REPUBLICANS VS. HIGHER EDUCATION
Declining conservative support coincides with militant liberal activism on campuses
The Pew Research Center has a new survey confirming that, as you’d expect, Republicans have little love for institutions such as media and labor unions. Whats surprising, however, is the extent to which Republicans have grown hostile toward colleges and universities, and how quickly their attitudes have changed.
Pew found that 58% of selfidentified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect on “the way things are going in the country.” Only 36% disagreed. As recently as 2010, 55% of the GOP viewed colleges positively.
The collapse of Republican support for colleges and universities coincides with the popularization of a militant brand of liberal political activism that gestates on campuses. Take, for example, the University of Missouri-Columbia.
BROADER CRISIS In 2015, Mizzou students rallied in defense of a student who claimed that the campus was plagued by people in pickups chanting racist slurs. That accusation reopened the still festering wounds resulting from clashes that had erupted among peaceful protesters, rioters and police in Ferguson just months earlier.
As The New York Times observed, the protests soon became typified by “intersectionality,” which contends that all discrimination is rooted in class, gender and race and is therefore linked. The demonstrations swelled, a series of administrators resigned, and the intersectional student movement appeared victorious.
It was, however, a video featuring communications professor Melissa Click that turned the campus controversy into a national story. She was filmed attempting to prevent a student journalist from taking pictures of the protests and calling for “some muscle” to be deployed.
“In the minds of many, her outburst and the resignations became symbols of a hair-trigger protest culture lacking any adult control,” the Times reported. It said freshman enrollment at the state system’s flagship campus has fallen off by 35% since 2015.
The Missouri story is indicative of the broader crisis at many American colleges. Increasingly, they are places of strictly enforced intellectual, cultural and political homogeneity. That rigid conformity might be enforced from below by energetic activists, but it finds succor and rationalizations from above. A study of “faculty voter registration in economics, history, journalism, law and psychology” published last fall found that at 40 leading universities, registered Republicans were outnumbered by their Democratic counterparts by 11.5 to 1.
A 2015 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that nearly 71% of freshmen believed that colleges should “prohibit racist/sexist speech,” and that 43% of incoming freshmen agreed colleges should “have the right to ban extreme speakers” from campus.
PERPETUAL ADOLESCENTS In an April op-ed for The Times, New York University Vice Provost Ulrich Baer praised “snowflakes” for recognizing that “alt-right demagogues” were a threat to “the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse.”
But this “no platforming ” movement isn’t strategic or thoughtful. It’s more like a mob. Occasionally, genuinely controversial speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos are successfully “no-platformed” off campuses amid property destruction and physical violence. But other conservatives who have been run off — including Condoleezza Rice, Jason Riley and Ayaan Hirsi Ali — suggest that Baer’s snowflakes have a distorted view of what’s alt-right demagoguery.
Republicans have also noticed how campuses incubate perpetual adolescents. They are institutions typified by “safe spaces” — where uncomfortable topics, and those who’d challenge fragile preconceptions, are forbidden. They are establishments in which challenging subject matter is not broached absent a “trigger warning,” the academic equivalent of content ratings guidelines.
They are places where lecturers are compelled to resign for failing to protect college-age adults from the sight of a provocative Halloween costume. They are places where racial, religious and political segregation is finding new purchase, if only so that students can enjoy a break from what Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro called the “uncomfortable learning ” associated with heterogeneity.
The intellectual cloistering that typifies colleges today has trickled down from faculty to students. The product these schools now turn out is a stultified, juvenile creature. Graduates are less prepared for the real world than they were four years and a quarter-million dollars ago.
It’s hardly conservatives’ fault for recoiling.