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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, as students head back to school, college campuses across the country are hoping this academic year begins more calmly than the last one ended.

Back in May, the tantrums of campus radicals made some elite schools so inhospitable to learning, particularly for Jewish students, that administrators were driven to cancel commencement ceremonies. Since then, Columbia University's president has resigned, along with three deans who were put on notice for anti-Semitic comments made about a panel on Jewish life on campus back in May.

These are, of course, steps in the right direction for an Ivy League institution that professes--professes--a commitment to ``thoughtful, rigorous debate'' and a campus culture ``free of bigotry, intimidation, and harassment,'' but Columbia and other universities have a great deal of work still to do to earn back the trust of students, parents, and alumni alike.

Other recent personnel decisions actually inspire less confidence. Remember, for example, the Columbia doctoral student who served as the unofficial spokesperson of the violent Hamasnik mob that forcefully occupied a campus building? In between her studies of Marxist poetry, she demanded that campus officials provide the trespassers with food and water. Months later, she is now scheduled to teach a required course for undergraduates on nothing less than contemporary Western civilization.

So the decline in the Ivy League's academic rigor is well-documented, but it would seem that, at a bare minimum, its instructors ought to be able to distinguish between civilization and barbarism and to act accordingly. A survey conducted over the summer by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 72 percent of college students agreed that, in at least rare circumstances, it could be acceptable for students to have an encampment as part of a campus protest, and more than one-third agree that it would be acceptable to deface school property.

I have to wonder whether a survey of the parents of college students or, for that matter, the campus staff who clean up their misbehavior, wouldn't paint a different picture.

Unfortunately, what used to be a reliable path to the middle class appears to have turned into a breeding ground for childish radicalism. Fortunately, this radicalism may begin to face limits to its own upward mobility.

Earlier this year, over a dozen Federal judges described Columbia as an ``incubator of bigotry''; declared that they had ``lost confidence in Columbia as an institution of higher education''; and announced that they will not hire law clerks from Columbia Law School until it undertakes serious reforms.

Predictably, this news is met with howling from liberal busybodies. In fact--get this--a State prisoner even filed an ethics complaint against a number of judges.

Apparently, the left would have the signs outside America's courthouses read: ``Hate must have a home here.''

Fortunately, Chief Judge Richman of the Fifth Circuit wasn't having it. She observed in her opinion dismissing a complaint that ``judges . . . have discretion to refuse to hire law clerks who graduated from a university that does not foster what the judges believe to be important aspects of higher education, such as viewpoint diversity and tolerance and differing viewpoints.'' Indeed.

Columbia would do well to heed these judges' warning, and their colleagues on the bench would do well to heed their example.

Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration hasn't skipped a beat in ensuring that taxpayer dollars go toward subsidizing the post-modern indoctrination on display in so many American towns.

Over the summer, the Supreme Court upheld a stay on the administration's SAVE plan. But the administration still won't take no for an answer, pushing forward with yet another version of student loan socialism.

Last week, the scheme hit another roadblock in Federal court.

Remember, the Penn-Wharton model has estimated that previous iterations of this scheme would have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Even left-leaning think tanks have criticized student loan socialism for the regressive nature of its beneficiaries. But the Biden-Harris administration, like the Marxists of Morningside Heights, keep coming back for more.

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