House GOP Demanding Harvard be Stripped of Billions in Federal Funding Over Anti-Semitism
Rep. Elise Stefanik: “It is unacceptable and un-American that any taxpayer dollars are going to universities propping up their promulgation of antisemitism by supporting professors, students and staff many who have openly called for the genocide of Jews.”
Harvard has decided to defend President Claudine Gay, despite her horrible answers and performance at the congressional hearings about anti-Semitism on campus, not to mention new allegations of plagiarism on her part.
In response, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and other members of the GOP are calling for the school to lose billions in federal funding.
The New York Post reports:
GOP calls to strip Harvard of billions in federal cash, tax breaks over ‘antisemitism shame’
Harvard is facing demands to be stripped of billions of dollars in federal payments and tax breaks over its failure to tackle antisemitism on campus.
The university benefits from hundreds of millions of dollars in direct federal payments — and even more in sweeping tax breaks which have helped make it the world’s richest academic institution.
Harvard, led by controversial president Claudine Gay, is being investigated by the federal Department of Education over whether it has breached the civil rights of Jewish students, which are protected under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican whose questioning of Gay at the House Education and Workforce Committee last week left the college leader’s career in crisis, told The Post she wanted to “defund.”
“We must defund the rot in America’s higher education,” she said.
“It is unacceptable and un-American that any taxpayer dollars are going to universities propping up their promulgation of antisemitism by supporting professors, students and staff many who have openly called for the genocide of Jews.
Others and I have often said that if you want this madness on campus to end, start by shutting off the cash. Harvard’s endowment is worth billions. Let them spend it.
Ed Morrissey of Hot Air suggests that this doesn’t go far enough, and I am inclined to agree with him:
Nevertheless, the scope and intent on this is too limited, and too constrained to one particular diseased outcome. The issues in Academia go well beyond anti-Semitism; they go directly to the heart of what it means to be educated rather than indoctrinated. For the last several decades, progressive activists have transformed the former into the latter and imposed tribalism via DEI. That has created an environment on most campuses of extreme intolerance to differing points of view, and created leadership that quashes debate and dissent from the progressive-woke orthodoxy.
The proper approach is to defund Academia entirely, at least at the federal level. The federal government had no business goosing Academia’s business model in the first place, and the six-decade experiment has utterly failed. It has not improved education, but contributed to its destruction. The federalized loan program has turned at least two generations into debt paupers, and incentivized “debt forgiveness” at the expense of taxpayers who pay their own bills. And the tuition-support flood has created a massive administration class that operates politically rather than scholastically.
To her credit, Elise Stefanik says she is just getting started:
This is just the first step.
I will continue to root out the rot of antisemitism from our colleges and universities and hold those individuals and institutions who have fostered its growth accountable.
"Harvard, Penn, MIT Formally Rebuked Over Campus Antisemitism After House…
— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) December 14, 2023
Republicans have a golden opportunity to make some real change here. They should not hesitate.
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Comments
Sorry, GOP. You still won’t get the Jewish vote.
/Yes. I am that cynical.
You are most likely correct that most Jews will not switch parties. Is that because the GOP is not progressive enough for them, or because once a liberal Jew, always a liberal Jew?
P.S. The downtick was not from me fur shure.
Maybe some are still resenting the restricted country clubs. I don’t know.
Why don’t they resent the KKK. It treated Jews and blacks poorly.
Elections and ethnic group party loyalties and predilections aside, this effort to defund Harvard and its ilk of federal funds is laudable and needs to be done.
Agreed!!
Moron right in Congress is against free speech.
Speak all you want, just don’t ask me to pay for it
It has to be content neutral. You yourself can refrain from donating for any reason but the government cannot.
Denial of Jews civil liberties. Done and done.
Federal funding for education is unConstitutional on its face.
A lot of that funding is hidden as “research grants”.
Research funding misuse is as comon as dirt. Labelling the money as “research grants” is like saying Dylan Mulvaney is a pre-teen girl.
When the quote donations unquote are in the form of taxes, just you try to skip out on them
Moron right in comments fails to see the forest for the trees.
Gay is free to utter her idiocy. We are also free to deny funds to Harvard for said idiocy. This isn’t about support for one side or the other, but naming and shaming those who do nothing about calls for genocide. When Gay can’t even denounce said calls for genocide among Harvard’s own students and faculty I certainly don’t want my tax dollars going to this institution.
Speech isn’t free from consequences. As my Father wisely told me ‘ boy, don’t let your alligator mouth overload your hummingbird ass’. So long as one is willing to accept the consequences for good or ill they can should be willing to speak their mind.
What isn’t acceptable is for individuals and institutions who receive public funding from taxpayers or significant subsidies in the form of foregone taxes applicable to others to demand the those taxpayers not have the ability to withdraw that funding and those benefits.
Many of these Universities have significant endowments and most of us would call that ‘eff you’ money. The problem here is that these Universities seem to want to be able to tell the taxpayer ‘eff you’ without drawing on the significant financial resources of the University to back their abhorrent stance not only re virulent antisemitism but lots of other issues. Instead they are emboldened to
tell the taxpayer ‘eff you’ while felling some sort of entitlement to receive taxpayer funds and the benefits of near zero taxes in perpetuity.
