WASTE: $7 Billion in Taxpayer Funds Went to Ivy League Universities with Anti-Israel Protests

The nation is approaching $35 trillion in debt, and the number is rising fast. We are, as a nation, headed off a fiscal cliff, and Congress seems determined to keep pushing to Thelma-and-Louise us right off the edge. Now, to add to everything else the federal government spends our money on, we learn that some of the very Ivy League schools currently dealing with virulent pro-Hamas, antisemitic protests are also the benefits of $7 billion in government largesse - and that's only for the fiscal year 2023.

More than $5 billion worth of taxpayer dollars were given to Ivy League schools through sponsorship, grants and contracts during fiscal year 2023 alone. Another $2.1 billion also made its way to other prominent schools that have had anti-Israel rallies of late.
The Ivy League schools – Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Dartmouth College, and Cornell University – have been the scenes of some of the most high-profile anti-Israel unrest.
The tumult has led several Republican lawmakers in the Senate and the House to call for the removal of federal funding for schools that refuse to meaningfully address the situations transpiring on their respective campuses.

Some of these schools have impressive endowments. Some of the top ones:

Harvard: $50,877,680,000
Yale: $41,383,260,000
Stanford: $36,338,794,000
Princeton: $35,126,200,000
MIT: $24,600,809,000

Note that these top five endowments are in billions of dollars.

In other words, these schools are sitting on huge piles of cash yet are still receiving billions in taxpayer funding. That's not to mention grants and government-guaranteed loans given to students, and bear in mind that the Biden administration has been leaping through flaming hoops trying to find ways to abrogate centuries of contract law and "forgive" those student loans.

Many of these selfsame schools are now home to anti-Israel encampments, speakers fomenting antisemitism, and hapless administrators who don't seem to be able to do much about the situation. Fortunately, this seems to be changing, at last.

Previously on RedState: This Is How You Do It: Cal Poly Rips 'Lawless Behavior' of Protesters, 'Nothing to Do With Free Speech'

John Fetterman Pulverizes Anti-Israel Protesters 'Living in a Pup Tent for Hamas'

It's not just Ivy League schools, either.

UC Berkeley received more than $451.4 million, NYU received more than $805.5 million, UT Austin received roughly $645.6 million and GWU received more than $200 million.

So why do these universities still receive all of this taxpayer money?

Look, the fact that these campuses are currently beset with anti-Israel protests, with protestors who are, by and large, useful idiots, is only one part of the larger problem, which is the state of higher education itself. The constant influx of money has given rise to legions of non-value-added administrators, DEI directors, and a host of useless Underwater Ethnic Dog-Polishing Studies programs that have transformed America's university system into a bitter joke.

When it comes to higher education, I’m at the “let’s burn it all down” stage. No funding, no regulation, no incentivizing, no nothing, no kidding. If possible extend it to the states. Privatize all of it. Any loans to be made for educational purposes would be privately sought and privately offered, based on prospects of repayment, just like any other loan. Oh, and any foreign students who are participating in these protests? Revoke their visas. Send them home.

That, right there, would go a long way toward cleaning up the current mess. Of course, I’ve already added this to the long, long list of “things I can’t have,” but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.