Universities have suffered a cataclysmic decline in public approval and support.
A Gallup poll taken this year found that only 36% of Americans polled either expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education—once the agreed-on touchstone to upward mobility.
Gifting to most universities has been down for two consecutive years.
There is zero intellectual diversity on most university campuses.
Speakers with conservative viewpoints are often either disinvited or shouted down—and worse.
The
federally guaranteed student loan program is in shambles. Some $1.7
trillion in outstanding loans were taken out by half of all college
students.
Nearly one-fifth are now not being paid back.
Marriage,
child-rearing, and home ownership are all delayed by some 40 million
indebted graduates, who can take decades to pay loans back.
The
Biden administration demagogued the issue by illegally granting rolling
student loan amnesties—to win votes just before both the midterm and
general elections. That proposed debt relief would be covered by
taxpayers, over half of whom never went to college.
The expansion
of student loan debt roughly correlates with universities raising their
annual costs higher than the rate of inflation—largely due to
administrative bloat.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court recently
struck down the practice of using race and gender to adjudicate
applications and hiring, universities are already seeking ways to
circumvent the ruling.
Asian and white Americans for decades have
been systematically, overtly, and supposedly with justification,
discriminated against by ignoring or not requiring test scores and
downplaying grade point averages.
Stanford University may be representative of these crises.
In
the 2020 election, 94% of Stanford faculty voted for the Joe
Biden-Kamala Harris ticket. Four years later, some 96% of all
Stanford-affiliated donations went to Democrats during the 2024 election
season.
Former Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried—parents of mega-Democratic donor and now imprisoned
Sam Bankman-Fried, and recipients of millions in gifts from their
felonious son—were reportedly heavily involved in either bundling large
left-wing campaign donations or offering legal advice to their son’s
bankrupt and Ponzi-like business.
In 2023, a federal judge was shouted down at Stanford Law School, his lecture aborted and then hijacked—by a Stanford diversity, equity, and inclusion administrator!
Former Donald Trump health advisor and Hoover Institution scholar Scott Atlas in 2020 was censured by the Stanford faculty.
Yet
subsequent events supported Atlas’s prescient warning that a complete
lockdown of the country and the shutdown of K-12 schools would not only
not retard the COVID-19 epidemic, but would cause far greater economic,
social, cultural, and health damage than the virus itself.
Two
recent attempts to lift that censure failed—in part because some faculty
claimed—that to do so would empower the Trump reelection bid!
In
contrast, Stanford professor Jeff Hancock, who founded the “Stanford
Social Media Lab,” boasts he researches ‘how people use deception with
technology.” Yet when liberal Minnesota officials wanted such “experts”
to support their new law banning “deep fake” technology at election
time, they called in the expert deception-detector Hancock.
However, the references Hancock provided to prove his support for the law allegedly never existed.
In
fact, the lawyers who challenged his online expertise argued his
sources apparently were invented by artificial intelligence software
like ChatGPT.
Who will police the deception police?
Last
academic year, anti-Israel Stanford students with impunity violated
university rules and camped out for months in the free speech area,
shouting and disrupting passersby.
A small group of students occupied and trashed the president’s office, and another vandalized historic campus architecture.
After Oct. 7, a Stanford lecturer was suspended for singling out and targeting Jewish students in his classroom.
A
Stanford faculty committee on antisemitism recently concluded, “The
most existential problem at Stanford is the emergence of a general
atmosphere in which Jewish and Israeli members of the Stanford community
are denied dignity and respect based on their Jewish identities, denied
treatment and protection afforded to other minority groups, and
afforded equal respect and inclusion only if they denounce Israel in
various ways and forms.”
Can out-of-control universities reform?
The incoming Trump administration has floated a variety of tough-love remedies.
They
include predicating hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants
on campuses’ adherence to the Bill of Rights, taxing the income on
universities multibillion-dollar endowments, and removing the federal
government from the student loan business.
Recently, there have been a few hopeful signs that campuses are aware of the need to change.
At
Stanford, a new president was hired, widely respected for his singular
commitment to disinterested education and freedom of expression.
The SAT entrance exam is returning to many campuses and is still appreciated as crucial to most universities’ applications.
A number of partisan elite college presidents have resigned in disgrace.
So, hope springs eternal, even if it may be too little, too late.
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