States are cutting university budgets. Taxpayers aren't interested in funding campus kooks

[PeteS in CA]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/10/14/universities-making-budget-cuts-taxpayers-interested-funding-campus-kooks-column/3970822002/

States are cutting university budgets. Taxpayers aren't interested in funding campus kooks

Times are bad for higher education, and higher educators are beginning to notice it. But the industry’s problems are mostly of its own making.
...
There are lots of cuts in lots of places, and while some of them can be blamed on state budgets, that’s not really what’s going on. ... The ultimate reason for the cuts is that taxpayers in many states no longer think higher education is worth the money.

Faculty members, and the administrators who are the real power in universities nowadays, dismiss this as ignorant anti-intellectualism. But is it?

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make crazy. And higher education has become objectively crazy. It’s not a shock that taxpayers think their money might be better spent elsewhere than on subsidizing enclaves of insanity. It’s especially true when universities spend so much of their time attacking so many of the Americans who pay taxes to support them, from Trump voters, to Christians, to gun owners and businesspeople. It takes a lot of chutzpah to slap someone in the face and then put your hand out for money, but that’s what universities have been doing for decades and with special force over the past few years.
...
Taxpayers may wonder what, exactly, about a truthful historical statement is beyond the bounds of university life, and why unelected educational bureaucrats get to decide what the university’s values are. But more likely they will simply conclude that universities are silly places, not worthy of their tax dollars.

Nor is what happened at Maine an isolated example. Websites like Campus Reform, The College Fix, and Minding The Campus provide a steady diet of similar — or worse — behavior at schools across the nation. And, of course, after the 2016 election, we were treated to such absurdities as the University of Michigan Law School offering Play-Doh, coloring sheets, and Legos for students in need of comfort after the election, while Stanford University reminded people that psychological counseling was available for those suffering “uncertainty, anger, anxiety and/or fear” from Hillary Clinton’s defeat. At Cornell they had a “cry in.”  At Yale, they had a “group scream.”

Education, for decades or even centuries in the US, has been a sacred cow, untouchable by criticism. But normal US people are waking up to the fact that the sacred cow has bovine spongiform encephalopathy. And that it's self-inflicted.

[Free Vulcan]

Still believe the Fedgov should only fund legit majors that lead to real world jobs. Let the donors fund the rest.

That would stop the kookleft stuff in it's tracks.

[The_Reader_David]

The problem with this is that cutting university budgets without actually cutting things that ought to be cut by doing things like abolishing all programs and departments with names of the form [Affirmative-action-beneficiary-group-name-here] Studies, defunding Multicultural Centers, and specifically cutting the budgets of Offices of Student Life, targeting in particular moneys used for things like "Sex-Positive Freshman Orientation", the cuts will be spread across all academic programs, hitting useful things like engineering and the sciences, just as much as the things that should be cut, and the administrators (who are actually the main source of rot in American higher education, polling to the left of the faculty and paying themselves fat salaries even though they neither teach nor conduct research nor do extension work) will leave their sinecures untouched, requiring "cost centers" (which somehow never include higher administration) like academic departments and the librarys absorb all the cuts.

The taxpayers will still fund the kooks, while harming the departments that are still doing what a university is supposed to do.

[roamer_1]

Still believe the Fedgov should only fund legit majors that lead to real world jobs. Let the donors fund the rest.

That would stop the kookleft stuff in it's tracks.

Like anything, any time a market segment is extraordinarily high, there is something propping it up.
Government indemnifies the school system from kindergarten on up. There is nothing to stop them from teaching whatever they want. They get paid any which way, leaving their students as the bag-holder.

I think that is by design.

And like anything, the way to fix it is to knock out the props.
Remove government subsidies, student loans, and grants, and watch what happens.

[Absalom]

Would be refreshing if some skipped the political malarkey occasionally.
Our educational structure is another modern fad from the French Enlightenment,
and obsessed w/credentials, the hallmark of our intellectual pretentiousness.
The Greeks and  Romans, who birthed Western Civilization, were self-taught and
in the process created:
* Representative Governance,
* Geometry and Architecture,
* History,
* Literature,
* Philosophy and Logic,
* Science;
to name just some, yet modern assholery
insists 'We are the greatest ever'!!!

[roamer_1]

Would be refreshing if some skipped the political malarkey occasionally.
Our educational structure is another modern fad from the French Enlightenment,
and obsessed w/credentials, the hallmark of our intellectual pretentiousness.
[...]

