The chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, whose hearing last month led to the resignation of the presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, told Newsmax on Monday lawmakers are not finished with oversight of colleges and universities that receive federal taxpayer dollars.
"We're going to be looking at everything that we need to look at as it relates to taxpayer dollars going into the colleges and universities of this country," Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "Hardworking taxpayers are providing trillions of dollars every year to these schools.
"We have been looking at reform of post-secondary education for the last four years."
Foxx mentioned the House passing the bipartisan DETERRENT Act in December 2023. The bill slashes the foreign gift reporting threshold for colleges and universities from $250,000 to $50,000, with a $0 threshold for "countries of concern." It also closes reporting loopholes and provides transparency to Congress, intelligence agencies, and the public and requires disclosure of foreign gifts to individual staff and faculty at research-heavy institutions to protect those targeted by U.S. adversaries.
"We're going to be doing a lot of investigations of a lot of colleges and universities," Foxx said. "This is part of the job of Congress to do oversight. We expect not only for us to be looking at accreditation, but the accrediting bodies to be looking at these institutions. Are they doing their jobs and keeping students safe?"
It was the subject of on-campus student safety in the wake of antisemitism claims following the start of the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists in October that prompted the Education Committee's hearing last month, in which Claudine Gay, Liz Magill, and Sally Kornbluth, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, replied "it depends on the context" when asked if calls for violence against Jews were violations of their universities' code of conduct. Magill resigned as Penn's president shortly after the hearing, and Gay resigned last week over the controversy and allegations of plagiarism. Kornbluth still leads MIT.
Foxx said a small number of colleges and universities don't receive federal taxpayer dollars, but "every other institution in this country takes aid from the taxpayers through the federal government in the form of financial aid grants and contracts."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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