Education Secretary Miguel Cardona refused to commit Tuesday to withholding student debt forgiveness from campus protesters who have engaged in antisemitic harassment and intimidation of classmates.
House Education and Workforce Committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) pressed Cardona on the more than $146 billion in debt that President Biden has canceled for student borrowers since taking office.
“You’ve been proudly volunteering taxpayers to take on the student loan debt of largely wealthy college graduates,” Foxx (R-NC) said. “Do you believe that students who spend their time in college calling for the destruction of an ethnic or religious group, or spend their time preventing students of particular ethnic or religious groups from walking around campus freely, or spend their time occupying campus buildings deserve to have their education paid for by taxpayers?”
“I’m really proud of the work that we’re doing to provide a lifeline to students who chose to go to college,” Cardona, 48, began to say, adding that he “couldn’t hear” Foxx’s question “that well.”
“I’m talking about the students who are being antisemitic and stopping Jewish students from being able to go to class and threatening them,” Foxx interjected. “Do you want to have the taxpayers pay their loans off?”
“I believe that students who are breaking the law and are disrupting the educational environment should be held to account,” Cardona answered, dodging the question.
“Will you commit to ensuring that no student who has harassed other students, or prevented other students from going to class or broken laws receives any form of student loan forgiveness?” Foxx asked again.
“We are committed to making sure campuses are safe. I condemn any form of hate or any violence on campus,” Cardona said, evading the question a third time.
“Well, we’d like you to follow through on those who do break the law, and make sure they don’t receive student loan forgiveness,” Foxx responded.
The House panel held the Tuesday hearing on the Education Department’s annual budget, as well as its other policies and programs like Biden’s student debt cancellation, which Republicans have harshly criticized as an election “ploy” to win over young voters.
“These loan schemes do not forgive debt,” Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee ranking member Bill Cassidy said last month. “They transfer the debt from those who willingly took it on to the 87[%] of Americans who decided to not go to college or already worked to pay off their loans.”
“This is an unfair ploy to buy votes before an election and does absolutely nothing to address the high cost of education that puts young people right back into debt,” added Cassidy (R-La.).
After Biden’s initial $430 billion debt cancellation program was struck down by the Supreme Court last year, the president moved forward with a second plan that could end up costing US taxpayers as much as $559 billion over the next 10 years, the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated.
Asked by Rep. Erin Houchin whether he was directed by law “to bail out student loans,” Cardona admitted the program bypassed Congress.
“I was not given a congressional,” he began to answer before trailing off.
“Were you given a congressional directive, by law, to simplify [the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA]?” Houchin (R-Ind.) followed up.
“Yes,” Cardona replied.
“So you spent a great deal of department hours, I understand, on the student loan bailout — but apparently not very many department hours were spent on simplifying the FAFSA that you had three years to do,” Houchin shot back.
“Your answers are about as unhelpful as the new FAFSA rollout,” she added, which was “botched” for “almost 18 million” college students seeking financial aid, according to House and Senate Republicans who have since demanded a federal probe of the matter.
The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) on Tuesday released a “Dear Colleague” letter about Title VI protections against discrimination — including antisemitism.
The letter cited several examples of discriminatory conduct that mirrored recent incidents against Jewish students on college campuses, such as “being spit at, called antisemitic slurs referencing facial features or materialistic tendencies, having their Star of David jewelry ripped off, having their kippahs snatched off their heads” and ultimately leaving campus to attend classes remotely due to feeling unsafe.
Jewish students testified to Congress earlier this year that they had experienced the exact same bigotry at their Ivy League schools.
“[A]lthough political protest on its own does not typically implicate Title VI, protest signs in this instance allegedly also targeted specific Jewish students using ethnic stereotypes, so OCR could find that the protesters engaged in harassing conduct based on race, color, or national origin, including shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics,” the OCR letter states.
Foxx called for Cardona to resign in February after he declined to answer in an interview with Jewish Insider whether “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an antisemitic call for the genocide of Jews.
“I saw this as a failure of moral clarity deeming you unfit for public office and called for your resignation in February,” she told the secretary on Tuesday. “With the outbreak of campus riots, I am only more resolute, so I will say it again: you must resign.”
“On all the broad strokes, you have a failing grade,” she went on. “The Department has failed to protect young women with its Title IX rewrite, failed to return employees to the office to work in-person, and failed to pass its 2023 financial audit.”
“I see each of these failures as a result of the original failure—that the federal government inserted itself into education in the first place,” Foxx added, before taking another swipe at Cardona for botching a famous line of former President Ronald Reagan.
“There are good reasons why the word education does not appear in the Constitution. Education is done best when it is handled at the local level,” she said. “As President Ronald Reagan once famously said, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
In November, Cardona had left off the first half of the Gipper’s dig at big government when touting his department’s achievements.
In his opening remarks, the education secretary told panel members, “My purpose here today is to propose a budget that helps protect and support our nation’s students.”
“The Biden-Harris administration, including the Department of Education, is taking action each and every day to help ensure that schools and colleges are free from discrimination and safe for Jewish students and all students,” he added. “And we’ll continue to do so.”
