GETTING SCHOOLED
In America, Republicans now distrust education.
Anti-intellectualism in the United States may have reached a new high with this week’s stunning finding from the Pew Research Center: most Republican-leaning citizens now believe that colleges and universities are bad for America.
Higher education hasn’t traditionally been a partisan issue in the United States. In 2010, 58 per cent of Republicans and 65 per cent of Democrats said that colleges and universities had a positive influence on the country. Now, like many other things in the U.S., views are much more polarized.
In this latest Pew survey, 72 per cent of Democrats felt positively about colleges and universities, while only 36 per cent of Republicans said the same. In Donald Trump’s America, nearly six in 10 Republicans — 58 per cent — believe that higher education is not a force for good in the nation.
Canadians, well most of us, are likely to have two reactions to this news. The first is simply, wow, that’s how bad things are in American political culture in 2017: the country now is divided about whether more learning is a good thing. And secondly, most of us (I think) would hope this trend doesn’t move northward.
Some Americans have been sounding alarm bells about this survey result. David Graham, writing in the Atlantic, called the results “stunning” and worrying — a possible portent of declining post-secondary prospects for Americans overall.
In the Washington Post, Philip Bump suggested that the decline was at least in part the product of conservative media attacks on colleges and universities, particularly the increasing attention being paid to the notion of “safe spaces.”
This is a relatively new term, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a place (as on a college campus) intended to be free of bias, conflict, criticism or potentially threatening actions, ideas or conversations.”
Conservatives in the U.S. have tended to portray these safe spaces as left-wing constraints to freedom of speech.
Now this sounds familiar. Conservatives in Canada have also been taking up the freedom-of-speech cause, including the new Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, who would like federal funding to be denied to colleges and universities that fail to protect free speech.
In a fundraising letter sent out in April, Scheer wrote that “freedom of speech is under attack on our campuses.”
The letter went on to warn: “More and more, the establishment of safe spaces, forbidden topics and the banning of speakers and campus clubs, are making our colleges and universities no-go zones for open dialogue.”
Leaving politics or partisanship aside, we might worry that a decline in regard for colleges and universities is a symptom of a wider loss of hope or aspiration in the middle class overall.
In other words, people may not see the point of spending money and time getting more education in a precarious economy.
Post-secondary education used to be seen as a guaranteed ticket to good jobs and income stability. But that’s less true now than it was even 20 years ago. That’s at least partly because degrees and diplomas are more plentiful among the population.
As Laval University’s Stephen Gordon wrote on a Canadian economics blog late last month: “In 1997, one full-time worker in five had a university degree; now one in three do. And in 1997, one in six did not have a high school diploma; that’s now only the case for one full-time worker in 14.”
It seems unlikely that Canadians will ever see higher education as something negative, but then again, who ever expected any Americans to think that way?
In one area, at least, the new political climate in Trump’s America is proving to be good for Canadian colleges and universities. The BBC reported this week on the phenomenon of increasing foreign enrolment at Canadian post-secondary institutions — students who might have once wanted to go to school in the U.S., now choosing this country in the face of American travel bans and anti-immigration sentiment.
It’s another sign of how weird things have become since Trump became president. Education, which you wouldn’t expect to be controversial, is now a partisan issue in the United States, and a mark of distinction between Canada and the world south of the 49th parallel.
Note to readers: Last week’s column on changing minds in politics prompted a lot of reaction. Thank you to all who got in touch. Some people said they wanted to hear more about how views can shift in politics, so I’m working on that this summer. If you have a story of how your (or others’) political views shifted on a big issue — assisted dying, marijuana legalization, or even on party preference since the last election — I’d like to hear from you. Email me: sdelacourt@bell.net