Pew Research has some interesting findings that make intuitive sense.
While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views.
A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.
I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey during the Carter and Reagan administrations, and the Republicans I encountered at that time, while relatively few in number, would have been nearly unanimous in valuing higher education. They were primarily motivated to vote Republican by three factors. One was simple tax aversion and the sense that the federal government had grown too bloated and was wasteful and ineffective. The second was that the country was reeling financially, interest rates were sky high, and they were ready to give someone other than Carter a chance. The third was related to status, and voting Republican was a way of asserting your position on the top of the American food chain. There really wasn’t anything anti-intellectual about any of this, although that began to seep in as people began making apologies for the Reagan administration’s more hard-to-defend positions and policies.
I’m aware that I had an unusual upbringing and that anti-intellectualism was always a major component of Reagan’s national appeal, but it has certainly grown and grown and grown in the intervening decades. I think it’s now at the point where higher education is seen as a threat by most Republicans, which is what I take from these polls numbers. Presumably, these colleges corrupt the morals of their children by undermining the legitimacy of the conservative worldview. Maybe some portion of these survey results has to do with the exploding cost of college and their perceived ability to make a good return on investment, but the polls show no movement among Democrats, some of whom would be making the same negative assessment.
It’s really not compatible with being a country club Republican to have a negative view of a college education. A college degree confers respectability and signals status. Likewise, crudely expressed racism is not consistent with respectability with these folks. They’re still tax averse enough to vote for a Mitt Romney, but Trump’s vulgarity is too much for a lot of them.
This is the playing field where the national realignment is taking place. Obama did modestly well in places like the Philadelphia suburbs, but Clinton crushed there. We all saw that same dynamic play out recently as people analyzed the special election in Georgia’s affluent well-educated 6th congressional district.
The flip side of this is, of course, that Trump more than made up for this by running up numbers in areas where a college education is not the norm. The result is that the Republican Party becomes less a party signifying status and more one signifying resentment.
They also become increasingly impervious to advice from so-called experts or the consensus of the scientific community. They don’t listen to the media. They swallow any kind of nonsense so long as it is couched in grievance.
More and more of them home school their kids to protect them from the opinions of educated people, and fewer and fewer of them want their children to go off to college where their religious and political views may be undermined.
It looks to me like this is something that started off small but has taken on a snowball effect. How much did right-wing media like Fox News create this effect and how much did they just figure out how to cater to it?
Whatever the answers to those questions, a lot of groundwork had to be laid before we could get to the point that Donald Trump could win the Republican primaries. The assumption among most people was that the damage would stop there, but it turned out that the rot had expanded into the general electorate. It turned out that Trump got the better half of the trade when he kissed off respectable status-conscious Republicans in exchange for votes from people for whom college education is a positive ill.
How do we get back from this nadir?
I don’t know, but offering free college seems like it might not do the trick.
Note that Republican opinion flipped from positive to negative over the course of the last year.
Seems the most likely explanation is rationalization for voting for a grifting moron universally despised by the college educated. Tribalism and ego defense requires that colleges must be making people irrationally hostile to Trump. Otherwise they’re left with the admission that Republicans stupidly voted for an ignorant clown candidate.
d
still consistent with theory that Trump merely catalyzed an already brewing chemical reaction.
It is consistent. The Republican party has been trending toward a direct mail/Amway/Jerry Falwell scam my entire life. A grand con that exploits racism and feelings of inferiority to steal every last thing of value from the rubes. An attempt to capture through base ignorance, prejudice, and conspiratorial thinking a voting majority.
I keep expecting peak wingnut but H. L. Mencken continues to define our nation.
Indeed!
Would also explain this:
Trump won white college graduates 48-45.
http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls
He lost all college graduates by 5.
Trump received more votes from college graduates than he did from those with a high school degree or less.
Only about 1 in 5 Trump voters did not have some college.
I know – no one gives a damn about the data.
Just because they went to college, doesn’t mean they think it is/was important. Or perhaps it is more that college NOW is no longer a good thing, either due to strict economic factors, or all the social/cultural ones people are bringing up in other parts of these comments.
Exactly. How old were these Trump-voting college graduates? And look at the racial difference.
Thank you. The divergence of the Trump-voter demographic from some mythical “angry white working-class man” was pointed out by many careful observers during both the primary and general election campaigns. Yet the impulse to find a simple explanation for Trump’s victory is strong. The potential explanatory factors overlap–a statistician would say there is covariance. And the principal explanatory factor in one community might be a minor factor elsewhere.
Where they will learn not to be Republican.
could be true. that one will be a long-term investment, if it works. results would be muted by fact that grads won’t return to their communities, though, but instead settle in already blue districts.
