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Biden’s Student Loan Bailout Sends Taxpayer Funds to On-Campus Mobs


BY: CHRISTOPHER JACOBS | MAY 07, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/07/bidens-loan-forgiveness-plan-makes-taxpayers-fund-on-campus-mobs/

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In remarks regarding the growing unrest on college campuses nationwide last Thursday, President Biden denounced the violent acts associated with many of the demonstrations and the growing wave of antisemitism on college campuses.

But, as the saying goes, talk is cheap. There’s one simple way to give his position teeth: Congress should enact legislation prohibiting the Department of Education from making taxpayers assume or otherwise modifying student loans for any student found responsible by his university or a court of law for acts of antisemitism, trespassing, property damage, intimidation, or violence.

Loan Giveaways Encourage Campus Chaos

Biden might be loath to admit it, but in many ways the campaign for mass student loan forgiveness has helped cause the current campus debacle. This year’s seniors entered college during the 2020 election campaign, meaning that most students currently on campus spent their college career hearing promises that much if not all of their debt would be forgiven.

This leftist movement to make American taxpayers pay off other people’s college debt has further weakened the already-tenuous link between a degree and its earning potential. If they believe the government will ultimately forgive the cost of their education, students have no reason not to major in Grievance Studies, or some similar Marxist-adjacent course of study. Assuming their loan debts will get nationalized also makes students less concerned about potential employers refusing to hire them due to their participation in on-campus riots.

With less incentive for students to choose practical degrees, and officials prioritizing woke nostrums over intellectual rigor, colleges have given up all pretense of ideological balance. As a result, some institutions have become less like universities and more like madrassas, places that inculcate and radicalize youths rather than educate them.

The way Biden has continued to pursue loan forgiveness, despite a rebuke of his unconstitutional plan by the Supreme Court, set an example that demonstrators have replicated. The president may now deprecate the mob’s actions, and call for respect for the rule of law, but when he publicly brags that the nation’s highest court “didn’t stop me” from pursuing his objectives, can anyone blame the would-be jihadis on campus for thinking themselves entitled to take the law into their own hands?

Restore Sanity to Campuses

Congress can and should take a stand, by cutting off the financial spigot for participants in the bedlam. If Biden opposes the chaos on campus so strongly, he should be willing to take a break from buying votes via taxpayer loan payoffs to cut off access for those creating mayhem. And if Democrats on the left like Rep. Ilhan Omar wish to exclude from loan payoffs any participants in Islamophobic or other offensive acts, few Republicans — who oppose Biden’s forgiveness proposals outright — will object.

Some might fear this proposal would encourage already-timid university administrators to take a weaker line against the demonstrators because individuals held responsible could face significant financial repercussions. But in some cases, civil authorities may be able to act irrespective of whether the higher education institutions in question do. More importantly, this measure should deter students as much as university officials, if not more so.

Another potential concern, that Congress prohibiting loan bailouts for a narrow sliver of the population might be viewed as lawmakers permitting Biden’s power grab for other students, doesn’t appear to pass muster, either. The House passed a bill last spring disapproving Biden’s original student loan payoff plan, but the fact that the measure didn’t get enacted into law didn’t stop the Supreme Court from striking the plan down as an unconstitutional power grab.

Finally, this proposal focuses solely on actions, not speech. Like all other Americans, students can and should have the right to protest, and to express their views, however offensive others may find them. But when speech crosses into intimidation, or encampments that create safety and health concerns, let alone breaking into buildings, those actions should bring consequences — in this case, financial ones.

A Practical Solution

Prohibiting student loan payoffs is less expensive and more practical than the other alternative: giving demonstrators a one-way ticket to the Gaza Strip. It would also send a message in clear and uncertain terms about what the American people, through their elected representatives, think of the mayhem that has unfolded in recent weeks.

In the longer term, the recent campus chaos should prompt Congress to consider repealing the student loan program entirely, a reform that would incentivize students and universities to prioritize college affordability, while saving taxpayers at least $300 billion over the coming decade. But at minimum, lawmakers should act now to ensure that hard-working taxpayers are not subsidizing participants in violent demonstrations on campuses nationwide.

Chris Jacobs is founder and CEO of Juniper Research Group, and author of the book “The Case Against Single Payer.” He is on Twitter: @chrisjacobsHC.

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The DEI Racket Transformed Our Colleges, Universities. But Tide Could Be Turning.


By: Jarrett Stepman / @JarrettStepman / September 13, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/13/the-dei-racket-transformed-our-colleges-universities-but-tide-could-be-turning/

Fealty to DEI dogma has become practically mandatory at all levels of higher education, a report in The New York Times shows. Pictured: Students at UC Berkeley, whose DEI hiring requirements have been adopted by universities and colleges throughout the U.S., pass under Sather Gate on campus April 17, 2007. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

College campuses have been dominated by the Left for generations. That’s hardly news to anyone. But a recent news report sheds light on how higher education has been transformed from a general haven of left-wing ideology into an engine of radicalism and revolution in the name of DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The lengthy report in The New York Times, of all places, highlights how the use of DEI statements essentially has allowed schools to create ideological loyalty oaths for new faculty. These tests aren’t being applied only in humanities departments, they’re the norm in science departments and all others too.

