Conservative historian and scholar, Victor Davis Hanson, believes the time has finally come for a reckoning in higher education.
Colleges and universities have always leaned left, but in recent years Americans have watched in horror as academia turned into a straight-up progressive indoctrination machine. People go into debt to send their kids to these schools which then transform their once happy children into raging Marxists.
If colleges want to be that way, it’s their business but it doesn’t have to be done with taxpayer dollars.
Hanson writes at Townhall:
Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education?
Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal — and suicidal.
They did so with impunity.
Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.
By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.
Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.
Hanson suggests that college endowments are now fair game:
Congress will soon pass legislation that will tax the annual multimillion-dollar income from multibillion-dollar endowments at somewhere between 15 and 20%.
There will be no more “overhead” or “surcharges” on government campus grants allowed larger than 15%.
Those two reforms alone could cost some of the richest campuses nearly a half billion dollars a year in lost income.
Everyone should pay close attention to what’s happening with the Trump administration and Columbia University. It’s basically a preview of what is going to happen at a number of other schools. Trump is making it clear that if these schools refuse to change, they will have to learn to live without federal funding. This is long overdue.
Read the full article here