How Trump Let Us Down on Higher Ed, and How He Can Make Amends in 2021

American Thinker.com ^ | November 19, 2020 | Robert Oscar Lopez

[Kaslin]

I'm rooting for Donald Trump to beat the odds and get sworn in for a second term in January 2021.

I'm also praying that in a second term, he'll pick up one of the balls he dropped in his first term. The ball to which I refer is the persecution of conservatives in higher education.

By now, conservatives have spent so many decades complaining about anti-conservative bias on college campuses that it feels as though everybody has stopped listening. I contributed one chapter to a recent book, Church and State, in which I discuss the long history of complaining about liberal domination of the university, including the famous figures of William F. Buckley, Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, David Horowitz, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk.

All these commentators became famous while college liberalism only got worse. It stuns me that so few people have ever stepped back to ask why this could be. How is it that more we complain about liberals in higher education, the more liberal colleges become?

The root problem facing conservatives in college education is a system of unfair labor practices. Higher education's dual track professorate separating tenure-track from "temporary" instructor lines has been thoroughly criticized because of its exploitation of adjuncts and graduate assistants. People fighting racial discrimination have long noted that tenure yields underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos.

As I point out in a chapter of Church and State, conservatives are another group mistreated by the abusive nature of tenure. The same cultural snobbery and labyrinth of unwritten rules that have allowed the liberal professorate to shut out other "people who don't fit in" also shut out conservatives, and through the same mechanisms. The tenure system introduces a great deal of subjectivity and arbitrary discretion into personnel decisions.

[LS]

Virtually every Trump “let down” comes back to one, or more accurately, two people: Jeff Sessions and Bill Barrstool.

These to yokels have been really good at busting black-market pharma and, to their great credit, at shutting down child trafficking.

They have been horrible at every other aspect of their job.

[maddog55]

“Higher education” as it stands today is a joke anyway.

Students learn little, get indoctrinated, come out knowing nothing but wanting everything, blame anyone but themselves, work off emotion and can’t stand facts.

It’s the basic definition of a liberal.

[rlmorel]

Heya LS...hope all is well.

I have to admit, I saw this article, and it brought to mind the criticisms of the framers of the Constitution back in 1789 for not eliminating slavery and giving women and blacks the right to vote when they ratified the Constitution.

For the past four years, Trump did so much with people hanging on his back, trying to trip him up, trying to obstruct him, impeach him, or put him in jail, that it is amazing he got ANYTHING done.

[LS]

The business of having the Senate “confirm” is in my mind NOT set in the Constitution. The phrase is “advice & consent.” Consent to what? Consent to the nominee? Or consent to the PROCESS? Advice doesn’t have to be taken.

This needs to be reviewed, and we sure can’t trust the senate to do it.

[wrcase]

Too many Republicans are rah-rah school spirit dorks. “Can’t reform colleges and universities, might hurt sports recruiting.”

[Vaduz]

Now days the education system is a shell game for federal funds only states should fund their schools it’s a sink or swim option wager many would get their act together at the speed of light.