Calls on Department to Hold Universities Accountable
?WASHINGTON - Amid growing protests across colleges and universities in America, the Idaho Congressional delegation led by Senator Jim Risch is demanding answers from President Biden’s Department of Education and calling for U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to create and distribute a best practices guide for universities to appropriately handle protests on campuses.
“Given the growing number of radical encampments on college campuses and the harassment of Jewish students, we are concerned about their safety and ability to freely voice their views and practice a faith of their choice,” wrote the Idaho delegation. “ . . . As Congress holds hearings and continues to investigate the presidents of universities who have harbored and allowed these violent protestors to target Jewish students on their campuses, the Department must respond directly.”
The congressional leaders are demanding the Department provide its plan for protecting students as well as provide information as to whether and how the Department will hold universities accountable for their failures.
In the letter, the delegation outlined several antisemitic protests on college campuses nationwide, including:
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Northeastern University, where professional organizers occupied campus;
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Yale University and George Washington University, where on both campuses students created encampments and protestors also trespassed and or protested outside the university presidents’ homes;
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University of California-Los Angeles, where hundreds of protestors ignored the directive to disband their encampment;
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University of Wisconsin-Madison, where students and faculty refused to remove illegal encampments and where two student organizations led the effort to write antisemitic, discriminatory words around the Wisconsin State Capitol; and
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University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where faculty were threatening to withhold the grades of all their students if the university’s administration was not lenient on protestors’ punishments for their activities.
Given some universities have managed to handle these protests substantially better than others, like the University of Florida, the delegation is calling on the Secretary of Education to compile a list of best practices from universities that have correctly handled these protests and prevented them from escalating. The goal of the list is “to encourage all universities to take the correct approach. . .”
The full letter is available here.
