Replies

"There are state actors all over the place with Columbia. Public partnerships, public funding for students, government grants, and so on."

Regarding federal government funding and grants, please note the following.

Since the states have never expressly constitutionally delegated to the unconstitutionally big federal government the specific power to tax and spend for INTRAstate educational purposes, other than for military training purposes, federal funding for students, research is unconstitutional imo.

In fact, Pres. Thomas Jefferson and Justice Joseph Story had indicated that until states amend Constitution for federal involvement in intrastate schools, something that the states have never done, intrastate schools are hands off to the feds.

On a few articles of more general and necessary use, the suppression in due season will doubtless be right, but the great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers [emphases added].”—Thomas Jefferson : Sixth Annual Message to Congress
"The power to regulate manufactures, not having been confided to congress, they have no more right to act upon it, than they have to interfere with the systems of education, the poor laws, or the road laws, of the states. Congress is empowered to lay taxes for revenue, it is true; but there is no power to encourage, protect, or meddle with manufactures." —Joseph Story, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1, Commentaries on the Constitution 2

Any federal funding has to be reasonably justifiable under Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.

"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States."—Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

Schools can still get the funding that they want for students and research projects imo. However, such funding cannot be based on federal taxes unless states appropriately amend Constitution.

In other words, the federal government is an unconstitutional middleman for such funding.