This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, May 18th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The First Amendment demands a lot from public universities and notably from Congress as well.

The very purpose of universities demands a lot from all of higher education.

Earlier this week I spoke with Nico Perino, the Foundation for Individual Rights and

Expression, and Neil McCluskey of the Cato Institute. Neil, let me start with you.

After these widespread protests at many universities, many elite universities, public universities as well.

How has Congress decided to insinuate itself into attempting to quell or control or direct the activities of universities.

Well, so Congress has done really is kind of taking two avenues related to campus unrest and the protests over the war in Gaza.

It's really kind of two different things.

So the most concrete thing that it's done in terms of policy making was it passed something called the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act that said when the Department of Education does essentially investigations of colleges and universities

and also K-12 schools, but most of our focus on college and universities, that when it's

trying to determine if there has been an anti-Semitic

act and if there's sort of prevalent anti-Semitism in the school, it can use

this definition of anti-Semitism that is very broad and it has these kind of guidelines

and it's called actually a working definition so it's not even the group that did it, hasn't even solidified it, but it says,

look, we can say there's context to demonstrate anti-Semitism if, for instance,

whoever is involved in an incident may have said something where they hold Israel to a different

standard than they whole other countries.

It opens this huge sort of area in which investigators from the Department of Education can say, yes, we see

anti-Semitism and we can act against a school because they've allowed this and it's very dangerous.

The other thing that they're doing, which may ultimately have more impact

...