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      A Stanford Student Mocked the Federalist Society. It Jeopardized His Graduation.

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      The Stanford student sent a satirical flier that drew a complaint from the conservative group. The university then placed a hold on his diploma.It was the final day of classes at Stanford Law School, May 27, when Nicholas Wallace said he was blindsided by a message from one of the deans informing him that his graduation was in jeopardy for potential misconduct.His offense: sending an email flier to fellow law students in January that he pretended was from the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative and libertarian group with a chapter at the law school.The satirical flier promoted a discussion about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, featuring Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The title of the mock event: “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”The chapter’s leaders were not amused. They filed a complaint on March 27 with the university, which said in a message to Mr. Wallace that it wasn’t until May 22 that the complainants had asked the administration to pursue the matter.“I was astounded,” Mr. Wallace, 32, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe that without any more than this letter of concern they placed my graduation and everything I’ve worked for for the last three years, they’ve placed that under threat.”Mr. Wallace’s predicament drew national attention from both free speech groups and conservatives. It served as another example of the intense debate over political speech on college campuses in America.In response to questions on Wednesday, a spokesman for Stanford University said in an email that Mr. Wallace would be allowed to graduate after all after administrators consulted with the university’s legal counsel, who concluded the matter involved issues of protected speech.“In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent,” said the spokesman, E.J. Miranda. “The complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible, and the respondent and complainant have been informed that case law supports that the email is protected speech.”Mr. Miranda said that the university would also review its procedures for placing holds on student diplomas in judicial cases close to graduation.The president of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday night.Mr. Hawley, who received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, was widely criticized for objecting to the certification of the presidential election results. Mr. Paxton has drawn scrutiny for his appearance at a rally in support of Donald J. Trump in Washington on the day of the siege.Representatives for Mr. Hawley and Mr. Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday night.Grabbing attention itself was Mr. Wallace’s satirical flier, which he said he had emailed to a Listserv forum for law school students on Jan. 25, nearly three weeks after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.The flier said that the event was being presented by the Federalist Society on Jan. 6.“Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,” the flier said, offering Grubhub coupons to the first 30 students who R.S.V.P.’d for the fictitious program. “Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”Two days after the satirical flier was sent by Mr. Wallace, it was the focus of a fact check article by USA Today, which reported that the email was a form of satire.In a complaint to the university, unidentified officers of the Federalist Society chapter said that Mr. Wallace’s email had caused significant harm and had led other organizations to cancel their events with the group.“Wallace defamed the student group, its officers, Senator Josh Hawley, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,” the complaint said. “Wallace, impersonating the Stanford Federalist Society, wrote on the flyer that ‘Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,’ insinuating that the student group was encouraging and hosting a riot. He also wrote that Attorney General Paxton advocates for ‘overturn[ing] the results of a free and fair election’ by ‘calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol.’ And he wrote that Senator Hawley believes that violent insurrections are justified.”The names of the complainants were redacted from the complaint, which was posted online on Monday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group working to defend free speech on college campuses. Mr. Wallace had sought the group’s help.“By instituting an investigation and placing a hold on Wallace’s degree days before his graduation, Stanford betrays its legal and moral commitments to respect its students’ expressive rights,” the group said in a letter on Tuesday to one of the law school’s deans.The flap drew the notice of Slate magazine. The writer of that article, Mark Joseph Stern, was the featured speaker in a conversation about the Federalist Society that Mr. Wallace said he had organized about a month after he sent the satirical email.Mr. Wallace’s cause was also taken up by Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University.