Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:We told you he’s coming for ALL colleges when everyone was gloating about the Ivies getting hit.
DEI, anti-Semitism:
“These are all smokescreens. Trump views colleges as his political enemies, so he is doing everything he can to tear them down. That may be because college graduates overwhelmingly voted for his Democratic opponent, or because college professors produce the research that undermines his baseless claims about everything from climate change to tax cuts. Or he may be influenced by a branch of conservative evangelicals who believe that they need to take over education and other realms.
With Trump, the simplest answer is often the most likely. After winning the Nevada Republican caucuses in 2016 due to support from people who never went to college, he infamously proclaimed, "I love the poorly educated." He's now doing his best to ensure more Americans fit that description.”
Anonymous wrote:
Conservatives left. It wasn’t liberal coercion. Conservatives decided to abandon their intellectual wing to grifters like Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. Conservatives today don’t even know who Edmund Burke is, but instead prop up any anti establishment figure. You can’t whine about meritocracy when you aren’t even attempting to get into the club. Republicans teach their kids that school is indoctrination and college is a scam, and then wonder why their kids aren’t represented in academia.
I agree that conservatives have basically given up on academia and it is a huge loss. I’m liberal (but not far left) and really believe in challenge and debate. I think the right should re-enter academia but this is the wrong way. They are destroying it. I also think DEI is a smokescreen. I wonder why they don’t come up with legitimate intellectual positions instead of this populist garbage.
Trump is a descendent of the anti-intellectualism of Nixon, Agnew, Reagan and the second Bush, as represented in more extreme form in mass media over the years by people like Joe Pyne, Morton Downey and Rush Limbaugh before the advent of social media. Hostility towards elite educational institutions (shorthand reference "Harvard" or "Yale" as pejoratives) and government workers (Agnew: "pointy headed bureaucrats"), with not very subtle appeals to racism as with Limbaugh, were a means for the Republicans, dominated by the country club faction, to gain and maintain political power (Nixon: the Southern Strategy). The anti-intellectualism and racism were interwoven, and we see that here with the attacks on universities through demonizing DEI and appeals to Islamophobia.
But whereas the country club Republicans kept the people who responded to these appeals in check to retain their elite control over the party and achieve their economic objectives, and never actually did much to higher education, this is front and center for Trump and Vance. Enforcing a Hillsdale kind of educational orthodoxy on the US is the objective, a critical pillar for the construction of society where they will be in the ascendency indefinitely.