Attacks on higher education indicate authoritarian intentions

Diane Roberts says New College of Florida is an example of the political right’s attack on quality higher education (Photo: ncf.edu)

Donald Trump was completely serious when he said he “loves the undereducated.”

Authoritarians always like the poorly educated and poorly educated. The educated, the readers, the questioners, those who demand proof, gather facts and rely on verifiable information (as opposed to propaganda) are a threat.

Aspirants to dictatorship know that the first goal is to destroy education. Nip that critical thinking in the bud.

The Trumpists’ example is New College of Florida, now a sad shadow of a once prominent, much-beloved honors college, raped and plundered by Ron DeSantis, overpaid college president Richard Corcoran, and underqualified trustee Christopher Rufo. the name of fighting a phantom they call ‘awake’.

Leading teachers have fled, admissions standards have been lowered and costs per student have increased.

Not surprisingly, the college fell 24 spots in the U.S. News and World Report rankings.

I’m making a wild guess here: could it be because of vague moves like admitting academically unprepared jocks recruited from Christian schools and offering a course on the dangers of “woke” taught by a Tucker Carlson-backed British commentator and right-wing comedian ?

This is what you have to look forward to, America.

Rufo, who spread the dangerous nonsense about black people barbecuing cats in Ohio, has been called to Mar-a-Lago to discuss how best to cripple American higher education.

Universities that embrace diversity and inclusion or teach courses deemed insufficiently respectful of the “great” white men of the Western world could lose all federal funding.

Ignorance will reign; ignorance is the point.

Florida leads

As always, Florida is leading the way on the path of censorship and institutional stupidity.

The boards of state universities have recently forced colleges to eliminate subjects that were previously part of the core general education curriculum.

The trustees have cut 432 of the 571 courses at Florida State, including classes in women’s films, African-American history, issues in religion and sociology, and anything with “gender” or “race” in the title — anything that, like DeSantis and his accomplices in the Florida Legislature’s claim contains “unproven, speculative or exploratory content.”

The definition of “unproven, speculative or exploratory”? No matter what DeSantis and his favorite reactionaries say, it’s true.

The subjects haven’t been completely eliminated yet: you can still take many as electives, but you can’t get a gene. ed. credit to them.

That means many students will miss the opportunity to explore different perspectives on the world and expand their understanding of what it means to be human.

America, like Florida, is walking backwards toward its future.

A group of book citizens from Texas who called themselves a “citizens committee” had “Colonization and the Wampanoag Story” by Linda Coombs, a Native American historian, placed in the fiction section of their local public libraries.

It seems that Coombs’ well-researched account of how the arrival of Europeans affected the native peoples did not match the image white people prefer: Pilgrims and Indians happily tucking into turkey before settling down for an afternoon football and online shopping.

Librarians, educators, and historians caused an uproar, and the book was eventually returned to the nonfiction shelf where it belongs.

Fires start

But for every small victory over ignorance and resentment, MAGA’s arsonists set another hundred fires: attacking college classes here, banning books there, promoting the Bible as a text for public schools.

As if this wasn’t damaging enough, Donald Trump wants to abolish the Department of Education.

MAGAs do not realize – or care – that they are funding early childhood education projects, language learning initiatives, and programs for children with disabilities and special needs.

In addition, DOE’s Civil Rights Office enforces laws that prevent violence in schools and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and disability, administers Pell Grants and student loans, sponsors apprenticeship programs and donates money to Title I schools.

Without federal funding, the low-income students they serve will suffer.

To carry out his demolition plans, Trump has appointed former WWE CEO Linda McMahon to head DOE.

Her qualifications included lying about having a degree in education and participating in one of WWE’s fake fights in which she pretended to be drugged by her husband so he could have sex with a model-turned-wrestler, then just in time woke up to kick. him in the cross.

She is being sued by five former employees who allege that she, along with other WWE executives, knew they had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by their supervisor.

Exactly the kind of person you want to have overseeing the safety and educational performance of America’s youth.

Vivek Ramaswamy, one of Trump’s imaginative “government efficiency” honchos, likes the idea of ​​blowing up DOE. He accuses public schools of encouraging children to change genders and wants teachers’ unions abolished.

Together with the increasingly unhinged billionaire Elon Musk, Ramaswamy wants to cut up to $2 trillion from the federal budget.

No one outside of Mar-a-Lago or your local mental hospital takes these numbers seriously, but where do you bet the DOGE guys are proposing to cut a few hundred million here and a few million there from medical and scientific research – much of it done at universities?

‘The Enemy’

Vice President-elect JD Vance has declared: “Professors are the enemy.”

He quotes Richard Nixon.

Vance went to Yale, Trump to Penn, and both Ramaswamy and DeSantis have degrees from Yale and Harvard, but you don’t have to graduate from an Ivy to get a world-class education. You can get one at many state universities – assuming the politicians and their hand-picked administrators stop trying to regulate thought.

Like reactionaries from Nixon to Reagan to Bush 43 and beyond, Trump’s “bullying boy brain trust” claims that schools and colleges “indoctrinate” students into caring about social justice, seducing them toward Marxism, feminism, and environmentalism.

Yet they emerged from their supposedly left-wing institutions unscathed by progressivism, unburdened by empathy and disinclined to critical thinking.

What are they so afraid of?

Education is not supposed to make you feel comfortable; it is not intended to reinforce what you think you already know. Education should challenge you, disturb you and perhaps even offer you possibilities you didn’t even know existed.

But instead of shining an ever brighter light on our world, the Trumpists want to make it narrower, meaner, and darker.

This commentary was first published by Florida Phoenix, which, like NC Newsline, is part of the national States Newsroom network.