…lays the foundation for most social progress in this country. Progressives have lost many battles in the political arena but they’ve done outstandingly well in driving the agenda in education and the media.
That changes public opinion one person at a time. Eventually, progress makes into actual law.
We already see the fruits of this with the youth. As you probably know, had only millenials voted, Clinton, for all her weakness with that group, would have won something like 45 states.
We are waiting for older White WC and LMC to die.
…lays the foundation for most social progress in this country. Progressives have lost many battles in the political arena but they’ve done outstandingly well in driving the agenda in education and the media.
That changes public opinion one person at a time. Eventually, progress makes into actual law.
We already see the fruits of this with the youth. As you probably know, had only millenials voted, Clinton, for all her weakness with that group, would have won something like 45 states.
We are waiting for older White WC and LMC to die.
Not if the only three majors left are business, business, and business. Plus maybe marketing.
And state legislatures are already aiming their schools in that direction.
I think this drives more and more people from the Asian community toward the Democrats.
Minority communities, period.
You want up and out? You need to get up, and get out.
.
I blame the FOX news-watching community for the spread of ignorance, hate, and anger. And one thing I noticed about people who watch FOX on television tend to have it on ALL DAY. They turn it on first thing with breakfast and they have it on all of the time. It would drive me bonkers, but they seem to feed on it.
The stories are delivered in breathless, self-righteous anger and indignation. The headlines are often the same news item presented on other national broadcast news, but skewed to the point of absurdity…certainly no one would believe anything they say.
But they do. They hear it, they believe it, and they tell everyone else in the same breathless, indignant tones. I overheard two older gentleman in a diner discussing politics. One was clearly a Democrat, and he said flat out that he doesn’t know everyhting, but he’s worried about Trump and his policies. The other guy immediately rebuked him and said the same thing FOX has said, thet we needed to give Trump time, that he was a successful businessman who wasn’t a career politician…verbatim FOX nonsense. As often as the first guy would calmly restate his concerns and offer substantiation, the second guy blustered talking points. I’m not even sure why they were having breakfast together!
So I don’t know how to fight back. How do we even discuss anything with someone who thinks going to college is a bad thing? Or furthering one’s education or broadening horizons or understanding basic science?
It’s freaking me out. I can’t even imagine where this all goes or how we end up. But staggering around the G-20 like a lost child is not the Presidential look I’m hoping for. I don’t want a fucking idiot as the leader of my country. And I don’t want a country where education is discouraged,
As tolerance develops of hating others and blaming everyone else but yourself, you have to use more and more and more to get the same effect.
I feel your pain. I have several acquaintances who are the same.it seems utterly impossible to talk sense to them.
I haven’t been a student for 20 years, but my guess is based on the timing of this survey, its that one state university had some kind of day without white people protest and another tried to shut down that nice gay hero Milo whomever, proving once and for all that liberals will not ever call people of color racists against and are intolerant to conservatives. They are places where you go to have the failed identity based multiculturalism crammed down your throat while white people are made to feel extra guilty and excluded. Otherwise, I can’t really explain a 15 point shift in attitudes in the space of a single year. It’s not as if universities and colleges are this new fangled thing. Or that the issues posed by the universities changed that much.
Although we live in Blue MD, we have a farm in the Shenandoah Co. I like to look at the May-June local newspapers there and what they say about their local proud high school graduates. Aside from the fact that there are so few of them for such a vast area, many disappear into “no further information” but a sizable minority do go to a trade school and a few end up in places like James Madison Univ. in Harrisonburg about 25 miles from our farm. Yes, it is pretty whitebread but that’s the local demographic. However, it is also a leading renewable energy center and organic farming leader and other subjects highly relevant to the local economy. This area however doesn’t seem to have the feeder community colleges systems that prepare students with various challenges for the regular colleges/universities. This needs to change but the situation is not hopeless. There’s a real demographic aspect to all this. Our Congressman, Bob “Bad Coffee” Goodlatte, is reliably useless you want to talk about oppressing women.
I was going to bring up the Evergreen State College disaster of PCness run amok. The students (or inmates), who wanted the ouster of a progressive prof who objected to their White People Excluded Day, literally took over the admin building and, by the looks of the video evidence, held the administration and president hostage until their demands were met. No one in authority raised much objection; in fact, the Wally Cox-like president later praised them for raising everyone’s awareness of the plight of historically victimized groups at the hands of their privileged white oppressors.
The many YT videos are rather startling. An extreme example perhaps. Naturally it seems to have been well covered by Fox and the Right media. Other incidents of recent times — Yale, Univ Missouri, Berkeley — usually involving PCness gone crazy or a conservative speaker being denied the right to speak, are covered extensively by conservative sites and Fox.
