Will Bunch: Conservative attacks on higher education

Excerpt of a Fresh Air interview NPR's Terry Gross did with Will Bunch, author of the new book, After The Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke The American Dream And Blew Up Our Politics And How to Fix It. He's a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

BUNCH: Ronald Reagan emerged as an underdog candidate for governor of California in 1966. And this was right after the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. It was when you started seeing publicity about the counterculture of, you know, kids wearing blue jeans and having these parties with the wild psychedelic screens, with the music from the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead. And Ronald Reagan said famously that taxpayers should not be funding the intellectual curiosity of students. And this was a defining, you know, governmental philosophy for him.

When he won in a landslide that fall - when he took office, you know, he tried to impose tuition. Colleges in California had been free. And, in fact, that was basically part of the state constitution and something that was cherished in California - the idea that higher education for all its citizens would be free. And Reagan thought that, you know, free tuition basically encouraged kids to rebel against the establishment. So he launched this long crusade to - he wasn't - you know, he had political opposition. And he wasn't able to increase tuition right away. But he did raise fees, and he basically set the groundwork for higher tuition in California. And then it became higher tuition in other states as well as the backlash spread.

Forty-five million people have some college debt. And many of those 45 million have more than 10,000. Some of them have 50,000, 100,000, 150,000.

You know, there's been a lot of research that the Princeton University economists Case and Deaton have made a name for themselves writing about deaths of despair among working-class people, which refers to, you know, suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol addiction. And what they found is that people succumbing to these deaths of despair are getting younger and younger. And the No. 1 determining factor is whether or not they have a college degree, you know? Not having a college degree is the No. 1 driver of people being prone to these deaths of despair.

Gross: You say that Republicans are waging a war on higher education. And you offer examples from a couple of states, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Give us an example of what you mean.

Scott Walker

BUNCH: Well, Wisconsin is a perfect example, particularly during the tenure of Scott Walker as governor from 2010 to 2018. Some of it was just cutting funding for education. He certainly tried to reduce tenure protections for professors because he saw professors as promoting a liberal ideology. But to me, the most interesting thing was this idea of, what is college really for? And on the right, there's this push that college should be for workforce development and nothing else, you know, the flip side of this whole idea of liberal education and critical thinking. And in the middle of his tenure as governor, there was a huge controversy because he actually pushed to change the language of the University of Wisconsin's mission statement to take out the idea that the goal of the university is the search for truth. He wanted that language removed. He wanted it changed to, the purpose of the university is to develop the state's workforce, period. And, you know, I don't think people were ready for that. There was a huge outcry. And he actually backed down from that.

But what you have seen in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina and several other red states is more and more politically connected people being appointed to the board of university trustees, trying to exert more control over what goes on on-campus, you know, over hiring, you know? . . . You know, now in Florida, you know, Ron DeSantis has done the same thing, you know? He has a very conservative board of trustees overseeing the public universities in Florida.

And so, you know, you've seen this intense focus on, what are kids learning about race? What are kids learning about gender? What are they learning about the LGBTQ community? And, you know, it's interesting because I think it's an evolution, you know? In the 1960s and '70s, conservatives were worried about what kids were doing on college campuses. And now they're starting to think that we need to nip some of these critical thinking ideas in the bud when these kids are in grade school. And, you know, that's become the next battleground.