I recently delivered a lecture at the “Open University of the Left” in Chicago, titled “Does Capitalism Have a Future?” I strongly suggest for those interested in this topic, which focused on the role of higher education and other factors in stifling political-economic transformation, to check it out here. That talk appears all-the-more relevant following a July Pew Research Center study finding that 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agree that “colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country.” It’s tempting to dismiss outright the feelings of reactionary partisans, who fail to offer anything more nuanced than a “higher education is bad” mentality toward the world. But we need to better understand why it is that education is viewed with such disdain in contemporary America, in addition to exploring what’s wrong with this contempt.
First off, it’s worth pointing out that mass Republican distrust of higher education is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to Pew, in 2010, 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents held a positive view of higher education, but that number fell by a whopping 22 percentage points by 2017. Furthermore, the rapid growth in distrust didn’t occur until 2016 to 2017. So if distrust of academia is a new development, where did it come from?
It doesn’t take much imagination to recognize that growing conservative hatred of…