Congratulating the Folsom High School Bulldogs

Floor Speech

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Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, I wish to recognize and congratulate the Folsom High School football team on winning the 2023 CIF Division 1A State football championship, beating St. Bonaventure this weekend 20- 14. This is Folsom's fifth State championship since 2010, their first since 2018. Head coach Paul Doherty got his team to buy in, and together they were able to achieve remarkable things, with Defensive Coordinator Sam Cole taking the reins and making life for the St. Bonaventure offense rather difficult.

Sophomore quarterback Ryder Lyons opened the score in the first quarter, and Folsom held the lead at halftime. St. Bonaventure battled back and led 14-13 with less than 3 minutes left. Then Folsom's defense stopped the St. Bonaventure offense and took over with a little more than 2 minutes to go.

Lyons led his team downfield and completed a touchdown pass to Jameson Powell with 20 seconds to go.

Coach Doherty and Coach Cole's defense held from there, and the Folsom High School football team won the championship, capping off an amazing 12-2 season.

Coach Doherty and the Folsom Bulldogs should be congratulated on winning the championship of the entire State. We know how hard they have worked. This team brings so much pride to the city of Folsom, and I congratulate all the players on a very well-deserved victory and amazing end to your season. Free Speech on College Campuses

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Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, Harvard University's leadership today announced that they will be retaining President Claudine Gay, despite acknowledging President Gay's repeated failures to adequately condemn terrorism and anti-Semitism.

Now, the university will have to answer for why it takes these matters less seriously than the University of Pennsylvania, which recently forced out its president. As disappointing as this is, the refusal of one university to make a needed personnel change is not going to stop the momentum for far-reaching reform that we are seeing in higher education. This is a moment of reckoning for higher education in this country, where the true character of our universities has been laid bare for the world to see.

Even before last week's shocking testimony by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, many in this country were asking the question: How is it that our leading academic institutions have been gripped by such an ancient and retrograde prejudice as anti-Semitism? How is it that institutions that have been suppressing free speech for years suddenly discovered the First Amendment as a reason not to condemn terrorism or to stop Jewish students from being bullied and harassed? How is it that university leaders who have waded into every political issue of the day suddenly felt bound by institutional neutrality when it came to the murder of children? How is it that bureaucracies devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion turned a blind eye to the targeting the Jewish students and, in some cases, even contributed to that hostile environment?

Yes, this is a moment of reckoning. Our universities cost too much, their degrees deliver too little value, and they have become among the most intolerant places in American life. This is a time to rediscover the purpose of higher education so that our universities are once again leading lights in American life, are national assets, are places of community and belonging and truly higher learning.

Tonight, I would like to take a moment to suggest a path forward by identifying 10 principles for a fundamental cultural change at our universities. I want to say first that this is a process, a conversation, that should be taking place at universities themselves with alumni, with students, with faculty, with administration, with all stakeholders.

Congress does have a role to play. The Education and the Workforce Committee has already announced a congressional investigation into the three universities that we heard from last week and others about their failure to adequately address anti-Semitism on campus.

In a broader sense, Congress has a role to play because of the large amounts of Federal funding that go to even private institutions. The founder of OpenTheBooks reported that Harvard and Penn are now more Federal contractor than educator, collecting more on government contracts and grants than undergraduate student tuition. The group discovered that between 2018 and 2022, Harvard received $3.13 billion in total Federal payments, which includes Federal grants and contracts, while Penn received $4.38 billion in payments.

Yes, Congress has a clear interest in what is happening at our universities and not just from the perspective of oversight of our funds but also because universities are incubators for our broader culture.

So many of the problems in our country today--censorship, the explosion of DEI, a redefinition of merit as something unaligned with excellence or even at odds with it--had their origins on campus, which brings us back to the present crisis of anti-Semitism.

By now, the world has seen the shocking testimony of President Gay and her counterparts at Penn and MIT, refusing to condemn a call for genocide against the Jewish people as a violation of campus policies.

Even prior to that testimony, over the last 2 months, President Gay's inaction created an environment on Harvard's campus where at the time of our hearing, she could not even say if Jewish students will feel safe and welcome. I asked her that several times, and she refused to answer: Could you look the family of a prospective Jewish student in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter would feel safe and welcome on your campus? She refused to even answer the question.

In the aftermath of October 7, President Gay's carefully parsed statements, her silence, her Orwellian use of the passive voice, made it very clear that she sees the forces of anti-Semitism as a constituency that needs to be catered to--that sends a signal on her campus. It sends a signal that was clearly received by the forces of anti-Semitism on her campus, that reverberated across American higher education and seeped into our broader culture.

