A new bill about to be proposed by congress duo Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) would empower the US Department of Education to deploy a "third-party anti-Semitism monitor" to any college in the United States that receives federal funding, according to Axios.
Said monitor would evaluate "the progress that a college or university has made toward combating anti-Semitism," with the results of said evaluations to be released publicly on a quarterly basis.
As Rep. Torres reportedly said in a statement, “countless Jewish students from campuses across America” complained that they “feel deeply unsafe, purely as a result of their religious and ethnic identity."
"Jewish students have told my office that they feel completely abandoned by their university administrators and they view Congress as the only avenue for accountability and safety," he claimed.
The bill is expected to become the first such legislation to be introduced in the US Congress in response to a series of protests against the Gaza War that has rocked colleges and universities across the United States.
Cracking down on campus protests is hardly a novelty for the powers that be in the United States, with suppression of protests dating as far back as the Vietnam War.
In 2019, a non-governmental organization called the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) also observed that a number of laws threatening disciplinary measures against protesters have been introduced in several US states.
For example, a bill introduced in Illinois that year would allow a person whose “expressive rights are violated” on campus to bring a legal case against the university even if the violation was performed by student protesters and not by faculty.
“This creates an incentive for university administrators to overzealously police demonstrators to avoid potential liability,” the NGO warned.
The organization also pointed at the executive order issued by then-US President Donald Trump in 2019 “that ties federal funding of universities to these institutions taking appropriate steps to ‘promote free inquiry’.”
According to the ICNL, this order “could lead to politicized interference with university governance in the future and government monitoring of the political activity of students and faculty.”