Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is seeking to levy a one-time, six-percent tax on endowments of ten prestigious universities to fund Israel and Ukraine’s war efforts and boost security at America’s southern border.
The tax, proposed Tuesday as part of the Woke Endowment Security Tax Act, would generate a revenue of about $15.47 billion, according to the senator’s office.
The bill doesn’t name any specific institutions. Instead, it identifies two categories of schools to which the tax would apply: secular institutions with endowments of at least $12.2 billion and secular institutions with endowments of at least $9 billion that also operate under a contract with the state.
Applying this standard, the ten universities subject to the tax would be: Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Princeton University, Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Yale University.
It is worth noting that Cornell is the only one of the ten universities that falls under the second category. With an endowment valued at just over $10 billion, the Ithaca, New York-based Ivy League school operates four so-called “contract colleges” that were created by the New York State Legislature and receive state funds.
The bill uses the 2022 value of endowments to determine which universities would be taxed. It doesn’t include language to specify how the money would be spent, although Mr. Cotton’s office said the fund would go to aiding “Israel’s war against Hamas,” “Ukraine’s war against Russia,” and “efforts to secure the southern border.”
“Many of America’s so-called ’top' universities are failing to condemn antisemitism and violence against Jewish students on their campuses. We should levy this tax on these schools’ endowments,” Mr. Cotton said in a statement.
“A tax on the billions of dollars these schools have amassed would be more than enough to pay for our aid to Israel or security for the southern border,” he added.
The federal government already taxes large university endowments. Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which came into effect in 2018, private colleges and universities with at least 500 students and endowment assets valued at $500,000 or more must pay a 1.4 percent excise tax on their investment returns.
University Presidents Confronted Over Anti-Semitism
During a congressional hearing last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) confronted the three executives over chants explicitly calling for genocide against Jews that can be heard at on-campus pro-Palestinian demonstrations. When asked by the congresswoman whether students who called for “Intifada” or chanted “From the River to the Sea” should be disciplined for violating the schools’ anti-harassment policies, they were unable to give a direct “yes” or “no” answer.“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?” Ms. Stefanik asked, to which UPenn President Liz Magill repeatedly declined to give a definitive answer. Instead, she emphasized it would only be considered harassment if “speech turns into conduct.”
Just days after the hearing, Ms. Magill resigned but will remain an interim president and retain her status as a tenured faculty member at UPenn’s law school. Scott Bok, chairman of the university’s board of trustees, also resigned.
Meanwhile, Harvard has continued to back President Claudine Gay despite calls from Jewish students and alumni for her resignation over her remarks at the congressional hearing and recently surfaced allegations of plagiarism.
“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” they said Tuesday. “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”
MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who told Ms. Stefanik that it would take an investigation to determine whether a call for genocide against Jews is targeted at individuals and pervasive, also received the full backing of the school’s governing board.
“She has done excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate, all of which we reject utterly at MIT. She has our full and unreserved support,” the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation said in their statement.
