I remember how it was -- JR
What Joe Biden Has Said about Canceling Student Loan Debt
There has recently been more and more discussions about President-elect Joe Biden's plans to cancel student loan debt when he enters the White House in January next year.
While Biden has not committed to canceling all student debt, his administration will be able to introduce changes that could affect millions of borrowers—although this will also likely depend on who controls the Senate.
In March, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer called for $10,000 relief for all student borrowers in light of the financial chaos sparked by the coronavirus pandemic—a proposal that Biden later endorsed in a tweet.
By September, they later called for the next president to cancel up to $50,000 in debt and while Biden has not officially committed to this, he has instead proposed a program that offers public service workers $10,000 a year in student loan relief.
He also pledged to make public colleges tuition-free for all families with incomes below $125,000.
It comes after the Trump administration introduced a student loans holiday in March and waived interest until December 31. The incumbent president has still not conceded defeat to his Democratic rival and is still fighting several lawsuits with claims of voter fraud in battleground states.
It is unclear whether Donald Trump will extend the loan relief before Biden likely takes office on January 20 and borrowers are currently anxious to know if it will continue beyond the end of the year.
Newsweek has contacted Biden's transition team, the Trump administration and the department of education over the matter.
What Joe Biden has said on student debt:
During the campaign, Biden released 'The Biden Plan for Education Beyond High School' on his website, laying out a series of proposals which included plans for student debt relief.
The President-elect said he would create a public service forgiveness plan, where $10,000 in student debt will be erased from workers in schools, government and other nonprofit organizations, every year for up to five years to a total of $50,000.
Under the Biden plan, workers earning $25,000 or less will also be exempt from federal student loan payments and will not accrue any interest. Everyone making more than $25,000 will only have to pay five percent of their discretionary income—minus taxes and essential spending like housing and food.
Biden also said he would fix problems plaguing the federal Public Loan Forgiveness program. The initiative was created in 2007 to give debt forgiveness for workers entering low-paying public service jobs. But various conditions, like having the right kind of federal loan, means that only 2.2 percent of applicants have been deemed eligible since 2007, according to The New York Times.
His campaign statement said:
What Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have said:
In March, Warren and Schumer were among the lawmakers who called for the next president to cancel $10,000 in federal student loan debt per person during the pandemic. Biden endorsed this proposal in a tweet but Congress is yet to authorize it.
By September, the group of lawmakers called on the next president to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt but Biden has not publicly endorsed this proposal.
Schumer said in the statement published on Warren's website: "Education is supposed to be a ladder up, but for too many the burden of student debt has become an anchor holding them down.
"Massive student loan debt is exacerbating the historic and overlapping crises our country is facing, especially for communities of color, which have been hit hardest by the health and economic consequences of COVID-19. Our resolution lays out a way for the president to change that. Canceling student loan debt would help boost our struggling economy and close the racial wealth gap that has persisted for far too long."
Last week, Warren also wrote a Twitter thread to put more pressure on the President-elect by explaining some of the "big changes that a Biden-Harris administration can achieve on day one."
She wrote: "1. Biden-Harris can cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt, giving tens of millions of Americans an immediate financial boost and helping to close the racial wealth gap. This is the single most effective executive action available for a massive economic stimulus."
"Biden-Harris ran on the most progressive economic and racial justice platform of any general election nominee ever. Now isn't the time to hand over the keys to corporate lobbyists," the senator added.
Will Biden be able to implement his plans?
Any of Biden's plans to cancel student debt may be scuppered if the Republicans retain control of the U.S. Senate and this all comes down to the runoff elections in Georgia on January 5.
Not everyone agrees with policies of cancelling student debt, especially not Republicans, as it will ultimately be the federal government—so taxpayers—who foot the bill.
If the Democrats win the Senate, Schumer will be able to push through legislation on canceling student loans but it is unclear exactly what policy he would push, according to Forbes.
But if the Republicans win, student loan forgiveness will, in all probability, not become law since GOP senators have generally not supported debt cancellation plans, the publication reported.
The Democrats' next question would be whether student loan debt could be canceled through congressional legislation since the U.S. Constitution grants Congress power to to make laws.
Lawmakers, including Warren, have also argued that the president himself will be able to use an executive order to cancel student loans but this is still unclear from a legal perspective.
Students accused of non-Title IX misconduct should get fair hearings, too
Students sometimes ask why FIRE spends so much time making sure students accused of sexual misconduct receive fair hearings. They’ve noticed that over the past decade, a lot of our work has focused on the interplay between Title IX and due process.
But things weren’t always this way. While FIRE has always been on the front lines of the battle to ensure students accused of misconduct are given a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves before they are punished, our biggest early due process case centered around a Facebook post about a parking garage — it had nothing to do with sexual misconduct at all. FIRE started focusing more on fundamental fairness in sexual misconduct disciplinary procedures about a decade ago, when colleges and universities, under the direction of the federal government, started throwing away procedural safeguards specifically in sexual misconduct cases and not in other cases.
Our goal is to ensure that all students facing serious punishment like long-term suspension or expulsion receive a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves.
This year, the Department of Education finally mandated that schools bound by Title IX (almost all colleges and universities nationwide) guarantee students accused of sexual misconduct under Title IX many critically important procedural safeguards to ensure they are not punished without due process. So what now?