My impression is that Tucker Carlson regularly covers the campus PC stuff. Places like Msnbc and CNN tend not to cover it unless briefly and only if it involves a celebrity like Milo or Bill Maher (recall the brouhaha over his being asked to speak at a commencement address at Berkeley — students objecting to his “racism” and “Islamophobia” tried to prevent it) or a violent protest.
Apparently the campus PC crazies have really ramped up the craziness in the past 3-4 years, by some accounts, including from the objecting Evergreen prof under pressure in WA. A warped culture of artificial safe places, trigger alerts, micro aggressions and other insanity seems to have taken over more than a few campuses.
The Young Republican I had staying with me last summer as a paying guest, who complained he was being harassed on campus for his political views, tried to warn me of this, but it didn’t register. Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t exaggerating.
Rightwing PC does not act out. They do it with money. Or by buying professorial chairs. Not as photogenic and generally public.
But yes, the first major college demonstration of the 1960s was the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.
It was not Milo’s speech they were protesting, it was his habit of shaming someone in the audience to jazz up his supporters. Of course, Fox never gives the context.
Bill Maher seems to be protected in his job for the same reason Rush Limbaugh is — he brings in the audience. Hardly the model that you want the newly graduated adults to go imitate, is it. The presidents/chancellors of a few colleges and universities made poor decisions this year. The saddest was Bethune-Cookman University. “Students, you will be mailed your diplomas if your persist.” What do you do when you are facing down an authority that thinks you are not capable of being where you actually are at that moment. Ahhh, Betsy DeVos. What a piece of work.
Maher: with a few exceptions, all those hosting shows on a corporate platform are expected to bring in audience, so Maher is no different than most of the rest including Rushbo. Maher does have some other producing efforts — I think Vice and maybe another HBO show — which presumably give him added clout with his corp bosses. And he has still more of a cushion with his long track record of controversial remarks/opinions, which his bosses are entirely familiar with.
But I sense he knows that even in his fairly secure position there are limits. As with his recent House Negro remark. It was obvious in his subsequent shows that he was making an effort to tone things down, ride it out, lest he recklessly commit another verbal faux pas. He is fully aware that even HBO can pull an ABC on him and dump him for one controversial statement that goes a bit too far.
A controversial comedian indeed, and flawed at times (as with his mindless, uncritical acceptance of the Russiagate nonsense, suggesting he doesn’t bother to read beyond the msm headlines or engage in critical thinking). But with all his outspokenness and general fearlessness in taking an unpopular pov (eg. Islam), he’s actually someone, at least in the entertainment world, that students should admire.
Not quite Lenny Bruce, but far more of a bold envelope-pusher than, say, the cautious centrists Jon Stewart and the guy who took over for Letterman (except for his one great appearance at the WHCD grilling W and the lame MSM).
As for RW PCness, definitely they’ve tried to counter in those ways. But my point wasn’t to defend RWers (altho their media has been better in actually covering some of these campus PC stories, which the few liberal media outlets won’t) so much as to try to suggest a reason why Repubs have so markedly come to disapprove of our higher educational system.
Trump Jr released smoking gun emails and you’re still stuck in your narrative that it’s fake.
“Political correctness” was, and remains, a term of derision primarily used by people who want to be able to stick people into traditional and problematic categories. Thus (to give a single example) objecting to calling a baseball team the Indians, especially when that team has a mascot that any sentient being recognizes as a racist caricature, is derided and dismissed as “PC”.
The issue you identify at The Evergreen State College (Washington’s motto is “The Evergreen State”, for those who don’t know) is not a matter of “political correctness”, but more like a backlash against “political correctness” as originally understood.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I’m married to a woman who is a Princeton townie though her father and one brother are also Princeton alumni. Interestingly, Princeton was always a bit more socially conservative than other Ivy League schools despite its excellent scientific and mathematics reputation (Einstein lived there!) until maybe the 1980s-90s. Both my wife’s father and brother are nominal “Republicans” but her father positively loathed Nixon and Reagan and voted only for Bush 1 among all the GOP presidential candidates to the present and the brother has never voted for any GOP candidate except Tom Kean and Christine Whitman who, frankly, were quite popular among both Democrats and the GOP. Having spent a lot of time socializing with this group of people who are among the social elite of Princeton, none of them are anything other than you describe: socially liberal, fiscally moderate/good govt. types but with a more varied set of opinions on foreign policy (a few more neo-cons in orientation but not many).
But to the larger point, the college-value/non-value is symptomatic of a much deeper and very dangerous schism, i.e. the valuation of facts and scientific evidence; indeed evidence-based results of the type the CBO or GAO or the NAS and other science agencies utilize. Once, the right media discredit facts and reality among enough voters, the entire basis of the US Republic dating back to its foundation is finished. We’re not there by far but there needs to be a major pushback, especially in those rural counties where resentment and ideological fantasy are such strong pulls.