“Mocking an ideologically-based group can’t be made a basis for denying academic privileges in any open society worthy of respect,” Mr. Tribe wrote on Twitter. “If accurate, this report shows Stanford Law School to be unworthy of treatment as an academic institution.”George T. Conway III, one of the founders of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, also rallied behind Mr. Wallace.“As someone who been involved with the Federalist Society for over 35 years, I agree that this is totally ridiculous,” Mr. Conway said on Twitter, responding to Mr. Tribe.Mr. Wallace, who is from Ann Arbor, Mich., and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, said that he is supposed to take the bar exam this summer in his home state and then start a job with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C.He said that he would not have been able to take the bar exam without his law school diploma, which he will receive on June 12. More

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      What’s in Biden’s Spending Plan: Free Preschool and National Paid Leave

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      President Biden’s latest proposal is funded by raising taxes on wealthier Americans, and it is likely to encounter Republican resistance for that reason.WASHINGTON — President Biden’s $1.8 trillion spending and tax plan is aimed at bolstering the United States’ social safety net by expanding access to education, reducing the cost of child care and supporting women in the work force.Like the $2 trillion infrastructure plan that preceded it, Mr. Biden’s latest proposal is funded by raising taxes on wealthier Americans, and it is likely to encounter Republican resistance for that reason.Here’s a look at parts of the president’s spending proposal:Free Pre-K and Community CollegeMr. Biden’s plan promises universal free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds, as well as two years of free community college for young adults.The plan outlines a $200 billion investment in free universal preschool and another $109 billion over 10 years to make two years of community college free. On top of that, the president is proposing an $85 billion investment in Pell grants, vouchers that low- and moderate-income students use to pay for tuition, fees, books, room and board.The universal free preschool includes children from affluent families. That follows a model that cities like Washington and New York City have used, but some education experts favor programs targeted to helping low-income children.Experts call the plan to fund college education the “biggest expansion in federal support for higher education in at least half a century.”Even though it is broadly popular, free college across 50 states with unique systems and tuition costs, is complicated to carry out. The Biden plan would require states to eliminate tuition for community colleges to receive funding.The president’s pitch is that a high school diploma is no longer enough to ensure success and that making a federal investment in education will increase earnings long term. During the pandemic, unemployed workers without college credentials are having a much harder time finding jobs.Funding for Historically Black Colleges and UniversitiesMr. Biden’s proposal singles out historically Black colleges and universities, known as H.B.C.U.s, as well as institutions that serve members of Native American tribes and other minority groups, for specific funding.Addressing racial equity is a theme that runs through Mr. Biden’s agenda, and the 15-page memo outlining his spending plans notes the extent to which historically Black colleges and universities outperform. While they account for only 3 percent of four-year universities, their graduates account for 80 percent of Black judges and half of Black lawyers and doctors. (Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to hold the role, is a graduate of Howard University.)Students and alumni gathering at Howard University to celebrate Vice President Kamala Harris’s victory last November.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressMr. Biden’s plan calls for $39 billion over the next decade to fund two years of subsidized tuition for students from families earning less than $125,000 enrolled in a four-year program at H.B.C.U.s, or institutions that serve members of Native American tribes or other minority groups.During the 2020 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden promised to invest more than $70 billion in such schools, including $20 billion to build research facilities on their campuses.Affordable Child CareMr. Biden’s plan seeks to invest $225 billion to make child care more affordable and allow parents to stay in the labor force and work outside their homes.The plan would give child care providers funding to maintain small class sizes and classrooms that can help children with disabilities. It would also cover all child care costs for working families who are struggling. Administration officials did not say exactly who would qualify to have all child care costs covered, only that it would be a sliding scaled based on earnings compared with the state’s median income. Under the plan, families earning 1.5 times their state median income would pay no more than 7 percent of their income for child care.The plan also seeks to increase wages