President Trump revealed Friday in a pair of tweets that he has directed the Treasury Department to review the tax-exempt status of colleges and universities, saying many of them are “about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education.”
He is correct, they are.
This will be met by shrieking on the left, but as we have documented countless times, higher education in America lacks even a thin veneer of political balance.
What would the left be saying today, if liberal speakers were routinely shouted off stage at colleges and universities? If conservative students rioted when progressive speakers came to campus?
Kevin Stankiewicz reports at CNBC:
Trump threatens tax-exempt status of colleges, says many are about ‘Radical Left Indoctrination’President Donald Trump said Friday he is asking the Treasury Department to review the tax-exempt status of universities and school systems, suggesting in a tweet that too many were about “Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education.”Trump also said he would have their funding revoked “if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues.”“Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!” he wrote.
See Trump’s tweets below:
Rush Limbaugh reacted to this news on his show:
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, we have a golden opportunity staring us in the face, and that is an opportunity to do great, great damage to academe. I love that word. That’s the academy, meaning institutions of higher learning, which means these indoctrination centers known as universities…Let me get to the education. You know, I’ve been harping on this all week, that I believe the real problem that we face in America, or the problems, can be boiled down to one particular area that we lost that has given birth to all of this left-wing insanity, and it is our education system. We’ve lost it. We’ve lost the education. We lost the teachers. We lost the presence.And I don’t just mean a conservative presence.
Tyler Olson of FOX News has more on this:
Republicans have long railed against alleged left-wing indoctrination in public schools and universities, citing “free speech zones,” cases of professors and administrators showing hostility toward conservative students, and saying that in many cases faculty donate overwhelmingly to Democratic politicians and left-wing causes.But it’s unclear what exactly Trump was referring to in his tweets and it’s also unclear whether he would be able to follow through on the threat. An attempt to remove the tax-exempt status of universities over political grievances could run into constitutional issues, and public school systems are largely funded by state and local taxes.It’s also unclear what exactly prompted Trump to make the threat on Friday, but the tweets come as he is engaged in rhetorical sparring with teachers unions, which have resisted his push to get children back into schools with few if any restrictions or anti-coronavirus measures.
I don’t know what prompted this from President Trump, but I would suggest it is appropriate and long overdue.
Conservative students and campus visitors have been subjected to verbal and physical abuse in recent years. This has been one of the best arguments against ‘free’ college. Why should taxpayers be forced to fund colleges and universities when half of the American public is not even welcome on most campuses?
To borrow a line from one of higher education’s favorite political figures, isn’t it time for extremely wealthy organizations like Harvard, Yale, and Brown to pay their fair share?
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