If yours is a bid toward apprenticeship, internship, and learning by doing, I heartily concur.

[Absalom]

If yours is a bid toward apprenticeship, internship, and learning by doing, I heartily concur.

------------------------------
Roamer, as you already know:
* Plato defined representative governance in his "Republic".
* Euclid created Geometry w/o which modern structure is impossible.
* Homer's Iliad and Odyssey created the novel.
* Archimedes defined buoyancy, creating fluid mechanics, permitting ocean travel.
There's multiple dozens more yet reflect on how deprived they must have felt w/o "college degrees"?????

[roamer_1]

------------------------------
Roamer, as you already know:
* Plato defined representative governance in his "Republic".
* Euclid created Geometry w/o which modern structure is impossible.
* Homer's Iliad and Odyssey created the novel.
* Archimedes defined buoyancy defining fluid mechanics permitting ocean travel.
There's hundreds more yet reflect on how deprived they must have felt w/o "college degrees"?????

Oh, the humanity!

 

[goatprairie]

Would be refreshing if some skipped the political malarkey occasionally.
Our educational structure is another modern fad from the French Enlightenment,
and obsessed w/credentials, the hallmark of our intellectual pretentiousness.
The Greeks and  Romans, who birthed Western Civilization, were self-taught and
in the process created:
* Representative Governance,
* Geometry and Architecture,
* History,
* Literature,
* Philosophy and Logic,
* Science;
to name just some, yet modern assholery
insists 'We are the greatest ever'!!!

What? And get rid of "gender and women's studies"? What can you be thinking?   How can the country survive without parents wasting...er...spending hundred of thousands of dollars on their daughters majoring in "gender and women's studies"?

[IsailedawayfromFR]

The problem with this is that cutting university budgets without actually cutting things that ought to be cut by doing things like abolishing all programs and departments with names of the form [Affirmative-action-beneficiary-group-name-here] Studies, defunding Multicultural Centers, and specifically cutting the budgets of Offices of Student Life, targeting in particular moneys used for things like "Sex-Positive Freshman Orientation", the cuts will be spread across all academic programs, hitting useful things like engineering and the sciences, just as much as the things that should be cut, and the administrators (who are actually the main source of rot in American higher education, polling to the left of the faculty and paying themselves fat salaries even though they neither teach nor conduct research nor do extension work) will leave their sinecures untouched, requiring "cost centers" (which somehow never include higher administration) like academic departments and the librarys absorb all the cuts.

The taxpayers will still fund the kooks, while harming the departments that are still doing what a university is supposed to do.

only way to accomplish that is for better university board members to be appointed by the governor who will enact those cuts correctly.

[skeeter]

Still believe the Fedgov should only fund legit majors that lead to real world jobs. Let the donors fund the rest.

That would stop the kookleft stuff in it's tracks.

Send the money to vocational schools instead.

[The_Reader_David]

only way to accomplish that is for better university board members to be appointed by the governor who will enact those cuts correctly.

The cuts don't usually get enacted by the regents or trustees or whatever the particular state calls them.  They get enacted by university administrators, who, as I observed, as a group poll to the left of university faculty (yes that's possible, those of us in the sciences, plus engineering and business schools keep the faculty as a whole from drifting as far left as the administators, who, by the nature of their positions are the sort of people who think they should be running every else's life and business, the very sort of people who in all spheres of life tend to be leftists, and self-selected out of the already left-leaning population of the faculty.)

[Absalom]

What? And get rid of "gender and women's studies"? What can you be thinking?   How can the country survive without parents wasting...er...spending hundred of thousands of dollars on their daughters majoring in "gender and women's studies"?

------------------------------
Hmm........Prairie, you may be on to something here!!!

[IsailedawayfromFR]

The cuts don't usually get enacted by the regents or trustees or whatever the particular state calls them.  They get enacted by university administrators, who, as I observed, as a group poll to the left of university faculty (yes that's possible, those of us in the sciences, plus engineering and business schools keep the faculty as a whole from drifting as far left as the administators, who, by the nature of their positions are the sort of people who think they should be running every else's life and business, the very sort of people who in all spheres of life tend to be leftists, and self-selected out of the already left-leaning population of the faculty.)

and don't the college trustees and board members select those administrators?

Get the right board, they will select the right people to run the college.

As an example, go lookup who is the chairman of the board of Oberlin College which lost a scandalous lawsuit against a bakery it defamed.

Hint: he works for Soros.