Uncle Sam needs to figure out how to stop bankrolling the college cartel
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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For decades, higher education has sat at a noxious nexus of “intersectionality” among self-proclaimed aggrieved groups. Colleges and universities have positioned themselves as vanguards in a vocal “war against racism” and assorted other societal maladies. They’ve created an entire lexicon to excoriate and stigmatize perceived offenses ranging from “microaggressions” and “implicit bias” to “white privilege” and “assimilationism.”
And in spite of this supposed commitment to anti-racism — or more likely because of what this specific breed of anti-racism truly entails — many universities en masse recently failed an epic moral test.
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In the immediate aftermath of Hamas invading Israel and beheading its babies, raping its women, and murdering its civilians in cold blood, these supposed bastions of intellectualism in various ways decided to side with the terrorists, largely through a complicity of silence, or in “both sides-ism” statements that effectively portrayed killer and victim as morally equal.
Such moral bankruptcy might be dismissed as just another example of misguided leftism by fancy-titled elites. But colleges and universities are, for better or worse, a gateway into the middle class and above. A high percentage of leaders in business, politics, media, and other “respectable” societal realms graduate from several dozen or so “top-tier” colleges and universities, making it a virtual requirement for college-age students to get their tickets punched there — even with the “privilege” of paying annual tuition in the $70,000-$80,000 range.
Alas, Congress has finally had enough. While the government correctly lacks the power to censor speech on college campuses, however abhorrent, this recent scourge of antisemitism has convinced some in the Capitol to finally crack down on all the ways that we, the taxpayers, fund this drivel.
Chief among these attempts is a proposal by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), a 2024 GOP presidential candidate, to rescind federal education funding for colleges and universities that “peddle antisemitism or authorize, fund or facilitate events that promote violent antisemitism.”
A broader question is why, how, and through which avenues the federal government funds, in the first place, colleges and universities that are the worst in turning a blind eye to antisemitism on campus.
The most obvious but most indirect way we subsidize universities is through academia’s nonprofit status. While the federal government historically carved out some taxation exceptions for universities, it was only in the mid-19th century with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service that universities were granted tax-exempt status as charitable organizations responsible for delivering the public good of education.
While certain functions of universities have come under enough financial scrutiny to force their parent institutions to cordon them off from the rest of the nonprofit body (for example, profitable athletic departments are often separated from academics), academic fields like the same critical theory guiding the antisemitic bigotry on campus, such as “colonial studies” and queer theory, have been legally lumped in as public goods with petroleum engineering and cancer research.
More directly, the federal government provides direct grants to universities, such as Pell Grants, which aid individual students in need of tuition assistance, and research grants. These are the forms of funding already most immediately at risk when universities are accused of running afoul of federal law. For example, a university that fails to provide female students equal access to education, either through lack of athletic funding or through improperly adjudicating sexual assault allegations, could be defunded for violating Title IX of the Education Amendments. (Under President Joe Biden’s administration, however, allowing biological men who identify as transgender women to participate in women’s sports does not necessarily constitute a violation of Title IX.)
But for the most pernicious way we fund universities, we can thank former President Barack Obama. To fund the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s signature domestic achievement, it essentially federalized the previously private student loan industry. Not only did this mean that taxpayers were directly lending funds that went to tuition, but also universities, aware that the supply of credit was now limitless, could jack up the prices. In 2017, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that these federally-backed student loans result in a 60% increase in tuition list prices, obviously well above the overall inflation rate or the demonstrable quality of university degrees.
To counter this, a good start would be the Scott bill to defund universities promulgating racism against Jews. It would likely cut off all direct grants and could challenge the offending campus’s tax-exempt status.
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But to truly take the taxpayer off the hook, the federal government would have to treat these universities the same way that a college like Hillsdale, in Michigan, elects to be regarded. As a matter of principle and as to bypass federal regulations, the famously heterodox Hillsdale College does not even accept federally-backed student loans as tuition.
Only with this type of model will we really be free from financial responsibility for communities that seem unaware that “Never Again” is happening right now.