The One Shutdown We Need

End Leftist Indoctrination in Higher Education. No More RINO Excuses.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ recent proposal to stop all funding for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) bureaucracies in Florida higher education was less important for its substance than for its announcement.  Finally, Republican politicians are being forced to confront the leftist monster in higher education that their decades of collective neglect have fostered.

DeSantis is targeting both a crucial slice of poisonous bureaucracy in higher education and the worst aspects of pedagogical rot there.  DeSantis has required all state universities to report expenditures and resources used for campus activities that relate to DEI and CRT programs.  His parallel proposal would allow greater authority for university presidents and trustee boards to review the conduct of tenured professors.

As policy prescriptions, DeSantis’ proposals carry marginal value at best.  They do not address the utter leftist corruption of higher education in the Sunshine State and the rest of the land; they recall instead his clever transporting of illegals to sanctuary city Martha’s Vineyard to make a statement about open borders.  DEI and CRT funding are trifling parts of a state higher-education budget larded with leftist priorities (that’s equally true of state budgets in the rest of the U.S.).

Likewise, DeSantis’ idea of granting more power to university presidents and trustee boards to rein in especially bad tenured professors is well-intentioned but unlikely to succeed.  The educational appointees who would conduct those reviews are professional captives themselves.  They are highly connected, well-to-do people whose appointments to such boards are generally stepping stones for their careers.  They try to avoid drawing the attention of the bare-fanged Left at least as much as everyone else does.

At Last, Some Accountability

Yet DeSantis must be praised for offering critical leadership.  For over half a century, Republican elected officials, through gross dereliction of duty, have allowed a militant Left to take over higher education.  This societal high ground, once captured, has permitted the Left to fuel their insurgency by force-feeding their ideology down the throats of the nation’s future leaders.  At last in the DeSantis measures, we have some official acknowledgement from GOP leaders that pushback and reforms are needed.

The calamitous and self-serving failure of Republican political leaders—for decades—to address and prevent the Left’s foreseeable seizure of America’s universities was genuinely one of the gravest collective acts of political cowardice in the history of self-government.

There will be time and space in the future to analyze the calamitous and self-serving failure of Republican political leaders—for decades—to address and prevent the Left’s unopposed and foreseeable seizure of America’s universities.  A proper accounting for this is long overdue, for this was genuinely one of the gravest collective acts of political cowardice in the history of self-government.  For now, suffice it to say that this long-running malfeasance has ceded virtually all of the nation’s centers of money and power to the marching columns of the Left.

The story is shopworn but worthy of brief repetition.  In the 1960s, campus radicals stormed the offices of college deans and professors to protest various provocations, particularly the Vietnam War.  Emboldened by their success in cowing university administrations, they began to demand changes in curricula and personnel.  The leftist browbeating and destruction of educational norms that ensued were brilliantly described by Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind.  The book was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and a must-read for conservatives at the time.  That fact is important, because no Republican leader can credibly plead ignorance of the despoliation of higher education as of 1987, the year that watershed book was published.

Yet GOP leaders did nothing.  The Left graduated their cadres of 1960s radicals and then gained professorships for them.  Leftist professors worked with likeminded students to enforce their agenda in the power centers of academia.  This entailed blatant silencing of non-leftists through demonstrations, organized hostility in the classroom, forced cancellations of invitations to conservative speakers, and occasional violence.  Some of this happened at Harvard Law School when Obama, Neil Gorsuch and I were classmates, as related in my book published the year I took office as Maricopa County Attorney.

Not surprisingly, by a five-to-one margin, college professors are more likely to describe themselves as liberal than conservative.  Again, these developments have been known to leaders on the Right for decades.

Higher Education Surrendered to the Barbarians

The Bushes, John McCain, Mitt Romney—name your successful Republican leader of the past half century—looked the other way, mostly because this was a thorny problem to solve.  Now this lunacy has changed the country.  An analysis by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, “The Shaping of the American Mind,” found that the more college degrees a person earns, the more liberal that person becomes.  When Americans were asked, for instance, whether they believe public-school teachers should be allowed to lead a prayer in school, 57 percent of high-school graduates said yes.  That number dropped to 40 percent for college graduates, 30 percent for master’s degree holders, and only 17 percent for Ph.D.’s.  Quite simply, college graduates have become the backbone of the Democratic Party thanks to the Left’s commandeering of academia. 

There are other consequences to this debacle.  College graduates dominate corporate boardrooms, all levels of government, the media—virtually every major institution in America.  Certain professions that actually require college degrees (e.g., law) are, ipso facto, controlled lock, stock and barrel. 

