I started sounding the alarm years ago: through soaring tuition and leftist orthodoxy, higher-ed institutions would lose the support of a broad swath of the American people. At some point, parents rebel against paying small fortunes to have their kids indoctrinated to reject their values. As the latest Gallup poll shows, a steadily declining percentage of Americans express confidence in higher education.
Predictably, the decline over the past decade has been sharpest among Republicans, whose values are most reviled in academia. The decline among Democrats, who are far more likely to feel a philosophical kinship with campus progressives, has been modest. (See the Gallup numbers.)
I would love to see the same question asked about Virginia’s system of higher education as a whole, and for individual institutions, too. I would conjecture that resentment is strongest against “elite” institutions where progressivism is the strongest.
Obviously, there are many progressives in the general population, so some people are just fine with what’s happening on college campuses. But if you alienate half your potential market, you’re in big trouble. — JAB