of early child care providers, who are by and large women of color who currently earn about $12.24 an hour without any benefits. Mr. Biden’s plan would include a $15 minimum wage for early childhood staff.National Paid LeaveMr. Biden is proposing a $225 billion investment over 10 years to cover a nationally mandated 12 weeks of paid parental, family and personal illness leave. The program seeks to provide workers up to $4,000 a month in paid leave, rising to 80 percent for the lowest wage workers.President Donald J. Trump also called for paid family leave in his State of the Union address last year, the first Republican president to take up what has long been a popular Democratic cause.In contrast to Mr. Biden’s approach, the Republican-backed proposal only covered leave for parents of babies or newly adopted children under 6, excluding care for sick family members or leave for personal medical problems. It also did not propose a new source of funding to pay for it. Instead, people could dip into their own future federal benefits, and receive smaller benefits later.NutritionMr. Biden’s plan proposes $45 billion over the next 10 years to combat food insecurity among children.The program would make permanent a summer food program that allows families eligible for free and reduced-price meals during the school year access to meals during the summer at the same rates. Mr. Biden’s plan allocates more than $25 billion to make the program permanent and available to all 29 million children who receive free and reduced-priced meals.The plan also includes $17 billion to expand healthy school meals at high-poverty schools. The proposals would provide free meals to an additional 9.3 million children, about 70 percent of whom are in elementary school. More

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      After Capitol Riots, Billionaire’s ‘Scholars’ Confront Their Benefactor

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAfter Capitol Riots, Billionaire’s ‘Scholars’ Confront Their BenefactorMore than 160 participants in a master’s program funded by the Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman have urged him to stop donating to election objectors. He has declined.Stephen Schwarzman opened his namesake program at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2016.Credit…Getty ImagesFeb. 18, 2021Updated 1:33 p.m. ETThe private equity billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman has spent many years financing educational programs, from his old high school to the Ivy League.But the Blackstone chief executive’s largess hasn’t always bought good will: There was swift opposition to his proposal to put his name on Abington Senior High School in Pennsylvania, and his close ties to former President Donald J. Trump contributed to opposition to having his name on a campus center he funded at Yale.And now, some participants in the Schwarzman Scholars program — a master’s course he established at Tsinghua University in Beijing to be a Chinese analogue to the Rhodes Scholarships — are speaking out against their benefactor.They say Mr. Schwarzman is failing to live up to his own values and harming the program’s reputation by not cutting off money to lawmakers who opposed certifying President Biden’s electoral victory.In a letter emailed to Mr. Schwarzman on Feb. 10, 161 current and past Schwarzman Scholars and two program professors urged Mr. Schwarzman to cut off those politicians and groups. “You espoused integrity, honesty and courage,” they wrote. “Now, we ask that you demonstrate those values by refusing to financially support those who would overturn the results of a free and fair election for their own political gain.”About an hour later, Mr. Schwarzman — who with his wife was the third-largest donor to the objecting lawmakers, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics — refused.Although the election certification vote would be “one of the major factors” in determining whom he supported in the future, Mr. Schwarzman wrote, “I value my constitutional right to carefully determine who I vote for and support.”The rift centers on one of Mr. Schwarzman’s fondest achievements, a one-year graduate program started with a $100 million donation from him and augmented with $450 million he raised from others. Up to 200 students take part each year, living and learning in a building designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects — called Schwarzman College — with coursework focused on Chinese history, leadership and global affairs.Mr. Schwarzman and his wife, Christine, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018 for the Met Gala.Credit…Justin Lane/EPA, via ShutterstockBut some of the letter’s signers have begun to question whether having “Schwarzman Scholar” on their résumé is as much a risk as it is a benefit.“I feel like I cannot in good conscience allow my name to be associated with someone who refuses to commit not to donate to such people,” said Alistair Kitchen, a program alumnus who helped organize support for the letter.Mr. Kitchen, 29, an Australian who works in New York for Collective Impact, a strategy firm that focuses on progressive causes, said some scholars felt their association with the program could taint them, even as it burnished Mr. Schwarzman’s legacy, which Mr. Kitchen called a form a “reputation laundering.”For Ashlie Koehn, who had worked her way through the University of Kansas and joined the Kansas Air National Guard before becoming a Schwarzman Scholar, the program was a revelation — the first time she’d been able to focus on academics and not cost. But she said Mr. Schwarzman seemed not to understand the extent of his influence.