We can't simply say that this problem has only taken hold in the last couple of months. The reality is that anti-Semitism has been growing on college campuses and prior to October 7 had reached an all-time high. Many have been speaking about this issue with a growing sense of alarm.

For me, the extent of the problem, and the extent to which the universities themselves are serving to exacerbate the problem, really hit home for me in early 2020 when California released a proposed ethnic studies curriculum. This was a 550-page curriculum that was designed by ethnic studies leaders from various school districts and universities appointed by the State's board of education. It received support from 22 California State ethnic studies departments and education leaders throughout the State.

The curriculum was broadly, universally condemned on both sides of the aisle, from people of all points of view. Indeed, Governor Gavin Newsom said at the time that it was offensive in so many ways and would never see the light of day. Among the problems with the curriculum, the biggest, the most deeply problematic, was the many instances of anti- Semitism.

This is what was written by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, a group of legislators in our State legislature, in response to the proposed curriculum. They wrote that the curriculum: Erases the American Jewish experience, fails to discuss anti-Semitism, reinforces negative stereotypes about Jews, singles out Israel for criticism, and would institutionalize the teaching of anti-Semitic stereotypes in our public schools.

The letter goes on: Jews are essentially excluded from the curriculum. We have been advised that this exclusion appeared to be intentional and reflected the political bias of the drafters. They called it deeply insulting, fundamentally inconsistent with the purposes of ethnic studies, harmful to Jewish and non-Jewish students, and indicative of an anti-Jewish bias in the curriculum that would be dangerous to institutionalize.

The letter goes on: In the few instances where the curriculum acknowledges Jews, it does so in a denigrating and discriminatory manner. For example, it recommends song lyrics that inappropriately delve into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a strong bias and little nuance. The curriculum asserts that Israelis ``use the press so they can manufacture'' a classic anti-Semitic trope about Jewish control of the media.

The letter states: It is difficult to fathom why the State of California would want to actively promote a narrative about Jews that echoes the propaganda of the Nazi regime.

This was a few years ago where you had a panel of university leaders proposing, at the behest of the California State legislature, a curriculum that, by the way, was going to be a graduation requirement for every high school student in the country, and the State's own Legislative Jewish Caucus said that it echoes the propaganda of the Nazi regime.

This has been a problem growing at our universities for some time, and the failures of President Claudine Gay the last 2 months, and her shocking testimony at our hearing last week, simply put the deeply anti-Semitic currents in our universities on stark display.

Now, at the same time that we have seen this rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses, there have been many other deeply troubling trends. Indeed, what made President Gay's tolerance for anti-Semitism all the more morally abhorrent was that this was coming from a president whose university ranked dead last, 248 out of 248, in free speech rankings released earlier this year. Yet, here she was at our committee hearing talking about her university's ``commitment'' to free expression.

The rankings that found Harvard to have come in dead last--in fact, Harvard got the worst score in the history of the rankings--cited surveys of Harvard students where just over a quarter of students reported that they are comfortable publicly disagreeing with their professor on a controversial political topic--just over a quarter comfortable disagreeing with a professor on a political topic. Only a third of students said it is very or extremely clear the administration protects free speech on campus. Even 30 percent said using violence to stop a campus speech is at least acceptable on some occasions. Truly shocking statistics.

These problems have both been getting worse. As anti-Semitism has risen, so has the suppression of free speech. Indeed, even President Obama, several years ago, spoke about this issue. In 2016, Obama said: There has been a trend around the country of trying to get colleges to disinvite speakers with a different point of view or disrupt a politician's rally. Don't do that, Obama said, no matter how ridiculous or offensive you might find the things that come out of their mouths. There will be times when you shouldn't contradict your core values, your integrity, and you will have the responsibility to speak up in the face of injustice. But listen. Engage. If the other side has a point, learn from them. If they are wrong, rebut them. Teach them. Beat them on the battlefield of ideas. That is what President Obama said in 2016.

That same year, the head of the University of California, Janet Napolitano, discussed this in an editorial where she wrote that the sanctity of free speech in our country is hardly guaranteed, at least not on our college campuses. Napolitano, by the way, was a member of President Obama's cabinet and the Democrat Governor of Arizona.

She went on to warn how far we have moved from freedom of speech on campuses to freedom from speech. She said we have moved from freedom of speech on campuses to freedom from speech.

