{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ID=EE5DC28E-26CD-4023-96C0-8925E130DCD4", "Back to School For Campus Radicals, Student Loan Socialism", "2024-09-10", "2024", "2024-09", "Republican", "Senate", "KY", "Mitch McConnell", "M000355", "www.mcconnell.senate.gov", "mcconnell", "https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, D.C. \u2013 U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding higher education:\n\n\u201cAs students head back to school, college campuses across the country are hoping this academic year begins more calmly than the last one ended.\n\n\u201cBack in May, the tantrums of campus radicals made some elite schools so inhospitable to learning \u2013 particularly for Jewish students \u2013 that administrators were driven to cancel commencement ceremonies.\n\n\u201cSince then, Columbia University\u2019s president has resigned, along with three deans who were put on notice for antisemitic comments made about a panel on Jewish life on campus back in May.\n\n\u201cThese are, of course, steps in the right direction for an Ivy League institution that professes a commitment to \u2018thoughtful, rigorous debate\u2019 and a campus culture \u2018free of bigotry, intimidation, and harassment\u2019. But Columbia and other universities have a great deal of work still to do to earn back the trust of students, parents, and alumni, alike.\n\n\u201cAnd other recent personnel decisions inspire less confidence. Remember, for example, the Columbia doctoral student who served as the unofficial spokesperson of the violent Hamasnik mob that forcefully occupied a campus building?\n\n\u201cIn between her studies of Marxist poetry, she demanded that campus officials provide the trespassers with food and water. Months later, she\u2019s now scheduled to teach a required course for undergraduates on nothing less than contemporary Western civilization!\n\n\u201cSo Mr. President, the decline in the Ivy League\u2019s academic rigor is well documented. But it would seem that at a bare minimum, its instructors ought to be able to distinguish between civilization and barbarism, and to act accordingly.\n\n\u201cA survey conducted over the summer by the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression found that 72 percent of college students agreed that in at least rare circumstances, it could be acceptable for students to have an encampment as part of a campus protest. And more than one third agreed that it could be acceptable to deface school property.\n\n\u201cI have to wonder whether a survey of the parents of college students, or for that matter, the campus staff who clean up after their misbehavior, wouldn\u2019t paint a different picture.\n\n\u201cUnfortunately, what used to be a reliable path to the middle class appears to have turned into breeding ground for childish radicalism.\n\n\u201cFortunately, this radicalism may begin to face limits to its own upward mobility.\n\n\u201cEarlier this year, over a dozen federal judges described Columbia as \u2018an incubator of bigotry,\u2019 declared that they had \u2018lost confidence in Columbia as an institution of higher education,\u2019 and announced that they will not hire law clerks from Columbia Law School until it undertakes serious reforms.\n\n\u201cPredictably this news was met with howling from liberal busybodies. In fact\u2014get this\u2014a state prisoner even filed an ethics complaint against a number of the judges.\n\n\u201cApparently, the left would have the signs outside America\u2019s courthouses read, \u2018Hate must have a home here\u2019.\n\n\u201cFortunately, Chief Judge Richman of the Fifth Circuit wasn\u2019t having it. She observed in her opinion dismissing the complaint that \u2018judges \u2026 have discretion to refuse to hire law clerks who graduated from a university that does not foster what the judges believe to be important aspects of higher education, such as viewpoint diversity and tolerance of differing viewpoints.\u2019 Indeed.\n\n\u201cColumbia would do well to heed these judges\u2019 warning, and their colleagues on the bench would do well to heed their example.\n\n***\n\n\u201cMeanwhile, the Biden-Harris Administration hasn\u2019t skipped a beat in ensuring that taxpayer dollars go towards subsidizing the post-modern indoctrination on display in so many American college towns.\n\n\u201cOver the summer the Supreme Court upheld a stay on the Administration\u2019s SAVE plan.\n\n\u201cBut the Administration still won\u2019t take \u2018no\u2019 for an answer, pushing forward with yet another version of student loan socialism.\n\n\u201cLast week, the scheme hit another roadblock in federal court.\n\n\u201cRemember, the Penn-Wharton model has estimated that previous iterations of this scheme would have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Even left-leaning think tanks have criticized student loan socialism for the regressive nature of its beneficiaries.\n\n\u201cBut the Biden-Harris Administration, like the Marxists of Morningside Heights, keeps coming back for more.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T18:46:43Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ID=EE5DC28E-26CD-4023-96C0-8925E130DCD4"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8379458449780941, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}