On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “The Bottom Line,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) stated that the academic freedom complaints about the Trump administration going after Harvard’s funding are curious coming from Harvard given the school’s abysmal free speech ratings.
Kiley said, “[I]t’s especially rich to see likes of President Obama and the university itself now talking about academic freedom and the like. Where was this high-mindedness when Harvard was ranked dead last out of 251 colleges when it came to protecting free speech on campus? … [A] rating of zero. And then where was this high-mindedness when Harvard was really the epicenter of fueling this modern resurgence of one of the world’s most retrograde and ancient prejudices, this unbelievable, abhorrent resurgence in antisemitism and all of the associated unlawful activity that we saw on campus, the encampments, the intimidation so that Jewish students didn’t even feel safe walking to class? We had a number of them come and talk to us in the House. And where was it, by the way, when President Gay refused to even denounce, before our committee, efforts calling for genocide on campus, and, in fact, the university stood by her right up until she finally had to be removed for an unrelated reason, which was plagiarism?”
He added, “Harvard is saying that we do all of this important research, which is true. There is a lot of important research that’s being done there. But that doesn’t mean we should just ignore the massive civil rights violations and antisemitism that exists on that campus. Imagine if they were having Klan rallies on the campus, would we say, well, we’re still going to provide federal funding because you do important research? No, of course, not. We would say, there is no way that any institution that allows this, that propagates it should receive a penny of tax dollars from the federal government.”
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