Indeed, the rise of anti-Semitism and the suppression of free speech on college campuses has gone hand in hand. I saw the degree of this when I was a State legislator and proposed the Free Speech on Campus Act. That legislation got support from dozens of Jewish-American groups who had seen how the suppression of free speech was used to exclude people, to shut down speakers who represented their point of view or were of their background.

In fact, earlier this year, we saw California university student groups actually say they were not going to allow speakers based upon their views on the State of Israel.

This is a very important point. It is the same university culture that has given us speech code, safe spaces, microaggressions, bias reporting systems, and all of the other threats to free speech and free inquiry that we see on campus today. That same university culture has also given us widespread prejudice of a kind we never would have expected to see in America in the 21st century.

Something has gone terribly wrong with higher education in this country. There is a particular culture in higher education that is in many ways detached from reality, a world unto itself, divorced from the norms of frankly either political party, as we saw in the bipartisan condemnation of the university presidents last week, or even basic American institutions.

Now is the time to uproot that culture and to reform higher education in America, to return our universities to their guiding purposes. Figuring out the path forward is going to take a lot of different perspectives.

I want to list, very briefly, 10 basic principles that I think can guide that process. If pursued in earnest, it can return our universities to being national assets rather than institutions that are accelerating our country's decline.

The first principle, of course, is a commitment to freedom of speech. This should be codified in a statement like the University of Chicago's. It should be aligned with the principles of the First Amendment with narrowly defined exceptions, as the Supreme Court has defined. Importantly, one of those exceptions is bullying and genuine harassment.

A second guiding principle is academic freedom so that students and professors alike do not have to fear negative repercussions based upon the type of research they choose to undertake or the points of view that they choose to express.

A third principle is institutional neutrality. Fareed Zakaria, in a widely shared clip from CNN, has said: ``The American public has been losing faith in these universities for good reason.'' He said there has been a ``broad shift'' as universities have gone from ``being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas.''

Universities themselves should not be political actors but rather should be forums where ideas can be debated and discussed and where students can be exposed to a wide variety of views and come to their own conclusions.

A fourth guiding principle is upending the DEI bureaucracy, which has given us safe spaces and trigger warnings. It has taught students to look at each other through the lens of distrust, which has bred hate and division and taught students to hate our country.

A recent op-ed in The Washington Post by Danielle Allen said this: ``I was one of three co-chairs of Harvard's Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which in 2018 delivered a strategic framework for the campus.'' She said, ``Many are chalking up current controversies to diversity, equity, and inclusion work, and the task force's report was a contribution to that field broadly understood.'' But, she said, ``Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense.''

A fifth guiding principle is to allow for ideological diversity among administrators, students, and faculty. One report showed that 1 percent of Harvard professors identify as conservative. That is not a healthy environment for the flourishing of a free exchange of ideas.

A sixth guiding principle is eliminating foreign influence at our universities so that our universities are not being funded by China and other adversaries of the United States.

A seventh guiding principle is to return to core and real academic disciplines and to get rid of those that do not have any academic value or merit or adhere to the traditional norms of scholarship. This would include redefining core curriculums in such a way that students have a common set of knowledge that they come out of universities with.

An eighth guiding principle is to revive trade schools and the teaching of practical skills, crafts, and professions at our universities as well as, by the way, in our secondary and primary schools. This is so every student doesn't feel like they have to go to university in order to get the skills and qualifications to get a good- paying job.

A ninth guiding principle is to make our universities more affordable so that tuition does not continue to skyrocket in a way that the Federal Government has fueled and so that students are not left hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt in some cases.

A final principle, which in many ways encapsulates all the others, is to return to excellence as the real, true, overarching guiding principle of our universities--excellence in all of its forms.

This would mean getting rid of grade inflation. It would mean revisiting admissions standards. It would mean restoring standardized tests, which have given people from all walks of life an opportunity to choose their excellence. It would mean having a culture of debate and discussion on campus where the better idea wins, and each student can make that decision for themselves.

If our universities truly come to value excellence again, then that will be the characteristic of their graduates and the future leadership of our country, as well.

This is a moment of reckoning in higher education. It is a moment to rediscover the purpose of a university as a center for research, as a place to explore cutting-edge ideas, and as a place to prepare young people for the task of citizenship, which goes to the heart of what our country is all about, this great experiment that our Founders started in self-government.

Rethinking our institutions of education and higher learning is going to be vital to making sure that that experiment continues to flourish in the years and decades ahead.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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