Follow this authorPerry Bacon Jr.'s opinions
Follow
Public colleges are reliant on states and the federal government for much of their funding, so they need politicians on their side to survive. But although Democrats often try to make college more affordable, such as President Barack Obama’s proposal for free community college, the party hasn’t positioned itself as a stalwart defender of universities. Until recently, that wasn’t necessary — the happenings on campuses weren’t at the center of state and national politics.
And many Democratic politicians and prominent left-leaning figures have positions on higher education that make them less than ideal defenders of it. They view college as a luxury for students who choose to pay for it and a pathway to white-collar jobs, as opposed to a place for learning and intellectual development. As factory jobs declined and racial inequality persisted, the Clinton and Obama administrations pushed K-12 reform and expanded college access as ways for working-class Americans to essentially educate themselves into the middle class with a bit of government help.
Advertisement
So Democrats who consistently push for increased funding for K-12 schools and forcefully oppose cuts to that spending aren’t as invested in public dollars for colleges and universities. They haven’t opposed the gradual shift in financing of higher education over the past four decades, as colleges went from charging low tuition to dramatically increasing costs and expecting most students to take out loans.
Also, many prominent Democrats agree with and therefore reinforce conservative depictions of colleges as enclaves for the elite and super-liberal. Democratic politicians, their children, their advisers and the journalists whose articles they read disproportionately attend or attended Ivy League schools and other expensive private colleges with lots of rich students and some very vocal left-wing professors and activist groups. So leading Democrats’ personal experiences don’t match reality: The overwhelming majority of American students attend public colleges that don’t have intense left- or right-wing activism, in part because many of those students have part-time jobs and don’t live on campus.
Another reason Democrats are reluctant to defend colleges is that an overly simplistic view of the electorate has taken hold within the party. White Americans without bachelor’s degrees are increasingly voting Republican, while White Americans with degrees are shifting left. The nondegree group is about 40 percent of voters, those with a bachelor’s about 30 percent. So many Democratic pundits and strategists (wrongly) argue electoral math requires the party to distance itself from people who are attending or graduated from college.
Advertisement
“People say to me sometimes, ‘Well, Joe, that’s great, you’re helping people get into college, but how about all those hard-working people you grew up with in the neighborhood? How about all those folks in labor unions? How about all those hard-working people that work with their hands?” President Biden said in a speech in February.
I doubt people are actually coming up to the sitting president and complaining that he is too supportive of Americans going to college. Hopefully Biden doesn’t actually think (wrongly) that the country is neatly divided between non-unionized college graduates in cushy office jobs and unionized non-college graduates who mostly work with their hands. I suspect this is just pandering to older White voters.
When you combine Republicans’ organized, intense campaign against colleges and universities with Democrats’ ambivalence, you arrive at our terrible situation: students across the country graduating with loads of debt, university budget cuts in both blue and red states, officials in Texas as well as Michigan and California trying to limit left-wing protests on campus.
Advertisement
Democrats and the broader left are addressing some of these issues. The Biden administration is trying to forgive as much education debt as it can and continuing Obama’s push for free community college. New Mexico and Minnesota have created free tuition programs for four years of college. Democratic politicians and liberal activists are rightly attacking Republican restrictions on the teaching of critical race theory and rollbacks of diversity, equity and inclusion programs as partisan actions to make campuses more conservative on racial issues.
But none of that adds up to a broader vision for higher education. I worry the right will keep winning on this issue if conservatives have a clear view that inspires their base (“colleges are centers of ‘woke’ indoctrination”) and liberals are saying a bunch of disparate things.
Defining higher education as a public good is that unifying idea for the left. It reflects how most Democrats (and I suspect many Republicans and independents) actually think about colleges and universities. Politicians fund colleges (although not enough) for the same reasons they spend money on K-12 schooling: a more educated populace is good for the nation collectively, not just something that benefits the individuals who attend. Elected officials try (but not hard enough) to keep public college tuition low because they view higher education as something everyone should have access to, no matter their income.
Advertisement
They use government funds to pay professors and university staff because they are the necessary employees to carry out an essential public service, like firefighters and librarians.
And even if politicians and the public don’t recognize this, schools and universities provide a number of benefits that can’t easily be replicated by businesses or the private sector. They are often one of the biggest employers and health-care providers in small towns and rural areas. Research at universities has led to medical innovations that have saved lives and scholarly findings that have dramatically improved public policy.
“Public education is infrastructure. It belongs in the same category as our roads, bridges, utilities, municipal services, parks, libraries and everything else we need to operate society as a collective,” education writer John Warner argues in his book “Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education.”
Advertisement
If higher education is rightly recognized as a public good, policy should be aligned with that principle. Tuition should be free at public colleges, and those institutions should also help lower-income students pay for housing and other costs while in school. That will require much more funding from states and the federal government.