California—upholding its reputation for being at the cutting edge of anti-civilizational lunacy and tyranny—has predictably gone all in on the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime. Fealty to DEI dogma has become practically mandatory at all levels of higher education.

The Times notes that the faculty senate at the University of California, San Francisco urged professors to apply an “anti-oppression and anti-racism” lens to their coursework. On its website, UCLA’s public affairs school pledged to “decolonize the curriculum and pedagogy.” And the faculty senate of California Community Colleges instructed teachers on their duty to “lift the veil of white supremacy” and “colonialism.”

“Professions of fealty to DEI ideology are so ubiquitous as to be meaningless,” said Daniel Sargent, a professor of history and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times. “We are institutionalizing a performative dishonesty.”

It’s not just that school administrators enforce a pervasive, left-wing culture on campus. That’s been happening for generations. These schools also are hiring with strict DEI-style parameters, to the near total exclusion of merit. In one study, according to the Times, researchers found that at Berkeley “a faculty committee rejected 75% of applicants in life sciences and environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements.”

It seems this may have been a racial test too. From the Times’ report:

Latino candidates constituted 13% of applicants and 59% of finalists. Asian and Asian-American applicants constituted 26% of applicants and 19% of finalists. Fifty-four percent of applicants were white and 14% made it to the final stage. Black candidates made up 3% of applicants and 9% of finalists.

That makes sense, given what’s in the diversity statements. Many schools, including Berkeley, publicly post their standards online. Among the answers that will produce a low score is saying that you will “treat everyone the same.” To get the highest scores, you need to be explicitly racial in thinking and demonstrate that you’ve not only participated in or will participate in campus DEI programs but will be actively leading new initiatives.

What’s clear is that these schools aren’t focused simply on weeding out conservatives. People anywhere vaguely on the Right clearly don’t have a ghost of a chance of getting through the application process. No, these schools are about finding active, devoted leaders of social justice causes. If you aren’t a DEI revolutionary, schools don’t want you to teach about science or engineering or anything else at their institution.

Remember, when the Left says, “believe the science,” what it’s really saying is “believe the left-wing activist with institutional backing next to his/her/zir name.”

Unfortunately, what started in California didn’t stay in California, as many schools around the country copied the Golden State model. Among the methods schools use to promote DEI goals is what John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, called “cluster hiring.” Universities hire applicants in bulk, using DEI statements to weed out most unwanted applicants.

Sailer noted how in 2021, Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology undertook a cluster hire that “eliminated approximately 85% of its candidates based solely on diversity statements.”

The federal government exacerbates this problem.

“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has allocated $241 million in grant money for cluster hires at universities around the country—with the condition that every search committee must require and heavily weigh diversity statements,” Sailer wrote.

The DEI racket is a national phenomenon, but this bleak environment includes signs that change may be coming.

It seems that some school systems are reconsidering their DEI litmus tests. For instance, Georgia’s public university system eliminated DEI requirements in July. It put out a statement saying that hiring decisions should be “free of ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.”

I’d like to ascribe this change to a genuine change of heart, but it’s telling that this policy shift came right after the Supreme Court’s ruling that racial preferences in college admissions are unlawful. It goes to show how much of a game changer that decision is. Schools now have reason to be concerned about lawsuits from applicants claiming discrimination. 

Creating ideological litmus tests that appear to discriminate and actually tell faculty that not discriminating is bad surely won’t help the cause of colleges and universities.

This small retreat won’t exactly fix what ails higher education in America, but it does represent an opening for a recalibration.

Larger change will happen when more schools return to a classical learning model and jettison the DEI regime altogether. That seems unlikely to happen without outside pressure. 

But outside pressure is building as institutional trust declines. If more states reject the California model, a genuine new birth of freedom in education may not be so far-fetched as it seemed just a few years ago.

COMMENTARY BY

Jarrett Stepman@JarrettStepman

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of the book “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett

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Democrat Senators Ready to Limit the First Amendment because of Threats of Violence from Liberals


Reported By Onan Coca | June 21, 2017

If you  listen carefully to the Democrat leaders on Capitol Hill you can hear the whispers of fascism creeping in to their normal everyday conversation. The ease in which Democrats discuss the idea of restricting the First Amendment rights of their constituents should drive fear into the hearts of all Americans, but that simply doesn’t seem to be happening.

