A new Pew poll finds that 58% of Republicans now say that colleges and universities have a negative impact on the United States.
But this finding is a very recent development. In 2015, 54% of Republicans held that colleges and universities have a positive influence on the US.
What changed?
Trump became the GOP standard bearer and began attacking the news media and the findings of university scientists concerning climate change.
Trump’s new budget, by the way, dramatically cuts cost sharing for university research, i.e. it offloads office and other costs off onto the universities, which will have a negative impact on the US in the area of scientific discovery. Personally, I can’t imagine that people don’t know that American universities are incubators of important findings that improve people’s health, cure their diseases, and improve their lives.
Aside from the marked dumbing-down of the Republican Party since he began running for president, the other way you can tell that this is a Trump effect is that 72% of Democrats say colleges are a positive, and this statistic is unchanged in recent years.
The good news is that this new bout of anti-intellectualism is almost certainly a flash in the pan.
Thinking poorly of universities and colleges is the sign of someone who wants to pull the wool over people’s eyes. A college education teaches people to think analytically and to question the stories we are fed.
You can tell a reality-based political leader such as Thomas Jefferson, since he founded the University of Virginia and thought that schooling for critical thinking was essential to producing democratic citizens.
As I wrote in Truthdig a few years ago, in an essay that looks more and more prescient,
“In 1786, Jefferson wrote from Europe to a friend:
“Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [of tyranny], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”
That is, Jefferson believed that the alternative to publicly funded education was the rise of an oppressive oligarchy that would manipulate the ignorant majority…
Not only is a more rigid class structure implied by the decline of public support for state universities, but more fixed race boundaries are, as well. State universities are the most important vehicle for minority students in attaining a degree. While 800,000 minority students attend public universities, fewer than 200,000 can be found on private campuses. If the state universities become as expensive as the privates, the impact on minorities could be severe.
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2 Comments
what has changed is that the elitists acknowledged the fact that being educated has a direct correlation with progressive thought. So reducing education among commoners in America is their objective. They have no concerns about educational needs for industry, they simply outsource all jobs to countries which have good industrial training/educational systems.
There’s a circle of repression, of propaganda modelling working here, surely, which goes beyond Trump.
There is a corporate media that panders to and constructs a conservative, uber-patriotic, anti-intellectual mindset that comes to stark simple conclusion on many issues. There is a university staff who behave largely in a compliant way, but there is a small minority of dissident academics who are used and abused by the said corporate media to demonstrate the various froms of “treachery” and insanity that stalks academia’s elite halls. Then you have the small-c liberals trying to surpress the dissidents for the sake of some kind of imgained minimal progress; universities casualising and firing staff who do not comply (Norman Finkelstein and Ward Churchill come to mind). But the compliance is never enough, because the coprorate press are always on alert and out to stifle any dissent in the interests of profits for the hugely wealthy and powerful few. And Republicans are primed to suck it up and use it.
Edward Said spoke of how actually compliant before power academics in the US (much the same in the UK) are.
Ironically, the best thing Trump could have done is invite some academics to the White House and wine and dine them and tell them what a great job they are doing. Job done.
Of course entitled, concentrated power does not want independent thinking, informed citizens. And part of the problem for dissidents is to actually get many ordinary folk to agree how the opposite to that is what expresses a healthy democracy. It strikes me that in the UK and the US, many people have been socially inverted and are often looking little further than the people immediately around them and resenting them for their minimal advantages or disadvantages relative to their own circumstance.
People have to have an alternative. Corbyn is beginning to provide that in the UK (even though he didn’t go to university he is far from anti-intellectual in his approach). But even with Bernie Sanders I don’t see the Democrat Party bureaucracy providing that soon.