Then there’s political and non-profit fundraising.  Today it is an act of bravery for any right-leaning professional to donate money to conservative candidates or causes, speak up in defense of their beliefs, or otherwise publicly affirm their values.  In doing so they risk limiting or even losing their careers.  Also, college graduates as a group have fatter wallets than other Americans.  This creates a built-in fundraising imbalance between the major political parties, particularly if the GOP candidates are MAGA oriented.  Those Republicans who do have abundant means typically protect themselves by supporting more “reasonable” Republicans, better known as RINOs.

An End to Half Measures

In the face of such an onslaught and the Left’s continuing assault on the less-educated remnant of sanity in the country, the time for half measures is over.  We must insist that all Republican candidates for president and other GOP leaders at the federal or state level take bold and decisive action to rectify these decades of RINO neglect and self-dealing.  Otherwise, the Left will continue to siphon off money and power and consolidate their hardening tyranny by capturing college graduates. 

The solution is straightforward.  Our federal elected officials must vote against any federal budget that does not tie federal funding for higher education to long-overdue reforms so our universities cease being publicly funded factories of leftist aggression. 

If this means another federal shutdown of nonessential services, as has happened several times before, this is the one. This is the mountain to fight on.  It’s existential for us.

Without these changes, the Left’s stranglehold on money and power will only continue to tighten, and elections will become more and more meaningless.  That’s because those few MAGA politicians like Trump who manage to win elections against the odds will, once in office, remain powerless to accomplish anything because they face cadres of college-educated leftists honeycombing our institutions and obstructing their agendas.

State elected officials should enact the same measures.  No more delays.  No more excuses.

Those reforms should include:

·      Ensuring free speech on campus by banning speech codes

·      Mandating the expulsion of students who engage in violence to stifle free speech

·      Repealing tenure for professors

·      Firing currently tenured professors who have provably abused their positions in violation of the First Amendment to advance a particular philosophy.  That would include a demonstrable and consistent pattern of favoring in grades or other ways students who mirror their worldviews.

·      Disciplining professors who effectively encourage leftist intimidation in the classroom by tolerating student hissing and other such ugly tactics, up to and including firing.  Part of a professor’s job is to be a neutral referee in class, not a leftist ringmaster.

·      Setting up academic freedom boards at either the institution or state level to assess complaints against universities or individual professors.  These boards would permit students or professors suffering ideological discrimination to file complaints that could be resolved short of litigation.  This board should not be composed of political insiders and others who typically serve on state education boards. Rather, they should be ordinary citizens.  To find independent people willing to serve without fear or self-promotion, we may have to resort to unusual methods, such as enlisting retirees and others not at risk of being professionally damaged.  As things increasingly stand, we may have to look to the ancients for solutions, such as the Greek practice of sortition, or selecting people by lot.

Because of GOP neglect, this is not an easy problem to solve.  But we must start now, decisively and in earnest, to make up for lost time and turn things around.

The reality is that most people attending college today should not be there anyhow.  Young people are misled by the popular culture into mindlessly plodding off to college and racking up student debts for a degree that, in most cases today, costs more than it’s worth.  These naïve youth become indentured servants to the leftist higher-education establishment and struggle for years to pay off, effectively, the salaries of leftist educators who give them a worthless degree in return.

Working with the fake-news media, Democratic leaders will use all their powers to paint this effort as Armageddon.  That’s because such an agenda does, in fact, represent that very nightmare scenario for them.  These simple reforms are both long overdue and devastating to Democrats, their college-employed shock troops, and the steady streams of indoctrinated and intimidated graduates that will soon start to dry up.  In the long run (a calculation Republican leaders rarely consider beyond lining up their own pensions and post-political lobbying careers), the benefit gained from withstanding these attacks far outweighs the cost.

An Existential Battle

Why hasn’t this been done before?  Quite simply, GOP leaders didn’t want the blowback, and too many conservatives and patriots were distracted by such temporary topics as Hunter Biden’s laptop to insist on it.  But insist we must, since the Left is far better at focusing on what really matters, as shown by their growing power.  This is an existential battle and at long last must be treated as such.

Since Republican leaders overwhelmingly have cared only about reelection and perks doled out by the establishment, it’s up to the grassroots to insist on these policies.  The good news is this strategy works. We saw this in the election of Trump against enormous ruling-class labors and intrigues.  Let’s resolve that 2024 will be the year in which we determine one thing once and for all:  which GOP leaders merely want to bamboozle us with side issues, and which ones are serious about ending one of the obvious root causes of the emerging tyranny in America.

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Andrew Thomas