On Tuesday, the Senate held hearings on Free Speech and how the current campus climate is stifling the First Amendment rights of many students, teachers, and citizens. During the hearings the Senate heard from some prominent professors who argued that the attacks on free speech that we’re seeing across the country can have a deadly serious affect on other areas of civil life. Weakening one of our “God given” rights, could quickly lead to the erosion of other rights. The professors also admitted that every right has its limits, and speech is limited by the threat that could be posed by said speech. (Think of the old argument about shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.) However, they argued that this limit could not be imposed on speakers by others who disagreed with their speech (often called “the heckler’s veto”), because this was the very essence of the First Amendment. Sadly, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and other Democrats (including Dick Durbin) did not seem to agree as they argued that threats posed by opponents of certain speech must also be taken into account when deciding whether or not speech was permissible.

After reading the First Amendment out loud, Feinstein said,

Legal expert, Professor Eugene Volokh disagreed arguing:

“There are of course times, as Senator Feinstein pointed out, that the University isn’t trying to suppress speech because it finds it offensive but because enough people who are willing to stoop to violence find it offensive that there is then the threat of a violent reaction to such speech. But I tend to agree with Senator Cruz’s view that that kind of a heckler’s veto should not be allowed.

“The question was asked ‘When you have a set group of people who come to create a disturbance, what do you do?’ I think the answer is to make sure they don’t create a disturbance and to threaten them with punishment, meaningful punishment, if they do create a disturbance. And not to essentially let them have their way by suppressing the speech that they are trying to suppress.

“One of the basics of psychology that I think we’ve learned, and all of us who are parents I think have learned it very first hand, is behavior that is rewarded is repeated. When thugs learn that all they need to do in order to suppress speech is to threaten violence then there’ll be more such threats from all over the political spectrum. And I think the solution to that is to say that the speech will go on and if that means bringing in more law enforcement and making sure that those people who do act violently or otherwise physically disruptively that they be punished.”

While Volokh made stunningly simple and clear argument, Senators Durbin and Feinstein continued to push back, arguing that the threat of violence from protesters was enough to shut down speech on campus or anywhere else where violence was threatened.

Feinstein continued Durbin’s argument by saying that sometimes the danger posed is greater than the capability of the school or local authorities to handle. Volokh countered that when the police could no longer control threats of violence or lawbreakers our society would indeed be in a perilous place. Feinstein continued to press the Professors by wondering if they expected schools to always be prepared to deal with protests and threats? The professors argued that yes, schools should always accommodate speech, particularly when invited by students of that school and for credible reason. Can we also just add, that when a school schedules a speech that might be controversial, it’s really not that difficult for the school to coordinate with local authorities to provide for student and campus safety.

 

Sadly, Feinstein just never seemed to understand that if you allow the hecklers to shut down free speech… then free speech is functionally dead.

Professor Frederick Lawrence: I think the way to start with this is with a strong presumption in favor of the speech, particularly if it’s speech that’s coming from a student group who has invited somebody.

Feinstein: No matter how radical, offensive, biased, prejudiced, fascist the program is? You should find a way to accommodate it.

Professor Lawrence: If we’re talking about the substance of the program, not the danger and credible threats but the substance of the program, then yes.

Folks, if the Democrat leaders can’t seem to grasp the concept of free speech how are their followers ever going to get it? If this hearing is indicative of the Democrat Party today… our nation is in very big trouble.

Here’s the entire hearing – Volokh on free speech starts about 1:10:00 into the video and Feinstein jousts with Professor Lawrence at about 1:46:00.

Thankfully, not everyone in the room was a Democrat. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) delivered a short statement that cut to the heart of the matter explaining that free speech is important and that it must be defended at all cost.

“The Best Solution For Bad Ideas And Speech, Is Better Ideas And Speech.”

Conservative Review put together some of Cruz’s best moments from the hearing:

In his opening statement during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “The Assault on the First Amendment on College Campuses,” Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, offered a robust defense of free speech, criticizing colleges and universities that have “quietly rolled over” to intolerant and bullying liberal student bodies.

“If universities become homogenizing institutions that are focused on inculcating and indoctrinating rather than challenging, we will lose what makes universities great,” Cruz said. “The First Amendment is about opinions that you passionately disagree with and the right of others to express them.”

“College administrators and faculties have become complicit in functioning essentially as speech police – deciding what speech is permissible and what speech isn’t,” Cruz said. “You see violent protests … enacting effectively a heckler’s veto where violent thugs come in and say ‘this particular speaker, I disagree with what he or she has to say. And therefore, I will threaten physical violence if the speech is allowed to happen.”…

“What an indictment of our university system,” Cruz declared. “If ideas are strong, if ideas are right, you don’t need to muzzle the opposition. You should welcome the opposition. When you see college faculties and administrators being complicit or active players in silencing those with opposing views, what they are saying is they are afraid.”

“They are afraid that their ideas cannot stand the dialectic, cannot stand opposition, cannot stand facts or reasoning, or anything on the other side. And it is only through force and power that their ideas can be accepted.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Onan Coca

Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Romulus Marketing. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children. You can find his writing all over the web.

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