“He has this self-perception of himself as an average American citizen, which he is in some ways,” said Ms. Koehn, 30, who works in state government. “But I think it disregards the fact that he has this outsized capital, and his donations give him an outsize impact.”A quarter of the more than 600 students who have participated in the program since 2016 signed the letter, including 18 anonymously. Some scholars supported the letter, organizers said, but feared repercussions in their professional lives if they signed.Others had different reasons for declining. Charles Vitry, a London-based alumnus of the program’s 2018 class, did not sign, although he said he “respected and appreciated the principles” of those who did. He said he also saw a need for “a broader community space to discuss challenging issues.”A spokesman for Mr. Schwarzman noted that the program had started in 2013 — “long before the 2016 election” — and that Mr. Schwarzman had supported congressional Republicans across the board in 2019 at the recommendation of G.O.P. leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. “The majority of candidates Steve donated to voted to certify the results — as Steve had repeatedly called for,” said the spokesman, Matt Anderson.A spokeswoman for the Schwarzman Scholars program, Ellie Gottdenker, said in a statement that the program “remains true to its global mission and reputation as a world-class bridge for mutual understanding between China and the rest of the world.”The Schwarzman Scholars building at Tsinghua University.Credit…Getty ImagesThis is not the first time that Mr. Schwarzman has made a foray into educational philanthropy and faced opposition from those who benefit. Nor is it the first time that the opposition stemmed from his political positions.After Mr. Schwarzman donated $150 million to Yale, his alma mater, in 2015 to construct a building for events and informal gatherings to be named the Schwarzman Center, some professors and students complained about Blackstone’s business practices and his ties to Mr. Trump.In 2018, he pledged $350 million to build a new computer science center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also to be named after him, which drew opposition on similar grounds.The same year, he pledged $25 million to help upgrade the high school he attended in suburban Philadelphia, which agreed to add his name to its own. The proposal set off an immediate backlash, and Mr. Schwarzman and the school quickly shifted course to name only a new science and technology building after him.The friction with the Schwarzman Scholars started almost immediately after the program welcomed its first class in 2016.A portrait of Mr. Schwarzman in the program’s facilities in Beijing.Credit…Getty ImagesSoon after the election, Mr. Schwarzman agreed to lead a business advisory council that made him one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent associates. After Mr. Trump introduced a travel and immigration prohibition aimed at people from predominantly Muslim countries, Mr. Schwarzman received sharp questions from the scholars on a video chat, according to one attendee. He argued that it was important to take a broad view and focus on common ground rather than on differences, the person recalled.Then came the 2020 election, and Mr. Schwarzman’s reaction to the outcome felt like equivocation to some members of the program.On a call with business leaders as votes in battleground states were still being counted, Mr. Schwarzman said he was sympathetic to voters who were skeptical of the counts. Later in the month, he said that the outcome was “very certain” and that Mr. Biden had his full support.When rioters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Schwarzman condemned their actions as an “insurrection” and “an affront to the democratic values we hold dear” in a statement to Blackstone employees and Schwarzman Scholars.But as a number of businesses and trade organizations were announcing that they would withdraw financial support from those who opposed certification of the election, at least two alumni wrote to Mr. Schwarzman raising concerns about his financial support of the objectors; they said he did not reply.Frustrated scholars began discussing a group letter. Mr. Kitchen and his former classmate Ricky Altieri, a 28-year-old Yale law student, circulated drafts over WeChat, text and Signal and eventually settled on a five-paragraph note. It asked that Mr. Schwarzman commit never to donate to any politician or political group that “supported Mr. Trump’s bid to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.”