It is also essential to maintain high numbers of professors and staff on campus, just as we need sufficient numbers of teachers in middle schools.
Classes in English, humanities and other subjects that aren’t clearly tied to jobs should be encouraged because they are part of a full education. We aren’t cutting literature in K-12, even though most people don’t quote Shakespeare in their jobs.
We need strong protections for academics to research what they wish. There’s going to be less groundbreaking scholarship if professors are worried they will be fired or lose research funding if their findings don’t align with politicians’ views.
Advertisement
To reinforce the idea of colleges as being for the public and deserving of government funding, defenders of higher education should particularly highlight the virtues of community colleges and four-year public colleges, where the overwhelmingly majority of students go, not small exclusive schools such as Harvard.
Speaking favorably about colleges isn’t some huge danger to the Democratic Party. Voting patterns are more based on religion, ideology and other factors than whether someone attended college. But reframing higher education as a public good has political value, too. It shifts away from the idea that higher education is by and for elites, with people without degrees locked out of many jobs and only those from prestigious colleges getting the top roles.
The left and center-left should be trying to create a society in which higher education is available to everyone who wants it but in which there are also plenty of steady, decent-paying jobs with good benefits that don’t require a degree.
Advertisement
It’s unfortunate that higher education has become such a political issue. But today’s right is at war with many ideals that I thought were safe and sacrosanct, such as respecting election results. Liberals need to strongly defend higher education or eventually live in a nation that no longer has colleges and universities that foster innovation and social mobility, draw brilliant students and professors from across the world, and fuel the economies of small towns across the country.
Share Comments
Popular opinions articles
HAND CURATED
- Opinion|Ken Burns on Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ and the Black history of country April 3, 2024Opinion|Ken Burns on Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ and the Black history of country April 3, 2024
- Opinion|The mournful isolation of Israel six months after terrorists attackedApril 4, 2024Opinion|The mournful isolation of Israel six months after terrorists attackedApril 4, 2024
- Opinion|Here’s why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned with capitalism April 1, 2024Opinion|Here’s why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned with capitalism April 1, 2024
View 3 more stories Sign up
Republican officials and conservative activists have long demonized America’s colleges and universities as centers of elitism, hyper-liberalism and wasteful spending. And in purple and red states, they are increasingly enacting policies in line with that vision: putting Republicans with little higher education experience in top roles at universities, banning classes and programs that don’t align with conservative beliefs, and either cutting or not increasing funding at colleges, leading to the shuttering of departments and even entire schools.
Democratic officials and the broader left generally support America’s long-standing system of universities that operate largely independently from partisan politics. Now, they need to act on that belief by aggressively and forcefully pushing back against the right’s war on colleges.
There’s nothing new about conservatives attacking academia. The right views universities like the news media: as a left-leaning institution that must be delegitimized, weakened or taken over by conservatives. Attacking the University of California at Berkeley as a symbol of out-of-control liberalism was part of how future president Ronald Reagan rose to power in the 1960s.
That said, over the past decade, the Republican Party has become even more fixated on what’s happening on campuses. Bashing colleges and enacting policies to constrain them weren’t hallmarks of being a George W. Bush-era Republican politician.
Public colleges are reliant on states and the federal government for much of their funding, so they need politicians on their side to survive. But although Democrats often try to make college more affordable, such as President Barack Obama’s proposal for free community college, the party hasn’t positioned itself as a stalwart defender of universities. Until recently, that wasn’t necessary — the happenings on campuses weren’t at the center of state and national politics.
And many Democratic politicians and prominent left-leaning figures have positions on higher education that make them less than ideal defenders of it. They view college as a luxury for students who choose to pay for it and a pathway to white-collar jobs, as opposed to a place for learning and intellectual development. As factory jobs declined and racial inequality persisted, the Clinton and Obama administrations pushed K-12 reform and expanded college access as ways for working-class Americans to essentially educate themselves into the middle class with a bit of government help.
So Democrats who consistently push for increased funding for K-12 schools and forcefully oppose cuts to that spending aren’t as invested in public dollars for colleges and universities. They haven’t opposed the gradual shift in financing of higher education over the past four decades, as colleges went from charging low tuition to dramatically increasing costs and expecting most students to take out loans.
Also, many prominent Democrats agree with and therefore reinforce conservative depictions of colleges as enclaves for the elite and super-liberal. Democratic politicians, their children, their advisers and the journalists whose articles they read disproportionately attend or attended Ivy League schools and other expensive private colleges with lots of rich students and some very vocal left-wing professors and activist groups. So leading Democrats’ personal experiences don’t match reality: The overwhelming majority of American students attend public colleges that don’t have intense left- or right-wing activism, in part because many of those students have part-time jobs and don’t live on campus.
