On today’s edition of The Editors, National Review Rhodes Fellow Dominic Pino said the administration should “treat universities like we treat churches.” This comes on the heels of President Trump’s vow to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status and the outrage from the university.

Pino isn’t thrilled about the administration’s approach to the issue, and said it “would be on much better grounds” if it said, “‘We’re going to treat universities like we treat churches. They’re going to be tax exempt, but we’re not going to give them federal funding. And we’re going to force them to stand on their own.’”

“I would love to see this just across the board,” Pino said, but “I don’t want this to be based on Harvard’s misbehavior — of which there is ample evidence.”

He also believes “it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for state governments to fund their own state education systems, because that’s, I think, a Tenth Amendment power that they have.”

Primarily though, Pino “would just love to see the federal government get out of this altogether because really, federal funding for universities is an enormous welfare program for the upper-middle class. That’s who benefits from this.”

“We do not need welfare for the upper middle class.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.