he conservative movement in the United States has long been wary of higher education. This is understandable given the fact that survey after survey demonstrates a positive correlation between education and progressive values. Conservatives tend to attribute this phenomenon to mass brainwashing by elite liberal professors coupled with a conspiracy to blacklist anyone who tells what they consider to be the truth. Indeed, educated hucksters like David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes have made a tidy fortune from their gullible funders by hawking exactly this silly idea: smearing academics with McCarthyite tactics as they simultaneously complain about the communities of competence that struggle to maintain the integrity of their disciplines.
In addition to these mini-crusades, right-wing foundations and funders have enjoyed considerable dividends from the program of long-term investments they made in private universities beginning in the 1970s, when a bunch of them decided that the entire edifice of public knowledge was titled against their worldview. More recently, however, the far right has turned its attention away from these elite-oriented universities to public ones. Instead of seeking to change the minds—and hiring practices—of the Harvards and Stanfords of the world, they are now seeking to undermine the intellectual standards of state universities across America. They are doing this by persuading Republican-controlled state legislatures and governorships to pass massive cuts in funding while attacking the very foundations of higher education. The new demand is that public universities should be treated as any corporate entity, to be judged not as a social good but exclusively on its bottom line. (I should probably mention that I teach in a public university and that my daughter is beginning her freshman year at another this fall.)