What you said:
I have little to say. I cry most days, my wife, my brother (the stupid one), my almost niece in law (Jessie) think I’m crazy.
Then I listen to this
and it all makes sense
There has been something inevitable about this for awhile. Conservatives have completely given up on empiricism as a tool for making decisions about the world.
Truth and all manner of right thinking for them are handed down from authority and that authority is not to be questioned. That’s the only way you end up supporting tax cuts for every occasion and the Laffer curve as policy for so long. What global warming?
Once they did that, they abandoned the disciplines of the university to the liberal enemy. So now the university itself is also the liberal enemy.
Unemployment rate for college grads is 2.4% no college its 4.6%. In the near future it will be a must to know stuff about computers if you want to fix cars. So, I don’t get this survey. I do not believe they will deny their children the opportunity to earn a living.
That depends on the cost of college and it is too often too expensive or easily interrupted.
They’re setting up to deny them health care. Why would this be any different?
There’s another element to this and it’s called cost. Take a lower income family. Neither the young people or the parents have the money to foot a college education. Often they try it. Borrow and then the new family arrives and college is no longer in the cards. But the college debt is until the day you die. So what happens? Folks begin to think a college education is no longer worth it or achievable.
So, yes, free college education at least through community college will help.
I lived and went to college in a fairly affluent area, so my experience would have been unusual even for the era. Gen-Xers tended to trend Republican at the time, especially if they were White and well-off. Among that cohort at the time, education was highly valued as the ticket to living a better life. This was a group that was well-read, albeit their tastes in books & periodicals and mine were radically different. In hindsight, the handwriting was on the wall. Ronald the Raygun was as anti-intellectual as they came, and there was certainly a cohort somewhere drinking his kool-aid. The GOP leadership in politics and in the mass media of the mid-1990s and onward struck me as far worse than Raygun. It was only a matter of time before we’d get to this point. When we look at markers like unemployment rate and income, completing a college degree makes a huge difference. Most of the jobs worth doing require a degree, if not at least some postgraduate education. Rational self-interest would dictate valuing a higher education as worth the bother. Rational self-interest however rarely appears to guide thought and behavior in everyday life.
There’s always been an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in the US. Anti-intellectualism has been ascendant for some time now. We’ve gone through cycles like this before. This too will eventually pass. Granted, this particular cycle came at an awful time for us as a nation and more broadly for our species, and I fear a lot of damage has been done and will be done that will take generations to clean up, if that is even feasible.
Ot quote from New York Times that might be of interest .
” WASHINGTON — Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email. ”
E mail was from Rob Goldstein, an intermediary.
And now we know why the Trumpers were leaking such self-incriminating info over the weekend. The truth was that much worse.
This is tougher than you imagine.
I live in one of those blue counties on the election map of North Carolina, and education here is in a strange situation. The three major universities in this area turn out Democrats and Republicans, Libertarians and a small minority of assorted lefties. The Universities.
The public schools are struggling with legislatively engineered financial crises, the effects of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, the capture of public charter schools by private for-profit and religious sponsors, and the proliferation of independent religious schools with loose state regulation and accreditation from questionable accreditation associations. Despite a respectable number of education advocates, education is becoming rapidly unequal in opportunities. And then there are the prestige private schools that now cater to the university professoriat.
Reminder: this is liberal heaven for North Carolina. A good percentage of the kids here will go to some college or another, often bridging through the local community colleges into regional campuses of the flagships of the state university system.
The infrastructure, thanks to governors from Democrat Luther Hodges to Democrat Jim Hunt made sure that the university system and even the non-public schools got assistance in building the resources that local business leaders said they needed. The infrastructure is increasingly used by foreign students and students from out-of-state; that brings in more revenue and uses less state revenue for subsidies. The faculty needed to attract the industries with the higher paying jobs needed to be internationally renowned and commanded large salaries, which had to be offset by greater inequality in professorial salaries and the increased use of adjuncts and teaching assistants. And these renowned faculty had to be allowed to have their own incomes from outside consulting practices to burnish their prestige.
Do you see the disconnect appearing between the academy and the people?
Ordinary people scrimp and save from ever more strapped jobs to have enough that the student loan their kids get is not that large. Students barely understanding the stakes are in a career choice and academic record competition to get into “the college of their choice”. They get there, and they are taught introductory courses by adjuncts with teaching assistants in labs and discussion sections; they then, if they don’t change majors a couple of times, get courses with the better teachers on the faculty for the last two years. If they survive they are out with a degree in the “career of their choice” and lost as to where to begin to look for a job and with limited resources for job search and travel. They urgently find whatever job they can just to be able to move out from mom’s and dad’s. And then the reality of the economy for the past two decades hits them. Maybe in a year, two, or three they get the entry job in their field and get set on their career path. Increasingly they don’t. Their degree now seems a handicap. Their parents wonder what all the excitement was all about.
