Replies

Five Ways Campus Turmoil Hurts Democrats and America

COMMENTARY

By Charles Lipson - RCP ContributorApril 30, 2024

Higher education is sinking lower and lower. That’s bad news for our country, which has benefited enormously from having the world’s best system of higher education. And it’s bad news for Democrats, who face a tight election. Their party is closely tied to education at all levels, especially at elite universities. It is the party of experts, after all, and the party of the left. Universities are both. Moreover, since the Democrats control the Executive Branch, the public holds them primarily accountable for ensuring social order. Their failures are obvious to the average voter. That’s bound to hurt Democratic Party candidates in November.

Parents with children in college or expected to matriculate soon have every right to expect their kids can learn in peace, hear diverse viewpoints, and speak freely without threats, intimidation, or indoctrination. That’s true whether the parents are Jewish or not. Decent Americans won’t tolerate threats against Jewish students any more than they would tolerate them against blacks, Muslims, Christians, or Asian Americans. Yet they now see those threats against Jewish students every day, and, at many universities, they don’t see administrators standing up for their rights.

Parents don’t understand why their kids aren’t being protected. They are unhappy that classes have been canceled and graduation ceremonies relegated to Zoom. They are dismayed that their tax money is being flushed down a sinkhole of anti-American propaganda. They wonder what in the world has happened to once-respected institutions. Good question.

These problems are bad news for Democrats generally. That they come in an election year gives them immediacy. Support for terrorists on the part of students and some faculty, combined with huge, sometimes violent, demonstrations hurts Democrats in several ways.

The first, and most obvious, is that Democrats and universities are seen as ideological soulmates. That association is particularly prominent in Ivy League schools, Stanford, and flagship state universities, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Texas. It is pervasive in the humanities division at every school, from Princeton to Northeast Podunk State. You are as likely to find a Republican professor of English as a Republican at NPR.

If faculty members kept their lockstep ideological fervor to themselves, their courses would be properly insulated from partisan politics. They aren’t. In fact, faculty are happy to proclaim their views in class and, worse, to insist their students fall in line. Many professors are proud ideologues, intolerant of other views. Some are outright propagandists. They expect students to parrot those views or pay the price. That’s wrong. It’s a betrayal of what higher education should be.

The public can now see this bias thanks to campus demonstrations. They can see the pernicious effects of identity politics, dividing the world into the “oppressed” (who are deemed righteous) and the “oppressors” (who are deemed guilty), based solely on their identity. They can see the sneering contempt for alternative views, or even common sense.

This repressive, illiberal campus culture is a grievous problem for universities. It has become a problem for Democrats, too, because they have been so close to universities for so long. They cannot escape that association now that it has turned toxic. That’s true even though most mainstream Democrats are appalled by the violence and intolerance they see on campus. Yet they are inextricably linked to it in the public mind, with no easy escape.