On Thursday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “The Record,” Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) argued that Harvard President Claudine Gay was picked due to her race and stated that all schools should lose their funding if they don’t measure up, “which, obviously, they are not” doing at the moment.
Owens said, “We heard the [term] a long time ago, the soft bigotry of low expectation[s,] there’s nothing soft about bigotry, there’s nothing soft about taking people’s dreams and looking at folks as an inferior. I will say that this [lies] on the plate of the Harvard board. They have put in place someone based on color, period. It has nothing to do with meritocracy, what she can bring to the plate. And we have to get over this. This is where our country will lose our way if we don’t get back to meritocracy, and we start looking at black people not having the same standards as others out there, we cannot do that if we’re going to continue our country moving forward the way we should.”
He added, “So, we can now look at the appropriation[s] process and look at outcomes. At the end of the day, every college should have outcomes that we can predicate our funding to, and if they’re not coming up to par, which, obviously, they are not, then we can start looking at how we can pull that back.”
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