University Leaders Headed Back to Congress To Face Questions on Antisemitism, This Time With Widespread Campus Unrest as a Backdrop

Round two of Congressional antisemitism hearings on Thursday will put another batch of college leaders on the spot. This time, the specter of widespread campus unrest and pro-Palestinian encampments will loom large over their testimonies. Some on Capitol Hill now want to know what, if any, impact foreign money has had on the schools and their reactions to the protests.The House Education and Workforce Committee is set to grill the heads of Northwestern, Yale, Rutgers, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan. The hearing, “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Anti-Semitic College Chaos,” is the next stage of Chairwoman Virginia Foxx’s crackdown on antisemitism within American higher education. One of those schools, Northwestern, is coming under sharp scrutiny for its ties to the Middle East. Like at Columbia and elsewhere, Northwestern had its own “Liberated Zone” on its Evanston, Illinois, campus. After administrators conceded to some of the protesters’ demands and the encampment disbanded, Ms. Foxx wrote a letter saying that the school’s president, Michael Schill, and board of trustees chairman, Peter Barris, “surrendered to the violators in a shameful agreement.”On Tuesday, Ms. Foxx’s committee launched an investigation into Northwestern’s relationship with the Qatar-owned news outlet, Al-Jazeera. The university’s campus at Doha has a “partnership” with the news outlet that a group of alumni argue could violate section 219 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which prohibits American entities from giving “training, expert advice, or assistance” to a foreign terrorist organization.Northwestern has received nearly a billion dollars from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other foreign sources since 2007, according to a recent audit by a nonprofit watchdog group that tracks government spending, OpenTheBooks. Qatar’s gift of more than $689 million came with scholarships for Qataris to attend the private university. The university did not immediately respond to the Sun’s request for comment. Between 2018 and 2022, the endowments of the top ten wealthiest American universities increased by a total of $65 billion, according to OpenTheBooks. Smart investing and federal subsidies have fueled much of this growth, but that’s not the full story.OpenTheBooks finds that since 1986, colleges and universities have gained $44 billion from foreign contracts and grants, or one billion dollars a year, according to disclosures under Section 117 of the Higher Education Reporting Act. A hefty $10.3 billion came from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, while Communist China gave $2.8 billion to American colleges and universities during that time period.Ms. Foxx sees a connection between foreign funding and the antisemitism that seems to be rampant on some college campuses. “There’s a direct correlation between the money coming from malign actors and the demonstrations on the campuses,” Ms. Foxx told the Sun in March. She is co-sponsoring the Deterrent Act, which aims to end the “nefarious transactions” taking place between elite universities and “rogue regimes.”If the upcoming hearings with college leaders stir as much national outcry as the one in December with the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT, Congress could take further action by attempting to defund the schools in question. As designated public educational charities, most top universities rely on taxpayer money in the form of federal subsidies, contracts, and grants. They pay minimal taxes on their endowments and other investments. OpenTheBooks, however, argues that “Northwestern operates like a for-profit corporation cutting deals with foreign governments and entities.”The next step Congress could attempt to take is to strip away the tax-exempt status of universities struggling to halt antisemitism on campus in alleged violations of federal civil rights protections. That was the threat of Congressman Jason Smith, who is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in letters he wrote in March to the presidents of Cornell University, Harvard, Penn, and MIT.“The focus of the Committee’s inquiry and questions is to understand what universities like yours are doing, if anything, to change course drastically and address what has gone unaddressed for years,” Mr. Smith said. “Doing so is essential to justifying the generous tax-exempt status that the American people have provided institutions like yours for decades.”Some on Capitol Hill are proposing legislation to tax the endowments of wealthy universities. Under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, endowment assets exceeding $500,000 a student pay a 1.4-percent excessive endowments tax. Last year, Senator Vance introduced a bill that would tax colleges with endowments greater than $10 billion at 35 percent.The consequences could be catastrophic for colleges, which tend to collect more in federal grant money than in undergraduate tuition. Northwestern’s endowment of more than $14 billion ballooned since 2018 thanks to more than $4 billion in federal contracts, grants, and sub-contracts, according to data disclosed in the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. Harvard, as the nation’s richest university with an endowment exceeding $50 billion, reported in 2021 that it received $625 million in federal funds, about 67 percent of the school’s total sponsored revenue that year. According to federal disclosures, the university has also received $1.6 million from Palestinian entities. Harvard did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment on the matter. Brown University also received “a gift of $643,000 in 2020 from a donor located in the Palestinian Territories,” a spokesman for the school, Brian Clark, tells the Sun. “This was from a philanthropic foundation in support of a professorship in our Middle East Studies program.”Columbia University is the second-largest recipient of federal largesse behind Harvard. About 19 percent of incoming Columbia undergraduates are beneficiaries of Pell Grants, a federal subsidy for the neediest college students in the country. Financial aid could also be called into question. Legislators in California and Texas have proposed legislation that would withhold either state or federal financial aid from students who engage in violent campus protests. Federal lawmakers could follow suit by targeting student financial aid administered by the Department of Education. Following complaints of antisemitism and anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab discrimination, the department’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating dozens of universities.

University Leaders Headed Back to Congress To Face Questions on Antisemitism, This Time With Widespread Campus Unrest as a Backdrop

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