House Republicans Launch Probe Into Education Department’s Funding of Woke Universities – Washington Free Beacon

Home Republicans are investigating the Division of Schooling’s dispersal of federal funds to tutorial establishments that “suppress free speech,” based on a letter from Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), the rating member of the Home Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the rating member of the Home Committee on Schooling and Labor.

The oversight committee is requesting a briefing on what steps—”if any”—the division has taken to safeguard tutorial freedom on campus, based on a duplicate of the letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Delivered to Biden training secretary Miguel Cardona on Wednesday, the letter rattles off a string of circumstances by which taxpayers have not directly footed the invoice for censorship, together with the $620 million the Schooling Division despatched to Yale College, the place directors investigated a legislation pupil for utilizing the time period “lure home” in an electronic mail.

“Establishments of upper studying are locations the place school and college students ought to take a look at, develop, and fine-tune theories, ideas, and concepts,” Comer and Foxx write. “Sadly, schools and universities are stifling free thought and expression.”

The letter states that the “proliferation of cancel tradition” extends to public establishments, that are funded completely by the taxpayer and sure by the First Modification. On the College of Washington, for instance, directors disciplined a pc science professor who refused to incorporate a “land acknowledgment” in his syllabi.

The Division of Schooling didn’t reply to a request for remark.

Delivered simply six weeks forward of the midterm elections, the letter displays the rising partisan divide over increased training. Solely 31 p.c of Republicans say that liberal and conservative views are revered equally on campus, based on a March ballot from the American Council on Schooling; amongst Democrats, the quantity is 57 p.c.

The hole has grown as universities themselves have turn out to be extra liberal. Between 1990 and 2014, the share of “conservative” and “average” professors dropped 6 and 13 factors, respectively, a survey from the Greater Schooling Analysis Institute discovered, whereas the share of self-identified “liberal” professors rose by 18 factors. The development is even starker amongst school directors, whose ranks have exploded over the previous twenty years and amongst whom liberals now outnumber conservatives 12 to 1.

That partisan tilt might clarify why college censorship disproportionately targets right-leaning school. In simply the previous 12 months, the letter notes, Princeton College, Georgetown Regulation College, and the College of Pennsylvania have both punished or investigated professors whose views don’t “align with ever-changing norms of political correctness.” These circumstances replicate an empirically verifiable development: Knowledge from Acadia College’s Jeffrey Sachs counsel that conservative professors are no less than twice as possible as liberal professors to be fired for political speech.

The schools partaking in such censorship are flush with federal money. In 2019, authorities knowledge present, the Division of Schooling doled out $830 million to the College of Pennsylvania, $370 million to Georgetown, and $1.2 billion to the College of Washington. Whole federal funding for increased training hovers at round $190 billion yearly.

So long as “American taxpayers make a major funding in schools and universities,” the letter argues, these faculties “must be havens of free speech.”