The Southern Class War in Higher Education

So someone just send me this . It portrays me as the southern Stoic gentleman opposed to the Snopesy (or the money-grubbing populist) governor.

But the opposition is overdrawn, of course. I don’t think anyone should major in gender studies or most stuff ending in studies either. Still, it’s not like I would use my political power to expel studies stuff from public universities because it’s not marketable.

The serious issue, as THE INSIDE HIGHER ED article on the governor says, is what should be the Republican agenda on higher education. I don’t think it should be directed against liberal education as nothing but tenured radicalism and toward productivity and job placement. The market is already making that move, and we Tocqeuvillians—Democrats and Republicans both—have to guard against that excess these days.

Accreditation and other forms of monopolistic bureaucratization are dominated by political correctness when the Democrats are in power and productivity fetishism when the Republicans are. They two forms of administrators unite on galloping and increasingly intrusive quantitative assessment as the key to make our schools at any level better. So we conservatives should resist the temptation to use those forms of administration to achieve partisan goals. Instead, we should do what can to reduce the burden of that kind of administrative footprint on the backs of schools and teachers.

We Republicans should be about preserving educational diversity. The most wonderful part of American higher education is that diversity. We have more really good (including but not only authentically religous) and maybe more bad colleges than anywhere else in the world.