What is Penn doing with the U.S. government money it deposits into its swollen coffers? In September 2023, UPenn helped sponsor the Palestine Writes Festival, which organizers claimis “dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.” However, the event showcased multiple writers deemed antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League, most famously Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, and, initially, poet Refaat Alareer. After the Oct. 7 massacre and reports that at least one baby’s remains were found in an oven, Alareer tweeted “with or without baking powder?”

Just days before Oct. 7, then-UPenn President Liz Magill had refused to move the event off campus. In the eyes of many donors, Magill then failed to sufficiently condemn or even bother to regulate or police ensuing protests that included chants of “from the river to the sea”—a call for the ethnic cleansing of Jewish citizens of Israel—and vandalism of school property. Angered donors include billionaire Cliff Asness, former trustee Vahan Gureghian, and venture capitalist David Magerman. In a letter to Magill, Magerman wrote, “I am deeply ashamed of my association with” the university. “I refuse to donate another dollar.” Investor Steve Eisman went so far as to demand his name be removed from a scholarship, telling CNBC, “I do not want my family’s name associated with [Penn], ever.”

An aide to House Committee on Education and the Workforce chairwoman Virginia Foxx said that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was invited to the hearing, but had declined over a scheduling conflict. Nevertheless, Columbia’s own lightning-rod moments won’t soon be forgotten. Business school assistant professor Shai Davidai gathered students and asked them to record a 10-minute declaration in hopes they would spread it across the globe on social media. He called Shafik a “coward” for allowing pro-Hamas chants and rallies to go unchecked. “Imagine not being able to go to your work because your boss does not value your life, because your boss supports pro-terror organizations,” he said. His message for parents was brutal: “we cannot protect your child.”

Columbia’s five-year, taxpayer-funded haul? $5.8 billion in U.S. taxpayer money—while its endowment swelled to $13.3 billion from $10.5 billion.

That brings us to Harvard. Donor Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, has helped spearhead the revolt of donors and Ivy League parents after dozens of university groups signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas’ barbarism. Through open letters shared with journalists and exhaustive posts on X, Ackman has chronicled antisemitism at Harvard, calling the situation “dire and getting worse.”

Here’s just one example at Harvard: at a so-called “die in,” protesters physically surrounded an Israeli graduate student, blocking his vision and ability to navigate the campus. His fellow students grabbed at him, shoved him, and shouted “shame!”, boxing him in and intimidating him. While reports were filed with the university police department and the FBI, Harvard would not comment on internal disciplinary actions.

Harvard has collected $3.3 billion in federal contracts and grants. With a $50.9 billion endowment, Harvard obviously doesn’t need taxpayer money to coddle discrimination or antisemitism. But then why is it receiving federal money to begin with—not to mention massive federal tax breaks on its endowment?

Following the congressional hearing, multiple UPenn students filed a lawsuitagainst the school for running afoul of civil rights law by failing to apply its code of conduct against anti-Israel agitators, hiring “rabidly antisemitic professors” and ignoring requests for help from Jewish students. Speaking to reporters at the Capitol complex, plaintiff Eyal Yakoby said, “36 hours ago, I along with most of campus, sought refuge in our rooms as classmates and professors chanted proudly for the genocide of Jews while igniting smoke bombs and defacing school property.”

If none of this sounds particularly charitable, there is plenty to be done about it. Currently, these institutions can both fundraise from vast alumni networks while also raking in billions from the government. While donors pad the endowments that ostensibly keep the lights on, prestige-building research is funded to the hilt by taxpayers. But the same body that held this tense hearing also holds America’s purse strings.

In addition to examining the tax-exempt status of institutions that tolerate open antisemitism and other expressions of radical bigotry, House appropriators need to go line by line with a red pen through the $7 billion doled out each year to these 10 wealthy universities. A laundry list of projects are either wasteful, wacky, driven by radical ideology, or all of the above. In 2022, Penn spent over $700,000 studying “structural racism and discrimination in pandemic vaccine allocation.” It spent $2 million of our tax revenue to “support the preservation of cultural heritage sites” of minorities in northern Iraq.

In 2012, Columbia famously spent $5.7 million on fake voicemails from the year 2065, after the world has supposedly been decimated by climate change. Cornell in 2014 took $1 million for a study, “Where It Hurts the Most to Be Stung By a Bee.”

More fundamentally, lawmakers should revisit what it means to be a public charity in the tax code. As others have observed, these wealthy universities are “hedge funds with schools attached.” Why such wealthy institutions should continue to enjoy public sponsorship while incubating discrimination, racism, and antisemitism and advocating on behalf of terrorists seems like a good question for Congress to answer.