIT chooses independence and so cannot agree to these terms. Separately, there is the question of whether it is in the best interest of the US to part ways with organizations such as MIT. > MIT is taking (lots of) money from federal government Surely nobody is naive enough to think the federal government is giving money to institutions like MIT with no expectation of reciprocal benefit? MIT is (was?) full of DoD asset tags to indicate which equipment was paid for by DoD grants. So another way of stating your point is the federal government is investing in programs at MIT to shape which basic research gets done so that it aligns with the best interest of the United States. (A prior iteration of conservativism would have recognized outsourcing to MIT as a capital-light way of accomplishing a set of policy goals. The alternative being to spin up the whole apparatus in-house without cost sharing. Left to their own devices, engineering students are not likely to discover and research problems that are immediately germane to DoD.) It is possible to be independent while also accepting grants from the USG. There's no contradiction there. The point of independence is that the Institute gets to determine how it runs its affairs. This Compact is an attempt to move that decision-making process to the White House. Maintaining independence in this environment therefore means abandoning federal research funding.