This week, an Arizona lawmaker introduced legislation that would prohibit federal funding for any university in the country that has an endowment greater than $5 billion. Rep. Eli Crane introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Ivy League Schools Act following the testimony of the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Crane questioned the funding of “elite” educational institutions while “critical rural institutions like Navajo Nation’s Diné College – the first tribal college in America – are often ignored.”
Currently, 21 educational institutions in the United States have endowments that fall into this category, including every Ivy League university. Per the legislation, the following universities would be impacted: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, UPenn, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Columbia, Washington University in St. Louis, Duke, UChicago, Vanderbilt, Emory, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Rice, University of Southern California, Brown, and NYU.
Crane claims that the schools in question “saw alarming increases in antisemitic activity on their campuses following the October 7th Hamas terror attack against Israel, with blatant calls for genocide and Jewish students fearing for their lives.”
Crane alleges that the “institutions did little to protect their students, instead helping to cultivate antisemitic environments sympathetic to genocidal terrorists.”
“Right now, American taxpayers are on the hook to finance institutions that function as breeding grounds for hateful, anti-American ideology. That’s on top of the hard-earned tax dollars they’re forced to shill out to the students at these institutions thanks to President Biden’s student loan giveaway. Students at these institutions take out loans to pay for their indoctrination. Then, the Biden Administration misuses American tax dollars to pay the schools off, instead of holding the students accountable for their financial decisions,” Crane argued in a press release.
Crane says that the American people are being forced to fund “hateful indoctrination from multiple angles and it’s time to pull the plug.”
“Bankrolling institutions that sympathize with terrorists is unthinkable – especially with $33 trillion in national debt. The “elite” institutions of this country are failing the American people & abusing federal funds,” said Rep. Crane. “We have to start reining in our national debt somewhere and what better place to start than eliminating federal subsidies for overvalued institutions that consistently undermine American values?”
With an endowment of $1.47 billion, Arizona State University falls far short of the standard set by Crane’s bill, but the university’s failure to protect free speech and diversity of thought has come at a cost.
The benefactor behind The T.W. Lewis Foundation, Tom Lewis, pulled funding from the ASU-Barrett Center for Personal Development.
Lewis’ decision to pull the funding comes after the executive director of the Center said, in an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal, that she was being fired and the Center was closing because she organized an event featuring Charlie Kirk, Robert Kiyosaki and Dennis Prager.
“After seeing this level of left-wing hostility and activism, I no longer had any confidence in Barrett to adhere to the terms of our gift, and made the decision to terminate our agreement, effective June 30, 2023,” said Lewis in a press release. “I regret that this decision was necessary, and hope that Barrett and ASU will take strong action to ensure that free speech will always be protected and that all voices can be heard.
In March 2019, the T.W. Lewis Foundation, Tom Lewis – CEO of Scottsdale-based real estate business T.W. Lewis Company – and his wife Jan gave a $2.5 million gift to Barrett to support student personal development and success.
The couple designated their generous gift for two purposes: $1.5 million to establish and fund the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at Barrett Honors College on the ASU Tempe campus and $1 million to go toward the construction of a $10 million Barrett Honors College Student Success Center.