Republicans Taking Aim at Academic Excellence

By: Joe Mauricio

 

Such is the Federal government’s power to establish new governing precedents, and mere Washington twitches can jeopardize principles and institutions. It is illustrated by a seemingly small but actually momentous provisions of the Republican tax bill – a 1.4-percent excise tax on endowment earnings of approximately 20 colleges and universities with the largest per student endorsements to raise less than $3 billion in a decade and less than 0.005% of projected Federal spending of $53 billion. Republicans would blur important distractions and abandon their defining mission.

The private foundations, often museums and libraries, are exempt from the tax investment earnings because they apply their assets directly to charitable activities rather than including grants to other organizations as do foundations that therefore must pay the supervisory tax.

Are Republicans aware of Princeton University’s endowment earning fund, more than half of its annual budget that will support the expansion of the student body?

More than 60% of the undergraduates receive assistance from the chosen 20 universities, the families with earnings of below $65,000 pay no tuition, room and board, and families with of $160,000 pay no tuition.

For eight centuries, surviving the thickets of ecclesiastical and politica interferences, the world’s great universities have enabled the liberal arts to flourish.

The sciences to advancement and innovations propel economic settlement. Increasingly, they foster upward mobility that fulfills democratic aspirations and fights stagnation of the elites. It is shortsighted to jeopardize all this, and it is unseeming to do scramble for resources to make a tax bill conform to transitory arithmetic of a budget process that is a labyrinth of trickery.

Great universities are great because philanthropic generations have borne the cost of sustaining private institutions that seed the nation with excellence.

This expectation will disappear and the generosity that it has sustained will diminish, if the Republicans siphon away a portion of endowments earning in order to fund the federal government’s general operations.

With the government having long ago slipped the leash of restraint, the public sector’s sprawl threatens to enfeeble the private institutions of civil society that that mediate between the individual and the state, and that leaven society and creativity that government cannot supply.

Time was conservatism. Central government for limiting government was to defend these institutions from being starved of resources and functions by government.

Abandonment of this argument is apparent in the vandalism that Republicans are mounting against universities’ endowments.

This is said against little platoons of independence excellence that would be unsurprising were it proposed by the progressives who are over-eager to extend government’s reach and to break private institutions to the states’ saddle.

Coming from a die-hard Republican, this topic is acutely discouraging.