university

Higher education is So Hot Right Now.

Tenure is an archaic and sclerotic system that blunts education innovation, teacher accountability and student learning.

Donny Kendal and John Nothdurft bring you episode #169 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s episode features work from the Goldwater Institute, and the Foundation for Economic Education.

Unfortunately, many recent college graduates report putting off buying cars or homes, saving for retirement, or marriage due to student loan debt.

“Donald J. Trump won the U.S Presidency despite perpetuating sexism, white supremacy, xenophobia, nationalism, nativism, and imperialism.”

In today’s edition of the Heartland Institute’s education podcast, your host, education research fellow and managing editor of School Reform News, Teresa Mull, spoke to Heartland’s own Kyle Maichle, project manager for Constitutional Reform.

One needs only to observe the aggressive pursuit of “diversity” in admissions and hiring, the abandonment of the traditional curriculum in favor of highly politicized “studies” based on group identity, the mandatory workshops on sensitivity training, and so on to fully comprehend the stranglehold the Left has managed to secure today within our schools, especially at the university level where instructors need not be as concerned with parental interference, but instead have a captive audience in which to indoctrinate our children to their Marxist philosophies

There has always been a struggle to keep our freedom and, it is the responsibility of each generation to do what is necessary to retain this most valuable asset. Today our battle for that basic right is happening at the most unlikely of places: college campuses. Few parents, even the ones who pay massive college tuition bills, may not know their children are being challenged by an unprecedented dose of liberal indoctrination by teachers, professors, school administrators, and outside political activists who use intimidating tactics to persuade students to their viewpoint.

Writing in Canon and Culture, Prof. Colin Garbarino of Houston Baptist University poses an interesting and accurate critique of the common notion that the nation’s colleges and universities indoctrinate a generally conservative or at least politically and culturally neutral incoming student population into advanced progressive leftism and political correctness. They do impose such an agenda, he notes, but the overwhelming majority of students they are indoctrinating have already heard and adopted its fundamental premises upon arrival.

Co-author Elizabeth Clarke remembers attending a speech in Waukegan, IL with her late husband in the summer of 1967, at which Senator Everett Dirksen (Senator Dirksen represented Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1933 – 1939 and the U.S. Senate from 1951 until his death in 1969.) spoke passionately against the then-pending Supreme Court case of Keyishian et al v Board of Regents that ruled against loyalty oaths.

College education has more and more been described by the political left as a right to which citizens ought to be entitled. This view has been popularized among left-leaning students, many of whom are energized by ruinously expensive college loans. They clamor for the “fair solution”, namely that the government should pay for all of it. The effort to make college a right is a disastrous proposition. It is a dangerous pipe-dream that could devastate an already rickety higher education sector. There are problems with the way student loans and college fees operate at present, but this is not the way to fix it.

The benefits of government-funded university research are not shared widely enough in society, with universities retaining full ownership, for the most part, of their academic work. This means they get to profit from the government-funded research, and rarely have to share it with the taxpayers. By mandating that the research it spends so much taxpayer money on enter the public sphere, the government can more effectively spread the benefits of its own largesse and do its duty to all its citizens to provide them with the full benefit of what it produces with their tax money.

University presidents are becoming ever more plutocratic even as the students find it harder and harder to pay for their studies.