“We believe that donations to such candidates would violate the most basic principles of Schwarzman Scholars and harm its reputation,” the letter said.In his reply, which immediately made its way among current and former scholars, Mr. Schwarzman pushed back, writing that he had publicly supported the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. Although the large number of objectors left him disappointed and confused, he said, they were “acting legally under the Constitution.”He added, “It is important in a democracy to continue to rely on our constitutional system and not voluntarily agree to be silenced.”Some of the scholars seemed to agree — and cited the program’s influence as one reason.Jacko Walz, 25, a New York-based strategy consultant focused on international development in Latin America, said the program had enhanced his awareness of the world around him and taught him about leadership and moral courage.“I think those topics are really authentically taught there,” Mr. Walz said. “And now that I’ve graduated I hope to practice them all the time.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      'Hateful' Tweet About Stacey Abrams Costs UT-Chattanooga Football Coach His Job

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      95 Percent of Representatives Have a Degree. Look Where That’s Got Us.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main story95 Percent of Representatives Have a Degree. Look Where That’s Got Us.All these credentials haven’t led to better results.Opinion columnistDec. 21, 2020Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesOver the last few decades, Congress has diversified in important ways. It has gotten less white, less male, less straight — all positive developments. But as I was staring at one of the many recent Senate hearings, filled with the usual magisterial blustering and self-important yada yada, it dawned on me that there’s a way that Congress has moved in a wrong direction, and become quite brazenly unrepresentative.No, it’s not that the place seethes with millionaires, though there’s that problem too.It’s that members of Congress are credentialed out the wazoo. An astonishing number have a small kite of extra initials fluttering after their names.According to the Congressional Research Service, more than one third of the House and more than half the Senate have law degrees. Roughly a fifth of senators and representatives have their master’s. Four senators and 21 House members have MDs, and an identical number in each body (four, twenty-one) have some kind of doctoral degree, whether it’s a Ph.D., a D.Phil., an Ed.D., or a D. Min.But perhaps most fundamentally, 95 percent of today’s House members have a bachelor’s degree, as does every member of the Senate. Yet just a bit more than one-third of Americans do.“This means that the credentialed few govern the uncredentialed many,” writes the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel in “The Tyranny of Merit,” published this fall.There’s an argument to be made that we should want our representatives to be a highly lettered lot. Lots of people have made it, as far back as Plato.The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between good governance and educational attainment that Sandel can discern. In the 1960s, he noted, we got the Vietnam War thanks to “the best and the brightest” — it’s been so long since the publication of David Halberstam’s book that people forget the title was morbidly ironic. In the 1990s and 2000s, the highly credentialed gave us (and here Sandel paused for a deep breath) “stagnant wages, financial deregulation, income inequality, the financial crisis of 2008, a bank bailout that did little to help ordinary people, a decaying infrastructure, and the highest incarceration rate in the world.”Five years ago, Nicholas Carnes, a political scientist at Duke, tried to measure whether more formal education made political leaders better at their jobs. After conducting a sweeping review of 228 countries between the years 1875 and 2004, he and a colleague concluded: No. It did not. A college education did not mean less inequality, a greater G.D.P., fewer labor strikes, lower unemployment or less military conflict.Sandel argues that the technocratic elite’s slow annexation of Congress and European parliaments — which resulted in the rather fateful decisions to outsource jobs and deregulate finance — helped enable the populist revolts now rippling through the West. “It distorted our priorities,” Sandel told me, “and made for a political class that’s too tolerant of crony capitalism and much less attentive to fundamental questions of the dignity of work.”Both parties are to blame for this. But it was Democrats, Sandel wrote, who seemed especially bullish on the virtues of the meritocracy, arguing that college would be the road to prosperity for the struggling. And it’s a fine idea, well-intentioned, idealistic at its core. But implicit in it is also a punishing notion: If you don’t succeed, you have only yourself to blame. Which President Trump spotted in a trice.“Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who spoke constantly of ‘opportunity’” Sandel wrote, “Trump scarcely mentioned the word. Instead, he offered blunt talk of winners and losers.”Trump was equally blunt after winning the Nevada Republican caucuses in 2016. “I love the poorly educated!” he shouted.A pair of studies from 2019 also tell the story, in numbers, of the professionalization of the Democratic Party — or what Sandel calls “the valorization of credentialism.” One, from Politico, shows that House and Senate Democrats are much more likely to have gone to private liberal arts colleges than public universities, whereas the reverse is true of their Republican counterparts; another shows that congressional Democrats are far more likely to hire graduates of Ivy League schools.This class bias made whites without college degrees ripe for Republican recruitment. In both 2016 and 2020, two thirds of them voted for Trump; though the G.O.P. is the minority party in the House, more Republican members than Democrats currently do not have college degrees. All 11 are male. Most of them come from the deindustrialized Midwest and South.Oh, and in the incoming Congress? Six of the seven new members without four-year college degrees are Republicans.Of course, far darker forces help explain the lures of the modern G.O.P. You’d have to be blind and deaf not to detect them. For decades, Republicans have appealed both cynically and in earnest — it’s hard to know which is more appalling — to racial and ethnic resentments, if not hatred. There’s a reason that the Black working class isn’t defecting to the Republican Party in droves. (Of the nine Democrats in the House without college degrees, seven, it’s worth noting, are people of color.)For now, it seems to matter little that Republicans have offered little by way of policy to restore the dignity of work. They’ve tapped into a gusher of resentment, and they seem delighted to channel it, irrespective of where, or if, they got their diplomas. Ted Cruz, quite arguably the Senate’s most insolent snob — he wouldn’t sit in a study group at Harvard Law with anyone who hadn’t graduated from Princeton, Yale or Harvard — was ready to argue on Trump’s behalf to overturn the 2020 election results, should the disgraceful Texas attorney general’s case have reached the Supreme Court.Which raises a provocative question. Given that Trumpism has found purchase among graduates of Harvard Law, would it make any difference if Congress better reflected the United States and had more members without college degrees? Would it meaningfully alter policy at all?It would likely depend on where they came from. I keep thinking of what Rep. Al Green, Democrat of Texas, told me. His father was a mechanic’s assistant in the segregated South. The white men he worked for cruelly called him “The Secretary” because he could neither read nor write. “So if my father had been elected? You’d have a different Congress,” Green said. “But if it’d been the people who he served — the mechanics who gave him a pejorative moniker? We’d probably have the Congress we have now.”It’s hard to say whether more socioeconomic diversity would guarantee differences in policy or efficiency. But it could do something more subtle: Rebuild public trust.“There are people who look at Congress and see the political class as a closed system,” Carnes told me. “My guess is that if Congress looked more like people do as a whole, the cynical view — Oh, they’re all in their ivory tower, they don’t care about us — would get less oxygen.”When I spoke to Representative Troy Balderson, a Republican from Ohio, he agreed, adding that if more members of Congress didn’t have four-year college degrees, it would erode some stigma associated with not having one.“When I talk to high school kids and say, ‘I didn’t finish my degree,’ their faces light up,” he told me. Balderson tried college and loved it, but knew he wasn’t cut out for it. He eventually moved back to his hometown to run his family car dealership. Students tend to find his story emboldening. The mere mention of four-year college sets off panic in many of them; they’ve been stereotyped before they even grow up, out of the game before it even starts. “If you don’t have a college degree,” he explains, “you’re a has-been.” Then they look at him and see larger possibilities. That they can be someone’s voice. “You can become a member of Congress.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Student Loan Cancellation Sets Up Clash Between Biden and the Left

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStudent Loan Cancellation Sets Up Clash Between Biden and the LeftDemocratic leaders are pressing the president-elect to cancel $50,000 in debt per student borrower by fast executive action, but he wants Congress to pass more modest relief.Marquette University in Milwaukee last month. Student debt has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages.Credit…Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesErica L. Green, Luke Broadwater and Dec. 10, 2020Updated 7:09 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is facing pressure from congressional Democrats to cancel student loan debt on a vast scale, quickly and by executive action, a campaign that will be one of the first tests of his relationship with the liberal wing of his party.Mr. Biden has endorsed canceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation, and insisted that chipping away at the $1.7 trillion in loan debt held by more than 43 million borrowers is integral to his economic plan. But Democratic leaders, backed by the party’s left flank, are pressing for up to $50,000 of debt relief per borrower, executed on Day 1 of his presidency.More than 200 organizations — including the American Federation of Teachers, the N.A.A.C.P. and others that were integral to his campaign — have joined the push.The Education Department is effectively the country’s largest consumer bank and the primary lender, since 2010, for higher education. It owns student loans totaling $1.4 trillion, so forgiveness of some of that debt would be a rapid injection of cash into the pockets of many people suffering from the economic effects of the pandemic.