FIRE’s goal was and is not that students accused of sexual misconduct be treated more fairly than students accused of other misconduct. Our goal is to ensure that all students facing serious punishment like long-term suspension or expulsion receive a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves, including the right to a presumption of innocence, information about the charges and the evidence against them with time to prepare before the hearing, and a live hearing with an opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. Federal regulations now require that students facing discipline under Title IX are afforded these protections. This is a solid advance for campus justice, but schools owe students an explanation if they’re not going to treat non-Title IX cases with the same care with which Title IX cases will be handled going forward.
To help ensure all students facing serious punishments are guaranteed fundamentally fair hearings, FIRE has written a template letter students can send to their college or university.
As suggested by the Supreme Court of the United States in Goss v. Lopez, the formality of school disciplinary procedures required to achieve due process depends on what’s at stake. This factor — not whether alleged misconduct is sex-based — should be key in determining what kind of safeguards against unjust punishment a student is afforded. Case law in recent years has affirmed that where students’ educational careers may be derailed, robust safeguards like those now required by Title IX regulations are integral to a fundamentally fair process. And, of course, it would be just as reasonable to suspend or expel a student for creating a hostile environment based on race or for assaulting another student in a non-sexual context as it would be to suspend or expel them for sexual misconduct.
To help ensure all students facing serious punishments are guaranteed fundamentally fair hearings, FIRE has written a template letter students can send to their college or university asking it to provide students accused of non-Title IX misconduct the same safeguards students are entitled to receive under Title IX regulations. Whether schools choose to adopt FIRE’s Model Code of Student Conduct or simply make their new, regulations-compliant sexual misconduct procedures applicable in all cases where students face long-term suspension or expulsion, improving the process is an essential step towards protecting student rights.
https://www.thefire.org/students-accused-of-non-title-ix-misconduct-should-get-fair-hearings-too/
‘Woke’ consensus ruining Australia's universitiesUniversities are our primary institutions for knowledge creation. And we assume the search for truth guides academics in their research and teaching, irrespective of their political views. However, while academics, particularly in the social sciences, have long leaned left, that bias is increasingly lopsided.
Academics who do not buy into certain left orthodoxies, particularly on issues of social justice, increasingly find themselves self-censoring their views to avoid damaging their career prospects.
Since I became a member of Heterodox Academy, an organisation founded to promote viewpoint diversity and respectful disagreement in academe, I’ve become increasingly aware of the ways the academic system selects against viewpoint diversity.
One junior academic, who we will call Sarah, has a promising scientific career ahead. She has an excellent publication record, international collaborations, strong teaching reviews, and has already been awarded significant grant funding. However, she has grown critical of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” sector that is such a dominant force in our universities. Sarah would like to be more publicly critical of this “woke” consensus that focuses on gender and racial identity, but doesn’t feel she can speak out for fear of offending academic colleagues, many her senior. Only when she has climbed the ladder and been promoted to professor would she feel secure to do so.
In a new book, Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education, academics Illana Redstone and John Villasenor explain how academe encourages conformity and the risks you face criticising diversity initiatives: “Well-intentioned criticism of any proposal involving diversity is perilous … (and) might well be detrimental to his or her reputation and career growth.”
Academic progress relies in large part on the approval of other academics, who review publication drafts and grant funding proposals and promotion applications. As such, academics with heterodox views reasonably prefer not to get offside with their colleagues and administration.
Sarah isn’t the only one to realise junior academics are constrained when speaking about controversial issues. Katy Barnett, a law professor, describes how her senior position allows her a freedom to express unorthodox ideas that other academics cannot: “I am much more comfortable with speaking out now I am a full professor. We can’t have a situation where the only people who can speak out are powerful. It’s a recipe for disaster.”
Recently, researchers found more than half of left-leaning academic philosophers said they would be willing to discriminate against hiring someone applying for an academic position if the candidate held right-of-centre views. Many added they would discriminate when reviewing publications and research grant proposals that expressed right-leaning views. Social psychology academics feel much the same about scuttling the careers of their ideological opponents.
This culture is acute in the social sciences, where the political views of academics often encroach upon their research and teaching activities.
At a recent academic conference in Australia, a high-profile professor and keynote speaker said: “Sociology demands you have a social justice lens. Any right-wing sociologists should be booted out of the club.” She received enthusiastic applause from most of her audience.
At what point did academic disciplines become “clubs” where one could be excommunicated for views deviating from orthodoxy? Social scientists are often concerned with power relations between oppressors and the oppressed. How might junior academics with heterodox political views see their career prospects when left-wing thought is all but mandated by those in power?
Last year, the University of California announced it was requiring all applications to new academic faculty positions to submit a “diversity statement”, declaring a candidate’s commitment to the cause. Applicants deemed insufficiently committed to a specific component of diversity — namely, racial and gender diversity — would be removed from the pool of viable candidates irrespective of the quality of their work.
It hasn’t taken long for Australian universities to demand the same as part of the agenda for diversity, equity and inclusion. It is nothing short of political screening of academics in a sector already ideologically homogenous.
While Australian universities face unprecedented challenges wrought by COVID-19, let’s not neglect the problems they faced before the pandemic, which will persist well into the future.
Federal government legislation may have strengthened the legal basis for academic freedom to a level recommended by the French review. But there are deeper cultural issues within academe demanding our attention.
Universities should be environments that can handle a diverse range of views and in which academics can have successful careers regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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