And they never run into the educational experience that generated intellectual excitement. Or they get caught up in a fraternity and sorority system that makes Animal House look like classical education. The hi-jinks, sports, and bonding experience happens but the Aha never does. Or they come out dramatically culturally changed from their parents culture. And angry or arrogant about it.
And they, their parents, their communities, and increasingly their employers say, “It wasn’t worth it.”
The employer talks about how they can’t do math, they can’t spell, they are ruined for practical work, they are difficult. Lots of Trump voters are managers and business owners, even up some ways in in the organizational hierarchy. Folks like the Koch’s are paying good money to amplify the anti-intellectual tendency.
And then there are the one-book people. I needn’t detail the issues there with maybe a third of Trump voters. Reinforced by the shock jocks and the new breed of GOP politicians of so much piety and moral fervor.
The existential situation of 20-some years of US history and the institutions of the Republican political machine (especially the narrowcasting media) are what we are up against.
How do we get back?
Rather how do we go forward? What is our vision of the transformed state of education that we are advocating?
The current system of Clark Kerr multiversities captured by business, government, and increasingly conservative billionaires is not attractive to student or parents, despite the athletic tribalism that keeps the alumni who finally make it supporting the system.
What I most sense from progressives in a longing for the old idea of liberal education — an education that challenges students to take a look at themselves critically, at their society critically; gives them the analytical tools to do that and come out with understanding and a way of acting on that understanding; and provides facility in the media of expression and persuasion to take an active place in society.
That is a fairly compact mission that now stands beside higher education instead of as it once did well within higher education. What is the trivium and quadrivium of the 21st century that all citizens (we are talking about an infrastructure are we not) share as a common experience?
The second challenge relates to the media. Narrowcasting allows dramatically separate cultures to exist geographically side by side. Cable and the internet are massive experiments in narrowcasting by interest an prejudice.
The current commercialization of the internet, driven for profit, has undercut the original purpose of Tim Berners-Lee’s design — to provide integrated access to information and knowledge among researchers and others. Berners-Lee was working at CERN at the time he proposed the HTTP protocol. It was to be knowledge infrastructure. By the time it was called an information superhighway (thanks Al Gore) it was to be a public carrier that individual projects of content provision could use cheaply and and have global access. There are some infrastructure experiments still going one that are in this spirit: Wikipedia, Internet Archive. They suffer from underfunding and horrendous copyright restrictions.
Take for example, Internet Archive. If you are looking for books that have been scanned, they have those most of interest to the donating libraries from the beginning of printing until around 1920. If the books were published originally by a university press, you have only those titles that have lapsed copyrights. Journals are paywalled by JSTOR, even early 20th century journals. But even with these restrictions, Internet Archive is a treasure trove for independent scholar projects, if that ever became a thing again.
But at base what is needed is a philosophical answer to the nihilism and absolute relativism of post-modernist defenses of bullshit. A Flat Earth Society is not an “alternative belief system”, it is a redefinition of “flat” and “earth” to have a cute in-group. Religious texts do not have authority over those who do not adhere to that religion. Granting tolerance of belief in a multicultural brunswick stew is not the same as being legislated into a religion.
And then the toughest of all. Desegregation. And equal protection under the law. In the 1970s when this was court ordered, enough “people of good will” took the plunge that lots of communities and churches were transformed and are still being transformed. Most mainline Protestant churches are still moving forward with desegregating congregations and mixing up theologies and liturgical styles and community service. These have stepped forward to provide sanctuary against Trump’s deportation orders. It is possible that they could be called to support a restored public education infrastructure.
Home schools often are not anti-intellectual. Others are people who have serious problems with their kids going to the local school because of emotional issues or disabilities that the school has not facilities to handle because of cuts in special education programs. Still others need to take some time with their kids to get them back on an educational track. All of these need educational support services and outside programs with other home schoolers or public school students. The public education system could provide this if given funds to do it. Likewise public school facilities and programs to support the public charter schools that are indeed doing innovative programs.
It is a minor issue, but public schools need some flexibility on building standards if they are to have funds for operations. Standards that make schools of 600-800 elementary students built on greenfield land cause frequent and large bond issues in a time of austerity and tax restraint at the local level.
The mechanism of school desegregation needs to move from assignment plans to a return to local schools. But this requires neighborhoods that are no longer exclusive by race, class, and ethnicity, which in turn requires dealing with the contradiction between preserving cultural identity and living in an inclusive society. That was the progressive vision of the 1960s through 1990s; it needs to be recaptured.
