Republicans wouldn’t attack higher education if it didn’t act like an arm of the Democrats | Opinion
Colleges and universities are under attack everywhere. The latest salvo comes in Kansas where legislators are pushing bills that would strip tenure protections for college professors. The efforts are coming from all over the country from populous states such as Texas and Florida to smaller states like South Carolina and Idaho. In all, hundreds of bills were offered in state legislatures across the country restricting diversity efforts, cutting back on tenure protections and more.
Nationally, colleges are ramping up their Washington, D.C., presence and Republican lobbying muscle to deal with the threat of increased taxes on university endowments that could go from roughly 1% to more than 15% or higher. Already this year, President Donald Trump has tried to cut back on the overhead the National Institutes of Health pays for on campuses to the tune of billions of dollars. Last year, colleges and universities around the country received $60 billion in federal grants.
Barbara Snyder, the president of the Association of American Universities, told The New York Times that Republican anger at universities is growing, but not new. “It’s more challenging than it was 20 years ago,” she said, but added: “I don’t think this has all been an overnight change.”
Neither has the reason for it. The issues on college campuses are the same as they were 20 years ago.
Colleges around the country treat the free speech of conservative students, speakers and faculty with contempt. According to the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 2024 was the worst year on record for free speech on campus and that most of the targeted speech was on the right, followed by threats to the rights of Jewish students and faculty.
Colleges and universities around the country have become increasingly vocal in their endorsement of “social justice,” which usually means left-wing politics and policy. Even at public schools in red states, it is easier to find certificates and minors in liberal “social justice” than it is to find one in the conservative-leaning Enlightenment philosophy of America’s Founding Fathers. Many universities and their individual departments take public positions on political issues far afield from education, including abortion, foreign policy and criminal justice.
Faculty and administrators at universities across the country have become uniformly left-leaning almost to the point of parody. It is a struggle to find a major university where the faculty and administrators give less than 90% of their political donations to Democrats. The University of North Carolina was typical in 2020, giving 95% of donations to Democrats, while the University of Texas, in the reddest of red states, was an outlier at a mere 89%.
While America was divided 50-50 on who should be elected president last year, donations at 20 universities I looked at ran 50-to-1 in favor of Kamala Harris over Trump.
Universities across the country can’t be surprised that Republicans have started to treat them like the enemy. They have, for all intents and purposes, made themselves increasingly an arm of the Democratic Party. Of course Republicans have noticed.
And now universities are left crying that their academic freedom is under attack. Perhaps the way to stop the attack is for universities to reform, giving academic freedom to dissenters from campus orthodoxy, rather than waste their money on an army of lobbyists. Universities’ massive investment in Washington lobbying – St. Louis University in Missouri has increased its lobbying expense by a factor of 14 in just the last few years from $50,000 to more than $700,000 a year in 2024 – is exactly the wrong approach to deal with the threats Republicans are making.
There are a few signs of hope. A small and growing group of schools have adopted the free speech policies promoted by the University of Chicago. A similar group of universities have decided that “institutional neutrality” is a better approach than announcing school positions on everything from the tipped minimum wage to legalizing prostitution. At the University of North Carolina, they’re starting the School of Civic Life and Leadership, the brainchild of Republican-appointed boards of trustees and governors, that could address campus balance issues at the university.
Taking those steps and moving to address the intellectual diversity of faculty would be a more practical approach to disarm the band of pitchfork-waving Republicans who have assembled outside their gates.
This story was originally published February 14, 2025 at 6:08 AM.
