Congress must end federal handouts to radicalized academia

(The Daily Signal) – In recent weeks, Americans have been shocked by widespread student protests and statements by professors from colleges and universities that support violence against Israel.

These incidents highlight that radical ideologies have taken hold of broad swaths of academia.

It’s important to counter the toxic pathologies that are opposed to the founding principles of society. However, it’s equally important to recognize that the federal government funnels tens of billions of dollars every year into educational institutions that are mostly or completely captured by leftist activists.

Congress has an obligation to address this problem in upcoming spending bills by reforming and eliminating the funding streams that provide financial support to the boosters of antisemitism and terrorism.

In the wake of the genocidal attack that Hamas terrorists launched against Israel on Oct. 7, most Americans supported Israel’s right to forcefully respond. However, that support is much weaker in places that represent the commanding heights of society, such as universities.

While instances of students taking the side of Hamas are discouraging, college faculty and administrators leading the way are far more troubling.

Examples of professors and departments openly siding with terrorism or genuflecting to its supporters are all too common: CU Boulder, Cornell, George Mason, Georgetown, UCLA, City University of New York, UPenn, UC San Diego, Yale, and many, many others.

Leftist activists masquerading as educators are promoting many of the most destructive ideas in circulation. From transgenderism to critical race theory to the cult of climate change, radical professors instill radical ideas in students and create legions of new radicals.

In the case of the debate about Israel and Palestinians, the pertinent leftist theory is decolonization, which divides the world into colonizers and the colonized—and justifies atrocities in the name of fighting “oppression.”

The concept is antithetical to Western values and is actively promoted by universities and institutional thought leaders.

Legions of radicalized students are spilling into key areas of society.

They are at the head of the spear of the “environmental, social and governance” movement that is driving corporate boardrooms to the left. They are taking over many important nonprofits. They become teachers and bureaucrats. And, naturally, many of them run “diversity, equity and inclusion” departments at universities. (Tellingly, most DEI bureaucracies don’t seem particularly interested in protecting Jewish students during the ongoing wave of antisemitism.)

Some states, such as Florida and Texas, are making important reforms to pull back direct government support for woke nonsense. However, the broader national trends are not encouraging.

The spread of ideological extremism in higher education isn’t happening in isolation. The infrastructure of the academic Left is heavily funded by the massive, multilayered system of handouts from the federal government, which includes:

• Tens of billions of dollars per year in grants and subsidized loans for students (leading to tuition inflation).
• Tens of billions of dollars per year in research grants from a variety of federal agencies, with grossly excessive bonus payments for “indirect costs.”
• Billions of dollars per year in additional programs and bureaucracies throughout the Department of Education that provide support to the ideologically captured academic establishment.

In light of the disastrous effects that excessive federal spending is having on the economy, this would be an ideal time for Congress to defund academia.

House Republicans are making progress in the upcoming slate of spending bills, which include significant cuts to the areas outlined above. However, those proposals will face stiff resistance in the Democrat-controlled Senate and White House.

Accordingly, it will be crucial for conservatives in both chambers to stand their ground as the spending debate heats up over the coming months.

With the public increasingly aware of the rot on college campuses, now is the time to act.