The pro-Hamas riots on many campuses are starting to die down (mostly) now that the police were finally called in to clear some of the encampments. But the recent unrest had already attracted the attention of people in Congress who have questioned the federal funding going to these schools that have allowed hateful antisemitic rhetoric and violence to flourish. Is this a wise use of your taxpayer dollars? That's the question that Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee brought up this weekend on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo. The latest round of appropriations is currently making its way through Congress and Hagerty says that public funding for those schools is a "top-of-mind issue" for them, suggesting that some of that funding may be about to dry up. (Washington Examiner)

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) agreed with some of his colleagues in the Senate that federal funding for universities allowing antisemitic protesters on its campuses is “a top-of-mind issue.”

Hagerty appeared Saturday on Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street to react to reports that 2,000 college students were arrested on campuses in their pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Some were charged with misdemeanors such as trespassing, while others stand accused of assaulting police officers. Videos have come out from some of these protesters revealing antisemitic themes in their chants and signage.

“We just passed through a massive appropriation package,” Hagerty said. “We’ll be looking at the next steps right away. In fact, it’s coming up over the course of the next several weeks. This is a top-of-mind issue for most of the senators. It’s even a bipartisan concern. We’ve got to address this. The campuses have really just let things run wild.”

So just how much money are we talking about here? The Twitter account @EndWokeness tallied up the figures from the 2023 budget on Saturday and there are some eye-popping numbers in there.

Federal funding of universities, 2023:

Columbia: $1.2 billion
Penn: $955.6 million
NYU: $805.5 million
Yale: $776.8 million
Cornell: $736.2 million
Harvard: $676.1 million
UT Austin: $645 million
Berkeley: $451.4 million
Princeton: $403 million
GWU: $200.2 million

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 4, 2024

Granted, that's not the kind of money that would suddenly balance the national budget if it went away, but it's still a considerable pile of cash. Just for the ten largest universities where the pro-Hamas encampments were set up, we're talking about a number just short of nine billion dollars. Perhaps ironically, Columbia was one of the worst perpetrators, but they also received the largest amount of funding at more than one billion dollars. Penn State and NYU weren't far behind.

Of course, we shouldn't paint all of these schools with the same brush and end funding entirely. (Though that might be worth considering anyway when you consider the size of their endowments.) Some schools did better than others. UT Austin moved in pretty quickly and unleashed the state police on the encampment there. They receive barely half of what Columbia gets and they arguably performed twice as well.

The trickier question to address goes beyond the federal funding these schools receive and deals with the administrators and faculty who are controlling these institutions and establishing the curricula being fed to young people who study there. Even in more conservative parts of the country, most of these colleges wind up hiring extremely liberal professors and administrators, including many that are openly antisemitic and hostile to Israel and the Jewish people. This is the sort of poison that's been seeping into the educational water supply for decades. But these are also private institutions, so the federal government can't simply go charging in there yanking them out of the lecture halls and off of the payroll, no matter how tempting the idea might sound.

The only real path toward change - assuming it's even possible - is to hit them in the wallet where it hurts the most. We saw a start to such an effort recently when wealthy donors and alumni began declaring that they would no longer make donations to schools endorsing or allowing blatant antisemitism to flourish. It was a good start, but a lot more of that type of action would be required before any sort of cultural shift on the nation's campuses could take shape.