While Oklahoma Dawdles, Its Universities Rot. Even in the reddest of states, higher-ed reform doesn’t come easy.

When accepting the Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Salvatori Prize on May 22, Chris Rufo remarked that state legislatures in red states such as Oklahoma need to start exercising oversight of their public universities.

He’s right. “There is an endemic rot of indoctrination, politicization, and intellectual intimidation,” Joel Gardner observed on this website in 2020, “that is eviscerating the historical purpose and nature of our institutions of higher learning.” This remains true today and not just in elite institutions. The rot is widespread even in public universities in Oklahoma, one of the reddest states in the nation.

Fortunately, with Republicans in possession of supermajority control of both houses of the legislature and holding all statewide elected offices, higher-ed reform is possible here, right?

The most effective reform, for starters, would be for Oklahoma’s political leaders to send a message to regents and college presidents by reducing appropriations to higher education. Unfortunately, Oklahoma’s legislative session ended on May 30, and higher education received a hefty funding boost.

Public choice theory provides a possible clue here: Soon-to-be-former lawmakers sometimes want “a cushy place to land.”

How about rolling back DEI? Both the University of Oklahoma (OU) and Oklahoma State University (OSU) have more DEI staffers than history faculty, and indeed “diversity” is a key part of OU’s strategic plan. Even Oklahoma’s community colleges are not immune. As Florida, Texas, and other states are making progress on this front, an Oklahoma state senator from Norman filed four bills aimed at eliminating DEI practices in higher education. None of the bills received a committee hearing. To his credit, Gov. Kevin Stitt did issue an executive order on DEI.

I listened to a podcast a few months ago and the topic was how Oklahoma led the nation in marijuana grow farms. The reasons why were many but varied, too many licenses given out, properties that were available, easy access to illegals, lack of oversight etc. It won’t come as a surprise to know that by far the chicoms owned the most properties.

It would appear that every state has loopholes in different categories where they are exploited by the left/uniparty/GOPe, as it is said, “because they can.”

When I graduated from college in 1979 there were still a few conservative (meaning normal people) professors. They were teaching because they loved it. All of them had consulting jobs. But you could see how the college was changing. In the engineering side students came in for classes but left for their jobs. On the “other side of campus” the students were there all the time, smoking pot. About the time I graduated the dean of engineering died and his replacement was somewhere between the way we dressed and a hippie. When I was last at an engineering college half the teachers looked and sounded whiffy-gay. And, because of all the government money, there’s no way to work your way through school. If you want the degree, the easily available government money means you simply must take a loan.

I question the value of a college education. So do large companies who now offer their own degrees teaching the skills they actually need. One complaint I had when I had the opportunity to talk to a college dean was, I’d get an engineer and then need to teach him how to use the standard engineering tools virtually every company had. He said, “Yeah, we can’t afford those programs.” Billions in their coffers yet they can’t afford to buy the tools industry needs them to teach their students. College is a waste of time and money.

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