“There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If we don’t deliver quick relief, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back.”Many economists, including liberals, say higher education debt forgiveness is an inefficient way to help struggling Americans who face foreclosure, evictions and hunger. The working poor largely are not college graduates — more than 70 percent of currently unemployed workers do not have a bachelor’s degree, and 43 percent did not attend college at all, according to a report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.While many Black students would benefit greatly from even modest loan forgiveness, debt relief overall would disproportionately benefit middle- to upper-class college graduates of all colors and ethnicities, especially those who attended elite and expensive institutions, and people with lucrative professional credentials like law and medical degrees.An October analysis by the Brookings Institution found that almost 60 percent of America’s educational debt is owed by households in the nation’s top 40 percent of earners, with an annual income of $74,000 or more.People who go to college “are often from more advantaged backgrounds, and they end up doing very well in the labor market,” said Adam Looney, a former Treasury official who helped write the analysis.Without a parallel effort to curb tuition growth, one-time debt relief could actually lead to more higher-education debt in the future as students take on larger loans, hoping the government would at some point wipe them clean, a “moral hazard” that often accompanies one-time interventions. And it would be expensive: Canceling even $10,000 per person in debt would eliminate more than $400 billion in government assets, although calculating the true cost to the Treasury is tricky because of student loans’ long repayment time and high default rate.Mr. Looney said that canceling $50,000, at a projected cost of $1 trillion, would be “among the largest transfer programs in American history,” on par with decades of targeted spending on programs that exclusively benefit low-income families, such as the $992 billion spent on federal Pell grants since 1972 and the $1.4 trillion spent on welfare since 1975.If debt relief overall would disproportionately flow to better-off Americans, even modest debt forgiveness would help many financially vulnerable people, especially people of color. Student debt load has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed both credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages, and much of it falls on Black graduates, who owe an average of $7,400 more than their white peers at the time they leave school. Black borrowers also default at higher rates.College dropouts, especially those who attended for-profit schools, often end up trapped by debt they cannot afford to repay.“In this moment of national reckoning on racial injustice, the president-elect must cancel all federal student debt on Day 1 of his administration,” Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “The president-elect must meet the moment. If he fails to, we will hold him accountable.”An economic working paper published by the Roosevelt Institute casts debt forgiveness explicitly in racial-justice terms. The total percentage of Black households that would benefit would be greater than white households, and the relative gains for those households’ net worth are far larger, the researchers found. The greatest marginal gains come from canceling the smallest debts; wiping out $20,000 would end student debt for half of all households with loans.Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a joint op-ed last week that $50,000 debt cancellations would give “Black and brown families across the country a far better shot at building financial security” and would be the “single most effective executive action available to provide massive stimulus to our economy.”To truly break the debt cycle, though, forgiveness would need to be paired with policy changes addressing the underlying cause of America’s skyrocketing student debt: affordability, an issue Democrats have tried to address.“The real problem is the cost of higher education,” said Betsy Mayotte, the president and founder of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors. “Unless you’re going to solve the problem, forgiveness is just throwing away money.”Mr. Biden’s campaign platform proposed making public universities tuition-free for families making less than $125,000 a year.“The virus epidemic has accelerated some of the trends that are strangling public higher education,” said Louise Seamster of the University of Iowa and a co-author of the Roosevelt Institute paper. She said a momentous move like debt forgiveness could spur “new ways of thinking.”“A lot of the debate has gotten stale because we’ve been limited in thinking about the fixes,” she said.Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have pushed for up to $50,000 in debt cancellation.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBut student debt forgiveness could have serious political implications. In 2009, relief extended by President Barack Obama to homeowners with houses suddenly worth less than their mortgages was the original spark for the Tea Party movement, driven by people who fastidiously paid their home loans and felt left out. The dynamic would almost certainly repeat itself as earlier and later borrowers wondered why they had to pay off their loans.“I don’t believe any president has the authority to give away hundreds of billions of dollars through the stroke of a pen,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. “And I think doing so is profoundly unfair to the millions of Americans who worked hard to pay down their student debt.”The legal argument for debt cancellation by executive action hinges on a passage in the Higher Education Act of 1965 that gives the education secretary the power to “compromise, waive or release” federal student loan debts. Mr. Schumer and Ms. Warren maintain that Mr. Biden can broadly use that power, and several lawyers have written analyses backing that view.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 10, 2020, 8:48 p.m. ETThe federal investigation into his son is likely to hang over Biden as he takes office.The Trump administration may sharply draw back military support for the C.I.A. in its final weeks.State Department watchdog announces early departure as Pompeo criticizes his office.But former government lawyers have warned that across-the-board forgiveness would face legal challenges from Republicans. And Mr. Biden has never publicly endorsed the idea. Some close to him say he recognizes the risks and consequences of bypassing Congress.There is more consensus that the $10,000 proposal would reach the most vulnerable borrowers, the estimated 15 million who have low debt under $10,000, often because they did not complete their degrees.Some experts argue that Mr. Biden has other, more progressive options for taming student debt, such as improving existing repayment plans that link borrowers’ loan payments to their incomes.The government has struggled to get all borrowers who would benefit from income-linked plans enrolled in them, in part because the loan servicers it hired to work with borrowers and collect their payments have not guided people through the complicated process of getting and staying enrolled.A separate program to forgive the debts of those who work in public-service careers has an even grimmer track record, and a longstanding program to forgive the debts of graduates bilked by their universities — usually for-profit colleges — has been crippled by the Trump administration.The “benefit of outright cancellation is simplicity,” said Eileen Connor, the legal director at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, which represents thousands of students defrauded by their colleges and mired in legal fights with the Education Department over loan forgiveness.“We are facing an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, and we need to use every tool readily available to keep families and the economy afloat,” Ms. Connor said.Mr. Biden has continued to push for the passage of legislation that called for some loan forgiveness, named the Heroes Act, that the House passed in the spring.Student debt holders are “having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent, those kinds of decisions,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference last month.Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House whose endorsement was key to Mr. Biden winning the presidency, said the president-elect should first try legislation. If that fails, Mr. Clyburn argued, Mr. Biden should use an executive order.“I sit here in this Congress because of an executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation. Harry Truman used an executive order to integrate the armed services,” Mr. Clyburn said.“Let them sue,” he added. “They’re not the only ones that can employ lawyers.”Mr. Clyburn, who speaks with Mr. Biden frequently, said in an interview that he did not think that what Mr. Biden proposed during the campaign “goes quite far enough.”Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina said President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. should use an executive order to provide student debt relief if legislation fails.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“I’ve got people with $130,000 in student debt. What’s $10,000 going to do for that person?” asked Mr. Clyburn, whose legislation to eliminate up to $50,000 would completely cancel student debt for 75 percent of borrowers.Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said he hoped the two parties could find common ground on the issue. He introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow employers to contribute up to $5,250 tax-free to their employees’ student loans, which was included as a temporary provision in the coronavirus relief law this spring.“There’s no question that student debt is a problem in this country, but simply forgiving student loans is not the answer,” Mr. Thune said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More