Ronald Brownstein: State Funding To Universities Is Sort Of Decreasing Because The Hate "Kids Of Color"

facepalm
   God, what crap.

Small-government ideology undoubtedly explains part of this shift. But more academic leaders are openly questioning whether other motivations are contributing to it, too. Michael Sorrell, the dynamic and innovative president of Paul Quinn College, a historically black college in Dallas, is one of them. “There’s an argument to be made that part of the reason we see a reduction in support is because the legislators are looking at the students and not seeing themselves,” he told me at an Atlantic education-policy summit this week. “Listen, it could be an unlikely happenstance that people are reducing the support of public education when the students are increasingly diverse and increasingly low-income. Maybe.”

Ah, the old "some people are asking" argument, together with speculation about the motives of your political enemies. Is there a shittier combination of arguments?

   There's no mention of the fact that college costs are going through the roof. Given that, we'd predict that states would provide a smaller share of their funding. We're not told what funding looks like in absolute dollars. We're not told whether higher ed funding has suffered in comparison to, say, infrastructure spending.

   Furthermore, I rather think that public funding for higher ed ought to decrease. My own university has become a bloated behemoth, packed to the gills with frills and baubles and and restaurants and coffee shops, para-faculty and shadow administrators and petty quasi-counselors. Here we only hear about basically three things: (a) "diversity and inclusion," (b) career training, and (c) "engagement," our institution's newest idiotic obsession. We've basically become an organization for the promotion of leftist ideas packaged up by marketers and represented as the uncontroversial opinions of every right-thinking person. "Engagement" is a new "rubric" (a beloved word hereabouts) for the promotion of (a) lower academic standards and (b) progressive causes. It's another way of shifting our emphasis away from scholarly pursuits and in the direction of (as they say) "relevance." And that means: politically-valenced classes and community service. Guess which end of the spectrum those things tend to lean toward?

   Eh, I'm just fed up with this place. You can't go entirely on my perspective. Especially not right now.

   But: one might consider this response to Brownstein: maybe there is a link between more "kids of color" (eyeroll) and lower funding: both are brought about, in part, by the leftward politicization of universities.