| apologies, I meant to suggest that Trump & MAGA are very hostile towards universities and Trump is threatening to pull so much federal funding some colleges may have to close, and a lot of Americans seem OK with that. I'm not making a value statement on that, Trump was elected to run the government, hence him reallocating funds (in this case) is part of our democratic process. People chose to put him in charge because they wanted him in charge. To tip my hand: I personally think universities don't have more people rallying to their defence because they have abdicated their responsibilities to provide space for open inquiry, and have instead allowed themselves to be institutionally & ideologically captured by a group of people with activist leanings and fringe beliefs not held by 90+% of Americans. My answer to my question above is "in the past two decades, the universities could have done more to protect speech across the board and not pick favourites to protect and others to abandon, as they have clearly done. In the last two years they could have refused to tolerate lawlessness on their campuses (not just 'speech' but actual law-breaking, including assaults, going unprosecuted) instead of turning a blind eye when the criminality was from a favoured cause du jour." I think if Universities had not abandoned their leadership duties, they wouldn't have Trump bringing the hammer down on them with so much public support. |
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| ▲ | guywithahat a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean, at a minimum, they think they're helping students. Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse, that doesn't make sense. In this case, they're trying to make universities more fair and to reduce government waste in universities by removing DEI programs. There's lots of logic to that. | | |
| ▲ | Izikiel43 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | >Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse Why not? One thing is the campaign, another one is exercising his power. To quote a famous Argentinian President: "If I said what I would do, they wouldn't have voted for me". | | |
| ▲ | guywithahat 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can't find the source of that quote (possibly a misquote?), but if I had to guess, he's saying he sold people on the problem, knowing they wouldn't like the solution. Everyone likes the idea of fixing the budget deficit, and some people like the idea of cutting wasteful government spending, but the act of fixing the budget means people lose jobs, and lives are destroyed. Even though it has to happen, people don't like watching it happen. I don't think your "quote" says what you think it says. |
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| ▲ | brazzy 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse, that doesn't make sense. Yet, that's what they did. Repeatedly. After he already demonstrated how much worse he would make things. Oh yeah, he denied that he would execute the planes for how he would make things much, much, MUCH worse, that had been
very openly stated by
his close associates. That's enough for it to "make sense" to you, I suppose. |
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| ▲ | concordDance 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > They are nit trying to make it cheaper and they are not trying to make it more accessible Should they be doing these things? Maybe I've read too much Caplan, but credential inflation seems to be wasting the new generation's best years. | | |
| ▲ | nosianu 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For the original argument above about Republicans and college I would focus more on things like who has been trying to make student debt as something special, something near impossible to get out of. I don't accept an argument of personal responsibility in this case, because student loans target one of the most vulnerable groups: Inexperienced and with a great need. To me, this is malicious. I'm all for personal responsibility, in this point I'm more on the conservative side, but reality also includes that humans are not perfect machines, and targeting their weaknesses is easy and impossible to avoid as an individual. This principle does not work when it's an individual against sophisticated well-funded organization (here, there is not one but many who influenced policy), even worse when it's someone too young or too old for their brains to be at their best (not yet experienced enough in the one case, the brain no longer working at its best in the other). | |
| ▲ | delichon 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then you're reading the right amount of Caplan. So you probably also want more babies and immigrants. |
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| ▲ | casey2 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In what way does an intellectual race to the bottom help students? If students want to learn on the cheap they can use the internet. Students want to feel like their time spent studying is worth it, not a weird blend of trivia, online classes you finish in a week or useless skills that you spend months practicing and lose 6 months after the class. Millions of people could be working productive manufacturing jobs, instead they are doing effectively nothing all because of a disproven belief from 100 years ago that if you study enough you will increase your innate intelligence. |
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