We’ve spent more than our fair share of time here covering all of the badness that goes on in American colleges and universities these days, particularly in the suppression of any and all conservative speech and the actual violence that greets conservative speakers who dare to show up and attempt to offer alternate views. The examples are far too numerous to list and regular readers are likely already familiar with most of them. But it’s always good to keep your ears open to the other side of the debate, so I was intrigued when I saw an article at The Atlantic from Michael Ignatieff titled, “Why the Populist Right Hates Universities.”

My assumption that the opinion piece would be some sort of glowing defense of liberalism in the university system was eventually proven correct… sort of. But Ignatieff really makes you work to get to what you’re probably looking for. He first, amazingly, launches into ten lengthy paragraphs detailing the recent history of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban and how he dismantled the Central European University and battled George Soros. He then veers back to the United States in an oblique fashion, describing how various Republican politicians have become admirers of Orban, seeing him as part of some global club of right-wing enemies of education and progressive values. He includes Ron DeSantis in this club, based on his efforts in “rewriting the school curriculum” and reforming the administrative culture at New College. It’s only then, after this long journey through recent history, that Ignatieff gets to the small amount of meat on the bone of why conservatives oppose universities. Apparently, we’re all mostly just jealous and we don’t really understand the value that the system delivers to the less-educated, who presumably make up the bulk of the conservative coalition.

For this sort of right-wing populist, attacking colleges and universities also mobilizes the resentments of people who never went to university and may dislike, often justly, the entitlement that a college degree can confer on its beneficiaries. If a crucial component of the Trump-era Republican electorate comprises people who may not have graduated from high school, then an attack on universities is pure gravy for the demagogue. Similarly, for these angry voters, the downside of such an attack—weakening the scientific, technical, and cultural innovation that universities make possible—does not carry much weight.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, Kulturkampf attacks on universities are both definitional, in the sense of the leader’s brand, and diversionary. If a leader were serious about addressing the resentments of an excluded voter base, he wouldn’t focus on universities at all. Instead, he’d take a hard look at the power of corporations, their tax rates and tax avoidance, and their offshoring of jobs, not to mention their overwhelming control of the digital public sphere. That leader would look at the incomes of the richest citizens and see what could be done to transfer some of that wealth to improve schools, hospitals, clinics, and other public goods that give people, especially those without a college education, a fair start in life. But it’s so much easier to target universities and their supposedly cosseted liberal professors than to tackle the perquisites and power of the corporate-donor class that funds his campaigns.

As you see, if any of you rubes had actually been bright enough to graduate high school and go on to obtain a liberal arts or gender studies degree at an Ivy League university, you wouldn’t be so confused. You’d understand how all of the elites are actually putting policies in place to make sure that you don’t sink completely into the quagmire of your own ignorance and professional shortcomings. Don’t you feel ashamed now?

In reality, Ignatieff is trafficking in stereotypes and ignoring virtually all of the complaints coming from the right about the modern system of colleges and universities. There are poor schools (far too many) and some that are better. But those schools have evolved radically from the era of actual liberalism in the 60s and 70s when people were having loud but balanced debates over burning draft cards, opposing endless wars, and defining what it means to be successful in the American marketplaces of both ideas and professions.

Now the system is almost entirely cloistered. Endless wars are fine and dandy if they are supported by the permanent power structure in Washington. Debate is forbidden unless both sides are arguing nuances in the messy stew of liberalism. If someone like Riley Gaines shows up and suggest that just perhaps someone born with a Y chromosome, a penis, and testicles can’t actually be a girl, she must be literally knocked to the ground and chased into a room where security has to guard her for hours before she can safely leave. Ben Shapiro must be blocked from setting foot on any campus and if he somehow manages it, he must be shouted down so that his forbidden words can not be heard.

And then there is the overall “value” of the college experience. What does it get you now if you aren’t in some sort of STEM program? The answer all too often is that you are left with a degree that can’t get you any sort of job outside of the aforementioned university system and a mountain of debt that you will later have to go beg a Democratic president to “forgive.” University tuition costs have exploded vastly faster than any other portion of the “normal” economy, even as they sit on massive hordes of endowment cash that their willing graduates continue to funnel back to them.

The system is largely broken and it works for few. Defend it if you wish, but I would advise any young parents these days to carefully consider guiding their high school children toward some sort of trade school, or perhaps the military. (Once they clean up their own wokeness problems.) The youngish (early 30s) man who installed a new bathroom floor and fixtures for us earlier this year already owns his own colonial house right in our neighborhood. And he doesn’t have any debt. He was working full-time at 19 and is now a partner in the business. How many people with a master’s in gender studies can say the same?