This summer a Pew Research Center study showed that a majority of Republicans and right-leaning independents think that colleges and universities are bad for our country, and that it’s dangerous to…
This summer a Pew Research Center study showed that a majority of Republicans and right-leaning independents think that colleges and universities are bad for our country, and that it’s dangerous to send their kids into the groves of academe.
I’m not quite sure what these folks would replace higher education with. Home-schooled B. A.s? Mother-taught master’s? Dad delivers the doctorates at the kitchen table?
College professors have always been more politically progressive than your average bear. Where’s the surprise there? I think it’s complicated to suss out exactly why the professoriate is in the main liberal — something to do with the scholarly mindset. Maybe they like all that bureaucratic red tape campuses are so famous for producing in the form of memos and regulations. It was that (conservative, obviously — there are outliers) Harvard professor Henry Kissinger who said, “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”
Accountants, stockbrockers and insurance agents are more conservative than most other Americans. Does that mean I should be scared to send my daughter to a CPA’s office for help with her taxes?
But if the liberal campus slant has always annoyed conservatives, the situation has grown drastically worse under the current widening of American political animosity toward those with different views. The same Pew study found a consistent increase in distrust of colleges and universities since 2010, when negative perceptions among Republicans was measured at 32 percent. That number now stands at 58 percent. Good Lord! Almost six in 10 on the right think little Janey and Chadwick will turn commie just because their profs are pinkos!
Look, folks, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Look at the rise of the Berkeley College Republicans, currently embroiled in a fascinating internecine spat between the alt-right members who brought about Free Speech Week and traditional Goldwater types who just want to be able to wear bow ties to class.
As you read this, I am on campus at UC Berkeley at a board meeting, where admittedly the vast majority of the students and faculty lean left. I have my own problems with some of the unthinking PCness. I got in a minor tiff last year with the wonderfully bright managing editor of our college newspaper when I pointed out to her the logical and grammatical folly of our paper’s editorial style of lowercasing white and uppercasing Black when it comes to referring to the races. She was disinclined to lay down the law, and I gave up, not wanting to be a pill. But the Golden Bears will be just fine.
The way to fight back against the rising tide of conformity is with humor and intelligence. One of the greatest books in the campus novel genre is by the late, very Tory Englishman Kingsley Amis. In his “Lucky Jim,” he signifies his distaste for the boringly liberal faculty by making them all recorder players. Our hero, an iconoclastic junior professor at a minor red-brick university, finds his only way of rebellion in drinking too many glasses of beer before giving a lecture in which he denounces the university culture of arty pretentiousness and finally passes out.
It doesn’t have to come to that. American GOPers, fear not for your children setting out for their voyages on the uncertain lib-heavy waves of the academic sea. They have minds of their own, you know. College is a great rite of passage for our youth. Just don’t let them drop out like the early Harvard-leavers Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. If they had only finished up, maybe we would have been spared control-alt-delete and the time-suck of Facebook.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