Please pint to me the part of the Constitution of the United States that says our tax dollars should pay for billion dollar educational institutions, especially those that violate the free speech of others.
I’ll wait.
And wait some more.
And wait some more.
And wait some more.
Because YOU will never find it, and your response will utterly fail.
Still waiting…
Insert Jeopardy tune here…
I’ll give you a hint to help your thoughts.
Free speech is still free speech, even if taxpayers don’t pay for it.
So Clown Gay and Harvard can say all they want about Israel, Jews, and whomever they wish. That’s free speech.
Forcing the taxpayer to subsidize it isn’t free speech, it’s idiocy.
What is wrong with your brain? You’re a simpleton pretending to be an intellectual. The taxpayers need not subsidize speech they find reprehensible. That doesn’t mean that haters can’t speak. Think a little.
I agree it is stupid that Congress is engaging in behavior that violates the 1st Amendment. However, the bigger question here is why is the Congress giving money to a private entity with the hopes it does what it wants? Be mad at that.
It will never happen
Strip ALL schools of federal funding. Shut down the Dept of Education completely.
When the government subsidizes something, it will always get more expensive. And shittier. Duh.
Claudine Gay, PhD (Dunce of Phony), stated, “ A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
“A few plagiarized pages here and few plagiarized pages there and a pretty soon you are talking a whole thesis paper.”1
1Quoted from “How to Plagairize Your Way to Success” by Claudine Gay.
Congress demands? No, they need not demand. First, they get rid of the continued resolutions in funding government and go back to individual appropriations. Now they can focus in on colleges… for starters they can set a tax rate of 80% on endowments (retroactive 10 years just for the fun of it) which will then weed out everything but honest teachers and janitors.
I would like to point out that I am in no way a proponent of Milhouse’s level of pedantry, but it would be hard to make a law retroactive to a decade ago.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I gave up on dreams a long time ago.
Nonsense. The Lautenberg Amendment made denial of gun rights a new punishment applicable to all domestic “violence” complaints ever lodged.. Plead to a nuisance charge to get it over with because the consequences are nothing but a misdemeanor and a fine, and 50 years later, the feds come to cart your gun safe away.
They should treat their endowment funds like a 401k where they pay taxes when withdrawing from the fund.
Also end the schools nonprofit status so people can’t reduce their taxes by making donations and the school has to pay taxes on money it receives as donations.
Lastly, stop student loans for these racist institutions.
The federal government shouldn’t be writing ANY student loans in the first place, other than for contract services rendered (like the GI Bill). Private banks and similar lenders can choose who they will and will not fund.
The last thing Harvard wants or needs is negative PR. The threat of retracted, lost, or denied federal funding is the only type of applied pressure these elite bozo’s understand–that and a drop in undergraduate admissions applications.
Harvard has gotten too big and, coupled with dei and racial initiatives, has become an “also ran” with the prominent state universities.
Correct. They have gotten so big that they are too big and need failure.
Ed Morrisey is right. But Republicans never defund anything. They are far more likely to negotiate an increase in funding and then claim they had no choice. But donate to them and vote for them anyway because democrats are bad.
Hah-vahd should have lost all federal money back when the law school kicked the military recruiters off campus. But our insane, tyrannical judiciary nixed that and came up with the notion that schools can sh*t all over the US military and still demand federal funds.
There should be no federal money going to pay or guarantee students’ tuition or expenses. NONE. And universities are ALL for-profit businesses and most of them are highly political, on top of it. No more tax exempt status for any of them. Let them do what they want and pay their own way for it.
BTW, student loans for these universities is such a profitable business that BarkyCare took over the entire business (most people are unaware of this) in order to steal the profit stream so that BarkyCare could then be judged to be “revenue neutral” by the CBO (still a joke). Now, a decade after this offensive and illegal and un-American move, Traitor Joe wraps it all up in a bow by trying to force the PRINCIPAL costs of college loans onto the American taxpayer!! The same taxpayer who has been getting royally screwed by the SOviet-style BarkyCare for all these years.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
“The proper approach is to defund Academia entirely, at least at the federal level. The federal government had no business goosing Academia’s business model in the first place, and the six-decade experiment has utterly failed. It has not improved education, but contributed to its destruction. The federalized loan program has turned at least two generations into debt paupers, and incentivized “debt forgiveness” at the expense of taxpayers who pay their own bills. And the tuition-support flood has created a massive administration class that operates politically rather than scholastically.”
This is the only practical strategy mentioned in the article and the comments, and the Grand Old Party won’t touch it with a ten mile pole. The only thing they are capable of doing is threaten dire consequences which they don’t intend to follow through on.
Eisenhower warned of military-industrial complex (the “MIC”). With the “education” industry being so completely owned by the anti-Western left, and funded by gov’t, it may have overtaken MIC as the most palpable threat facing the U.S. today. The left understands this, but the right continues to disregard the growing threat. With uninterrupted gov’t funding, it is not likely to subside.