'You’re not a school anymore': Trump plan would 'threaten the existence of universities'
A video recording shows high-ranking Republican elected officials threatening to pull federal funding from universities and strip their official accreditation as punishment for campus protests.
House majority leader Steve Scalise met last week in Washington with the powerful pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and The Guardian reviewed video showing him describe how Republicans would coordinate with a second Donald Trump administration to attack universities that allow pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses.
“Your accreditation is on the line,” Scalise says in the Oct. 1 video. “You’re not playing games anymore, or else you’re not a school any more.”
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Scalise and fellow GOP congressman Pat Fallon, of Texas, attended the event, which was billed as a discussion on the spread of antisemitism since the start of the Gaza conflict a year ago, but much of the discourse was on how to quash criticism of Israel's military operation in Gaza, and The Guardian noted "there was no attempt during the hour-long conversation to distinguish hatred of Jews from pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli government sentiments."
“We’re looking at federal money, the federal grants that go through the science committee, student loans," Scalise said. "You have a lot of jurisdiction as president, with all of these different agencies that are involving billions of dollars, some cases a billion alone going to one school."
Scalise singled out three universities – Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University – that have been roiled by campus protests over the Gaza war, which began Oct. 7, when Hamas killed 1,200 people inside Israel and took 250 hostage and then set off an Israeli offensive that destroyed much of the Palestinian territory and killed nearly 42,000 people.
“You start siding with a terrorist organization, and you think that’s mainstream," Scalise said, "because all your friends are in this little bubble, and I don’t know who you’re talking to – you’re sure not talking to normal people any more."