The schools in the most rural counties of North Carolina are of two kinds. Public schools, majority black but not exclusively so, governed by majority white county commissions and board of educations. And religious private schools operated by white and a few black congregations. Politically breaking the grip on school boards that are not interested in education would be a major step forward.
Ending the budget austerity that has degraded public education over the past almost 40 years would be by far the biggest thing to change attitudes. Local teachers who know how to talk to local parents and who are employed again in administratively well-managed schools without the harassment of legislatures, politicians, and other poor mouthing adults is the sign that there is once again a public education infrastructure that respects learning.
The public school movement of the early 20th century and especially the New Deal era is worthy of study because it had to deal with these same attitudes but in a segregated society within and outside the South that they could do nothing about without great danger.
Republicans in the age of Buckley feigned interest in education and “erudition”. Even as they unleashed the Southern and ethnic strategy that brought Republicans to where they are today. Education was a class marker. They did not like the lessers getting it. Still don’t.
Jesus.
you put more stuff in there than booman put in the original story. how do you expect anyone to interact with that?
Just a test of Booman’s thesis that times have changed.
There is an overall aversion in US culture to long-form information. It is called TL/DR.
Getting something out of a university experience requires dealing with long-form information about politics, society, and philosophy in addition to the information required for your career path.
Too many Americans after they graduate from universities try never to read long-form or non-contemporary writings again.
That is one root of US anti-intellectualism.
Read my first sentence again.
Not personal. I just have a pet peeve, crotchedy geezer that I am, with the TL/DR mindset on the internet.
Nuance takes detail, well-organized and well-argued.
You can fault me on the latter two in a comment, but length by itself is not a measure.
In addition to that we should rethink undergraduate education. My first thoughts would be still having Bachelor’s degrees but they would be more general in the old school liberal arts degree model there could be specific career training included but that would be secondary to a well rounded education, which is still valued by many employers.
Then we would have an equivalent or sub level of career focused education – they wouldn’t be Bachelor’s degrees maybe we call them certificates. All the courses that are included are only courses that would train you for a specific career and no other courses outside of that would be required.
Lastly, we would would still keep the community college/Associate Degree system but we would break them into 2 groups to feed into the above situations. One would be pre-certificate Associate degrees and others would be pre-Bachelor’s Associate Degrees.
I obviously don’t have all the details worked out but we’re trying to fit career education more and more into Bachelor’s Degrees and it’s not working and it’s costing a lot of money for students and taxpayers.
Interesting this, in regards to Bachelor’s degrees.
Yes, let’s keep tracking the working class away from the middle class. I was blessed that my small town school system did not do that at all when I was being educated. And the class exclusion in neighborhoods was not absolute although the race exclusion was and there were subsidized mill villages for a large portion of the textile working families.
My concern with the current situation is where do kids learn how to operate as democratic citizens. Or have we abandoned our hopes of democracy altogether?
I’m not sure how that relates to what I wrote but a functioning democracy comes from experiencing viewpoints different than your own and having to coexist with those same people & knowing how the mechanics of the levers of powers work would be helpful too.
I’m not trying to separate anyone, I’m saying a Bachelor’s degree shouldn’t be the vehicle for career education. We’re trying to stuff a round peg into a square hole.
Thanks, very well motivated and thought provoking.
“…at base what is needed is a philosophical answer to the nihilism and absolute relativism of post-modernist defenses of bullshit.”
Not saying I agree with everything in your essay, TarHeelDem, but that is a quote for the ages. I would hang that in my public school classroom, if I could get away with it.
There is a lot there to chew on. The issue of education vs. anti-intellectualism is the hinge upon which hangs the fate of our Republic. I thank you and BooMan for devoting time and thought to the issue. To be continued…
The thing is, colleges have also changed a lot over the last 50 years in all sorts of ways.
Even intellectual life itself is far more limited in its influence, and, I would say, more superficial, today.
I was visiting relatives recently who happened to have a beautifully preserved copy of a Sunday Times from 1951, with Review of the Week, Sunday Magazine and Book Review. I spent a pleasant time reading through it.
I was struck by how much higher the intellectual level was then than now, pretty much across the board, and by the lack of emphasis on things like trendy restaurants and lifestyles. And there was just far more to read, and more interesting.
This is going OT, but the other thing that struck me
was the main foreign policy issues — Korea, Iran, and Russia. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I retired from a large public university. One of our administrators said a primary reason for the increased cost of a college education today is the demand for and increase in amenities of all sorts.
