Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones of San Diego and Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher of Chico announced today that they would push to strip state financial aid from protesters found to have committed violent or criminal acts or violated other students' rights.
CalMatters reportsthey did not offer a formal proposal with details, but Jones and Gallagher said at a press conference that students who assault, harass and intimidate their peers or physically block them from attending class -- as reportedly happened to Jewish students at UCLA last week -- did not deserve to benefit from the Cal Grant program.
Jones said: "You have to earn those. We ought to be rewarding the students that want to use those Cal Grants to go to school, get educated and become productive members of society."
Jones and Gallagher focused their ire on pro-Palestinian demonstrators, whose aggressive tactics they said have left Jewish students feeling unsafe and completely derailed some campuses, including Cal Poly Humboldt, which closed for the rest of the semester after protestors occupied an academic and administrative building.
They largely sidestepped the attack earlier this week by pro-Israeli counter-demonstrators on the encampment at UCLA, which was dismantled by police early today.
The Republican leaders blamed university administrators across the state for not shutting down encampments sooner and Gov. Gavin Newsom for not intervening. They said they would also seek to withhold funding in the upcoming budget from University of California and California State University campuses that did not respond adequately to the protests -- perhaps an amount equal to state resources spent on providing law enforcement and cleaning up damage.
