Nine Universities, Nineteen Days

On October 1, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education sent the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education to nine universities. The University of Arizona was one of them.

Nineteen days later its president published the answer.

The letter Suresh Garimella posted on October 20 does two things institutional statements usually refuse to do in the same document. It concedes the critique, and it declines the terms.

The concession came first, and it was not hedged. "A number of the proposed federal recommendations deserve thoughtful consideration as our national higher education system could benefit from reforms that have been much too slow to develop." Many of the proposed ideas, he added, were already in place at Arizona.

Then the line, drawn in one sentence with no adjectives in it: "principles like academic freedom, merit-based research funding, and institutional independence are foundational and must be preserved."

And then the decision itself, in the flattest available grammar - "the university has not agreed to the terms outlined in the draft proposal, but instead submitted a Statement of Principles to the Department of Education".

He had been president for one year and nineteen days.

The Hole He Walked Into

Garimella became the 23rd president of the University of Arizona on October 1, 2024. He arrived at an institution that had, roughly eleven months earlier, reported a $177 million structural deficit.

That number is not an estimate and it is not an outsider's. It comes from the university's own press release of May 8, 2025, in which its senior vice president, chief operating officer and chief financial officer, John Arnold, described the framework that closed it: "this balanced budget eliminates what was a $177 million budget deficit just 18 months ago".

The framework itself is where the cost is legible. Overall allocated spending was projected to fall about 3 percent. Central administration absorbed the majority of it, averaging just over 7 percent. Colleges averaged around 2 percent - smaller, but not nothing, and applied to the part of a university that teaches.

What survived the cut is the more revealing list. Faculty promotions were fully funded. The employee raises announced that February were funded. So were student success programs in introductory math and writing, and the accreditation requirements of the College of Veterinary Medicine. Resident undergraduate tuition did not rise.

A deficit can be closed in ways that leave nothing standing. This one was closed around a set of things declared non-negotiable in advance.

What The Process Was For

Garimella's own account of the turnaround, published in a signed column in August 2025, is unusually procedural for a victory lap. The university had, he wrote, "re-envisioned how we operate and restored balance to our finances" - and he set out five anchors: operational efficiency, revenue growth, modernized athletics operations, careful financial management, improved organizational performance.

The sentence that matters most in that column is about method rather than result. He described approaching the process "with purpose, emphasizing transparency and accountability, while providing regular updates to rebuild trust throughout our university community".

The verb is rebuild. Trust was among the things that had gone missing along with the money, and a president who says so in print is conceding that the institution's problem was never purely arithmetic.

The Engineer In The Chair

His training is an odd fit for the fight he ended up in, and an exact fit for what it was about.

Garimella is a mechanical engineer - a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, a master's from Ohio State, a doctorate from Berkeley, all in the same discipline. His research field is electronics thermal management and heat transfer at micro and nano scales. He is co-author of more than 625 refereed publications and holds 16 issued patents. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He has mentored more than 90 graduate students and 50 post-doctoral scholars, 31 of whom went on to faculty positions.

He was president of the University of Vermont from 2019 to 2024, where research funding doubled and the university earned an R1 designation, and where he froze tuition for every student for the whole of his tenure. Before that he spent two decades at Purdue, latterly as executive vice president for research and partnerships.

He also chairs the research advisory board of Sandia National Laboratories, sits on the Department of Energy's Office of Science Advisory Committee and chairs its Genesis Mission subcommittee, and has been a director of Modine Manufacturing since 2011. Which is to say: when the federal proposal reached merit-based research funding, it reached the part of the system he has spent forty years inside.

The Year The Money Worked

The annual letter he published on July 23, 2026 reads like a balance sheet that has stopped bleeding.

Research awards grew approximately 17 percent - "a result made even more significant given the headwinds facing research universities nationwide" - which is as close as the document comes to naming the pressure. Arizona ranked among the top 20 public research universities for a seventh consecutive year. Resident undergraduate tuition and mandatory fees stayed flat for a third consecutive year. The state got its first rural medical school branch, in Yuma. University of Arizona Global Campus was fully integrated. A 1,368-bed housing facility broke ground for a 2028 opening, to hold the first-year students the university now requires to live on campus - a cohort its own data credit with an 11 percent higher grade point average and a 50 percent higher graduation rate. Study abroad participation reached 1,879 students, on pace to triple within three years, underwritten in part by a $20 million gift.

Filed among those items, in a single clause, was the October letter: "we engaged thoughtfully in shaping the future of higher education by articulating our commitment to academic freedom, merit-based research funding, and institutional independence."

Refusing to sign had been entered as an accomplishment of the year.

The Next Morning'S Mail

Eleven days later it started again.

On August 3, 2026, Garimella told his colleagues that "universities across the country, including the University of Arizona, received a communication from the U.S. Secretary of Education seeking responses on a broad range of issues affecting higher education" - a questionnaire this time, covering admissions criteria, cost of attendance, free speech and foreign influence, among others. He noted that the response to the compact had been well received, and that the university would consult its shared governance groups again before answering.

The first answer took nineteen days. The second has no published deadline. What is different is the ledger behind it: a balanced budget, a third year of flat tuition, and research awards up 17 percent - which is either the leverage to answer plainly, or simply a larger thing to lose.