Also, over my teaching career there was a major shift in the reason(s) for attaining a college education. The focus shifted from the liberal arts and the desire to be well and broadly informed, able to think critically and to write well to which major leads directly to a job. And the higher paying that job is, of course the better. Law, medicine and business come to mind. I taught upper division/graduate level courses in science, and I saw a huge decline over the years, even among my best students, in their general knowledge of history, geography and the arts. Friends who taught those subjects said their students were lacking in their understanding of biology, chemistry and math. So there has been a narrowing of what we consider critical to an education, and I assume this is happening at the high school level as well.
I agree with your second paragraph, but not with the first.
“One of our administrators said a primary reason for the increased cost of a college education today is the demand for and increase in amenities of all sorts.”
A primary reason for the increased cost of a college education today is the cost of administration! Only by a wild stretch of the imagination could one describe most of what they do as “amenities”. But of course that is the word they themselves would use.
“an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.”
https:/www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html
?mcubz=2&_r=0
This includes the costs of investing the endowments.
https:
http://www.thenation.com/article/universities-are-becoming-billion-dollar-hedge-funds-with-schools-
attached
State funding has not kept up with these increased costs; but on the other hand, it is highly debatable how much of these costs are justified.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/05/report-says-administrative-bloat-construction-booms-n
ot-largely-responsible-tuition
At any rate, they are paid for largely at the expense of students and their families, and the teaching faculty.
Aren’t those two linked? Requires more administration to oversee the increase in amenities. Not saying that there isn’t a lot of bloat or that it’s not responsible, but the two go hand-in-hand depending on how one defines “amenities”.
Yes, but that’s the point. A great deal of this stuff is not really “amenities”.
The person who told me this is still a actively teaching and conducting research as a member of his/her department in addition to carrying out administrative responsibilities. This person doesn’t have a bloated salary, either.
Until not that long ago, most administrative duties were carried out by teaching faculty. That’s how it should be.
Today there is a distinct class of full-time administrators, many of whom have never taught and who have little respect for the teaching faculty, and the university is run according to their priorities rather than those of the teachers or the students.
>>the main foreign policy issues — Korea, Iran, and Russia. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I can’t resist.
“there’s strife in Iran”
the 50s and 60s were the great days of cynical intellectual humor. Compared to these guys Bill Maher has nothing.
More papers in NY then — there was a division of labor.
The Times is covering the whole ‘not a tabloid’ spectrum.
Bingo. As I read through the comments lamenting the number of college graduates who voted for Trump, I reflected on many friends in academia who tell of the declining rigor and expectations for college students.
I am a public school teacher. A couple of years ago, the school library was giving away, or throwing away, books that had not been checked out in many years. Most were non-fiction volumes from the 1970s. Though they were nominally “young adult” books, these non-fiction books were well-written and sophisticated in their presentation of physical science, social science, and history topics.
Their replacements? Essentially picture books, and graphic novels. I love both genres, but our current crop of students often finds even a picture book to be too challenging.
And of course we wouldn’t want to ruin the precious self esteem of any child by holding them back a year, or two, until they can read material appropriate to their grade. So, we fail them forward, into the next grade. Just like our current president has failed from one business into the next, all the way to the top. So perhaps the model works!
When I’m in a particularly foul mood about the state of our education system, I pour myself a strong one to toast the secret weapon of American scientific and technological dominance: the H-1 visa. This allows us to import grad students and workers from places where rigor and high standards still exist.
God, that’s depressing.
It’s perhaps noteworthy that those who are inciting this anti-intellectual, anti-college attitude are in virtually all cases themselves educated, generally at “heathen” institutions. Donald Trump may “love the poorly educated” (who after all make the best marks); he was not such a fool as to leave any of his own children in that group. People may adopt this kind of pose as a cultural signifier for pollsters; but reality and the job market are going to push them in other directions. There are very few occupations left that will lead to a comfortable middle-class existence on a high-school education alone. The military certainly favors college attendance; all the services require a four-year college degree for acceptance to OCS. I suspect more than a few of those who are expressing this general outlook to pollsters are not following this line in their own lives or for their own families. And the most recent figures suggest that something shy of four percent of U.S. grade-school children are homeschooled.
It’s of greater concern that so many on the right have been deceived into believing so many lies on politically relevant issues, and into voting for so many people who campaign on and try to govern by those lies. But even then a bit of the gold plate may be wearing off. Recent events suggest that a fair number of people in small-town and rural America are waking up to the idea that voting for right-wing radicals is not a cost-free piece of white Christian nationalist performance art; it may cost them and their relatives dear — beginning with the loss of their health care. These people clearly thought they could have their cultural cake while enjoying the benefits of good governance that only Democrats these days can actually provide. The Trump administration and its enablers will continue to undeceive them.
The problem is that the enlightening of these dolts is going to come at a very high price — in some cases (as the recent alarming article on climate change in “New York” makes clear), a price we can hardly afford. Reality — both about the necessity for education and the falsity of right-wing ideas — will eventually break through; we just have to work as hard as possible to help reality out.
