10 Jul, 2020
President Donald Trump has announced that the Treasury Department will examine the tax-exempt status of the US’ universities and schools, accusing them of indoctrinating children with “Radical Left” ideology.
“Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status and/or funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues.”
… and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2020
It is unclear to what extent the Treasury would be able to prove a difference between “indoctrination” and “education,” and the IRS – which would be tasked with conducting such a probe – is prohibited by federal law from targeting organizations “based on their ideological beliefs.”
That university professors lean left is not shocking news. A 2018 study said that Democrat professors outnumber their Republican colleagues on campus ten to one, or 13 to one if military colleges aren’t counted. On the streets, university professors are far more often seen marching with Antifa than the Proud Boys.
Trump has taken aim at these left-leaning institutions before. After a conservative activist was assaulted on the Berkeley University campus in California last year, the president signed an executive order requiring colleges to protect free speech or lose federal funding.
“These universities,” he said at the time, “have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity and shut down the voices of great young Americans.”
Even before taking office, Trump had persistently railed against America’s universities. In a 2016 campaign speech, he accused the colleges of wasting their generous endowments on “things that don’t matter,” like investment funds and kickbacks to donors, rather than on lowering tuition and living expenses for students. Harvard University, for example, has an endowment of more than $40 billion, yet this September will charge undergraduates just under $50,000 to take online-only classes.
The president’s main beef with the universities, though, is likely not financial, but ideological. Universities churn out Democrat voters, and in the runup to November’s election, a recent poll found that Joe Biden held a 21-point lead over Trump among voters with a college degree.
Addressing a crowd at Mount Rushmore on Independence Day, Trump declared that “our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains.”
