Follow the Money Right to Republicans’ Faux Outrage Over “Antisemitism” on Campuses
Like everything else animating the republican party, follow the money.
Remember this past winter and spring, when a handful of republican lawmakers seemed so concerned with rooting out antisemitism on college campuses in the midst of protests after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel? So fierce was their outrage, they successfully pushed out University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and Harvard President Claudine Gay.
So concerned were they about “the rot in America’s higher education,” as Rep. Elise Stefanik put it, they demanded education be “defunded”. Stefanik even co-authored a bill seeking to withdraw federal funding from universities that do not attempt to curtail students’ First-Amendment right to protest.
Well, it shouldn’t come as a shock all that faux outrage was exactly what political allies and for-profit university donors were paying for.
In a recent piece in The Guardian, Reps. Stefanik and Virginia Foxx “are the [for-profit college] industry’s strongest congressional supporters, frequently ‘doing their bidding’ by pushing controversial legislation and shielding for-profit schools that fail students from accountability, all while pulling in campaign donations.”
For-profit institutions like Keiser University and Hillsdale College have been accused of predatory practices, like promising students’ degrees intended to help them advance in the job market, but are in reality worthless, all the while enriching shareholders.
The now-defunct Trump University was one such “college”. The convicted felon ran a scam that stole from veterans for which he was ordered to pay a $25 million education fraud settlement (as a sitting president).
As The Guardian explains:
The industry is composed of schools that either are for-profit and have shareholders, or are formerly for-profit schools that became non-profits to evade regulations, but which still maintain relationships with for-profit entities.
A Guardian analysis of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings and data from the nonpartisan nonprofit research group Open Secrets uncovered that Stefanik and Foxx have raked in over $300,000 from the for-profit education lobby, with Foxx — chair of the House education and labor committee — claiming the lion’s share at $270,000.
No surprise, then, they’re targeting their donors’ primary competitors, the so-called “elite” schools.
Tom Perkins and Will Craft, reporting for The Guardian, explain:
Both Foxx and Stefanik have also taken aim at funding, student loans, courses on racism and other measures on the conservative higher ed wishlist.
Seeing through the ruse, Student Borrower Protection Center policy director Aissa Canchola Bañez stated:
The quest to get at antisemitism on college campuses — Republicans have weaponized that effort and they saw it as a perfect opportunity to capitalize and attack higher ed.
A spokesperson for Rep. Stefanik retorted:
Any suggestion of ulterior motives is completely false and pro-terrorist antisemitic propaganda.
David Halperin, attorney with higher education watchdog group Republic Report, added:
I personally would guess that it is a relatively separate issue, and that they’re beating up on schools that had campus protests as a way to drum up rightwing and rightwing Jewish support for Republican politics. She [Rep. Foxx] thinks she’s attacking the liberal elites who dominate the most prestigious colleges and universities, so she thinks she’s scoring political points.
Last year, President Biden announced the Education Department will be tightening up years of “historical failures” and administrative errors to automatically forgive student loans — totaling $39 billion — for over 800,000 borrowers who have consistently paid 20 or 25 years of their income-driven repayment plans.
It’s basically fixing a problem that, for too long, miscounted qualifying payments.
President Biden explained:
I’m never going to stop fighting for you. We’ll use every tool at our disposal to get you the student debt relief you need, and reach your dreams. It’s good for the economy. It’s good for the country.
When campaigning for the presidency, Biden stated:
I propose to forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for debt-holders earning up to $125,000, with appropriate phase-outs to avoid a cliff.
He is making good on that promise.
Congressional Democrats introduced the Student Loan Interest Elimination Act intending to immediately slash interest rates to zero for all 44 million student loan borrowers.
Up until the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, tuition covered 20 percent of college; federal, state, and local subsidies covered the remaining 80 percent. Now it’s reversed, and with the Supreme Court approving a system of legalized political bribery, Wall Street banks make a killing on interest.
In 1998, legislation eliminated borrowers’ ability to discharge student debt if repayment presented an “undue hardship” and the loan had come due five years before filing for bankruptcy.
We are literally the only major industrialized nation that saddles students with mountains of debt.
Most countries send their students to college tuition free.
Denmark pays its students a $1,000 stipend to pursue higher education.
Why?
Because the government knows it is investing in its citizens’ intellectual capital.
An educated populace makes for a more productive, prosperous society, and people shouldn’t be punished for trying to be a part of it..
For every dollar we invest in a student’s higher education, we get back seven over that person’s lifetime in taxes.
That was part of the thinking behind the G.I. Bill.
Education, like healthcare, should be free.
This latest GOP ploy isn’t about Israel. It’s about further enriching the billionaire class, the only constituent republicans care about.
The republican party has no policies to help non-millionaires, but it can’t very well come right out and admit that and survive, so it has to constantly come up with ways to couch it in wedge issues, like “DEI”, Democrats’ “woke agenda”, and “CRT”, manufacturing panic and outrage for their base.
How could they really be so concerned about rooting out supposed anti-Semitism on college campuses while rallying around a presidential nominee who has and continues to spew anti-Semitic tropes, hosted a neo-Nazi for Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago, and called neo-Nazi protesters at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. “very fine people”?
Like everything else animating the republican party, follow the money.