At a speech in Texas last year, Donald Trump Jr. cantankerously told the crowd that colleges were taking $200,000 of their money. In exchange they "train your children to hate our country." Colleges "make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket-weaving and, my personal favourite, tree climbing."
A Pew Research study has found that no less than 58 per cent of Republicans believe colleges and universities have a negative effect on their country. Gallup found similar results. By contrast, only 19 per cent of Democrats feel that way.
For a huge swath of Americans on the political right, college bashing has become a prime-time sport. Higher learning is no longer held in high esteem.
States such as Arizona and Louisiana have cut funding per student by almost half. Some legislators are pushing for ideological litmus tests for the hiring of faculty. They paint today's universities as leftist brainwashing factories.
Betsy DeVos, U.S. President Donald Trump's Education Secretary, has accused professors of trying to politically indoctrinate their students. She prioritizes programs such as apprenticeships over four-year college degrees. She is viewed as more anti-public education than any secretary in the department's four-decade history.
The Trump administration's recent tax-reform package didn't go as far as the House of Representatives wanted in eliminating incentives for college degrees. But the law created new taxes on the endowments of well-heeled schools and new caps on state and local deductions, which will reverberate in the form of education cutbacks.
Like most everything else in the United States, education has become egregiously politicized. The populist turn of the Republican Party has sharpened the country's divide. In being anti-environment, anti-gun control, anti-immigration, anti-science and anti-intellectual, the GOP has done much, one might say, to earn an antediluvian reputation.
Now it has become increasingly anti-college – attacking not only the elite schools but also the publicly funded state universities.
Republicans see a liberal political bias at such institutions, and faculty surveys tend to support that notion. Of course, with the party having moved so far to the right, it's harder for any educational institution to gain the GOP's ideological stamp of approval. Courses that teach creationism or contend that climate change is a hoax are hardly common in college curricula across the land.
There's another problem. As numerous studies have shown, the more educated you are, the more progressive or liberal you tend to be. Graduates of Ivy League colleges and other leading schools vote for the Democratic ticket in large numbers. In recent elections, the appeal of Republicans (as well as the Conservative Party in Canada) has tilted strongly to the less educated.
The voting patterns are a strong argument for new-era Republicans – as opposed to the old-school variety, such as John McCain – to cheer on the dumbing down of America and deride college education. They don't worry about being seen as lowbrow bottom-feeders or less cerebral than those on the left. Rather, they make political hay by depicting the well-educated as out of touch – by equating erudition with elitism.
The anti-intellectual trend – guidance by the gut as opposed to empirical research – began well before Mr. Trump. Having graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump isn't inclined to scorning such Ivy League institutions. He has often cited that degree as a point of pride. But he knows where his support is based. "I love the uneducated," he said during his election campaign. He supports the tilt of his Education Secretary.
Although American universities rank among the most prestigious in the world, and the returns on college education are well-established, few doubt the need for broad reform of the college and university system. The "give us the money and leave us alone" ivory towerism has to stop. More accountability is needed. Costs are out of line. More intellectual and social diversity on campuses is necessary.
But changes need not be driven by political ideologues who resent that higher education is producing more minds that vote progressive than conservative – and who are therefore out to debilitate the public-education system. Instead, Republicans, especially the more mastodonian among them, might wish to consider that the edifice of public knowledge inclines against their worldview.
Lawrence Martin