Another reason Democrats are reluctant to defend colleges is that an overly simplistic view of the electorate has taken hold within the party. White Americans without bachelor’s degrees are increasingly voting Republican, while White Americans with degrees are shifting left. The nondegree group is about 40 percent of voters, those with a bachelor’s about 30 percent. So many Democratic pundits and strategists (wrongly) argue electoral math requires the party to distance itself from people who are attending or graduated from college.
“People say to me sometimes, ‘Well, Joe, that’s great, you’re helping people get into college, but how about all those hard-working people you grew up with in the neighborhood? How about all those folks in labor unions? How about all those hard-working people that work with their hands?” President Biden said in a speech in February.
I doubt people are actually coming up to the sitting president and complaining that he is too supportive of Americans going to college. Hopefully Biden doesn’t actually think (wrongly) that the country is neatly divided between non-unionized college graduates in cushy office jobs and unionized non-college graduates who mostly work with their hands. I suspect this is just pandering to older White voters.
When you combine Republicans’ organized, intense campaign against colleges and universities with Democrats’ ambivalence, you arrive at our terrible situation: students across the country graduating with loads of debt, university budget cuts in both blue and red states, officials in Texas as well as Michigan and California trying to limit left-wing protests on campus.
Democrats and the broader left are addressing some of these issues. The Biden administration is trying to forgive as much education debt as it can and continuing Obama’s push for free community college. New Mexico and Minnesota have created free tuition programs for four years of college. Democratic politicians and liberal activists are rightly attacking Republican restrictions on the teaching of critical race theory and rollbacks of diversity, equity and inclusion programs as partisan actions to make campuses more conservative on racial issues.
But none of that adds up to a broader vision for higher education. I worry the right will keep winning on this issue if conservatives have a clear view that inspires their base (“colleges are centers of ‘woke’ indoctrination”) and liberals are saying a bunch of disparate things.
Defining higher education as a public good is that unifying idea for the left. It reflects how most Democrats (and I suspect many Republicans and independents) actually think about colleges and universities. Politicians fund colleges (although not enough) for the same reasons they spend money on K-12 schooling: a more educated populace is good for the nation collectively, not just something that benefits the individuals who attend. Elected officials try (but not hard enough) to keep public college tuition low because they view higher education as something everyone should have access to, no matter their income.
They use government funds to pay professors and university staff because they are the necessary employees to carry out an essential public service, like firefighters and librarians.
And even if politicians and the public don’t recognize this, schools and universities provide a number of benefits that can’t easily be replicated by businesses or the private sector. They are often one of the biggest employers and health-care providers in small towns and rural areas. Research at universities has led to medical innovations that have saved lives and scholarly findings that have dramatically improved public policy.
“Public education is infrastructure. It belongs in the same category as our roads, bridges, utilities, municipal services, parks, libraries and everything else we need to operate society as a collective,” education writer John Warner argues in his book “Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education.”
If higher education is rightly recognized as a public good, policy should be aligned with that principle. Tuition should be free at public colleges, and those institutions should also help lower-income students pay for housing and other costs while in school. That will require much more funding from states and the federal government.
It is also essential to maintain high numbers of professors and staff on campus, just as we need sufficient numbers of teachers in middle schools.
Classes in English, humanities and other subjects that aren’t clearly tied to jobs should be encouraged because they are part of a full education. We aren’t cutting literature in K-12, even though most people don’t quote Shakespeare in their jobs.
We need strong protections for academics to research what they wish. There’s going to be less groundbreaking scholarship if professors are worried they will be fired or lose research funding if their findings don’t align with politicians’ views.
To reinforce the idea of colleges as being for the public and deserving of government funding, defenders of higher education should particularly highlight the virtues of community colleges and four-year public colleges, where the overwhelmingly majority of students go, not small exclusive schools such as Harvard.
Speaking favorably about colleges isn’t some huge danger to the Democratic Party. Voting patterns are more based on religion, ideology and other factors than whether someone attended college. But reframing higher education as a public good has political value, too. It shifts away from the idea that higher education is by and for elites, with people without degrees locked out of many jobs and only those from prestigious colleges getting the top roles.
The left and center-left should be trying to create a society in which higher education is available to everyone who wants it but in which there are also plenty of steady, decent-paying jobs with good benefits that don’t require a degree.
It’s unfortunate that higher education has become such a political issue. But today’s right is at war with many ideals that I thought were safe and sacrosanct, such as respecting election results. Liberals need to strongly defend higher education or eventually live in a nation that no longer has colleges and universities that foster innovation and social mobility, draw brilliant students and professors from across the world, and fuel the economies of small towns across the country.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