But we should still offer free college for a host of other reasons.
And free career education, including education in trades, technical fields, and para-professions. We used to come close. My IT education at a community college in the early 1980s was subsidized except for $51 a quarter. My wife’s near-minimum-wage job supported us and paid for that and books. With the tuition increases forced by the legislature since then, what we did then is not longer possible.
New York has just brought back free tuition.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/08/pf/college/new-york-free-tuition/index.html
It’s true that non-tuition expenses, especially room and board, are not chickenfeed, but at least in the CUNY system in New York City, there are no dorms — almost all students live at home.
Back in the day, I attended one of the CUNY colleges. I also had a NY State Scholarship (small). Like almost all my fellow students, I lived at home with my parents. The only unavoidable expense was books and supplies. Over the succeeding decades, according to various criteria which gradually narrowed eligibility, a considerable number of CUNY students continued to receive free tuition up to the present.
http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/forum/2011/10/12/when-tuition-at-cuny-was-free-sort-of/
Some of the US’s best-known public intellectuals went to the CUNY system during the Great Depression and made their careers as well-received non-fiction writers.
The list of distinguished graduates from what is now known as the CUNY system is very long indeed.
CUNY as we now know it was created in 1961, but the original four colleges are:
The Free Academy – Founded in 1847 by Townsend Harris, which later became the City College of New York.
The Female Normal and High School – Founded 1870, later renamed the Normal College and again in 1914 renamed Hunter College. In 1931, Hunter opened a Bronx campus, which is now Herbert Lehman college.
Brooklyn College, founded 1930.
Queens College, founded 1937.
https:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_City_College_of_New_York_alumni
https:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hunter_College_people
https:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Brooklyn_College_alumni
https:
/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Queens_College_people
Now CUNY has an additional six full undergraduate colleges, seven community colleges, and four graduate and professional schools.
“offering free college seems like it might not do the trick.”
Putting aside for the moment that the GOP is the party of nihilism, I have to say that THIS college-educated fellow is actually feeling quite similarly about the value of a college education. I cannot even begin to count the number of friends I have who are college-educated, many holding an MA or a PHd, who can’t find work in their field or anywhere. My friend Catherine, for example, is a librarian with an MS and 16 years on-the-job experience. She’s been out of work for three years, because they only want PHds with college teaching experience. I’m a professional writer (and former fundraiser) with gobs of experience: I was out of work for nearly 4 years.
Free college? I can understand why someone from a blue collar background wouldn’t get behind that: no guarantee of a job, even if it’s free.
Now, if the GOP or the Democrat proposed free TRADE school? Fuck yeah. The plumbers and electricians I know are, in general, doing a lot better than many of the college educated people I know. And yes, i know this is anecdotal. But that doesn’t make it less true. As a result, while I will encourage my son to check out college (in Canada, where it’s still affordable) I will also be encouraging him to think about work as a mechanic, an electrician, a plumber, or some kind of field where you don’t need to put yourself into lifelong debt (as I have) for a piddling or nonexistent ROI.
True.
Is this poll result not fairly easily explainable by the right’s fascination with student protests over the past year or so? The level of anti-educational sentiment in this country is certainly a concern, but the poll seems to be reflective of the latest BS shiny object that has captured their attention.
BooMan, I grew up in a college town in the Midwest. I can attest to your characterization. In the 70s, there were many Republicans among the faculty. The state was (and remains) very red. However, there was very little tension between “town and gown” – meaning those inside and outside of the academic community.
I’m not discouting social status, but I would more strongly endorse your perception that those Midwestern Republicans felt strongly about fiscal discipline (including opposition to tax cuts, if they were unsustainable.) Also, I didn’t see you mention national security issues. I remember many Republicans who felt that Democrats were good people, but a bit naive regarding the intentions of the Godless Communists.
Also, I would add that, in Kansas/Nebraska/Colorado, I interacted with Republicans who thought Democrats were suspect because they were strong in the South, and in large cities. These folks were disgusted by the racial violence of the Jim Crow South, and by the machine politics of large cities.
I fear this kind of Midwestern Republican is dying off. If their kids have adopted the views of their parents, they have become Democrats, albeit cautiously. Some remain moderates, and some continue to slide towards more progressive causes.
However, if the current 30 and 40-somethings rejected their parents’ mainline church, they’ve most likely moved to some evangelical mega-church, where they get a very stylish, musically uplifting dose of horseshit every Sunday. Anti-science, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-thinking. Some take the next step, and begin home-schooling the same excrement to their own kids 24/7. The decline of mainline Protestantism, and the rise of fundamentalist/literalist Christianity is a big part of this.