Pop Quiz! Is Knowing Things *Good*, Or Nah F*ck It?
Why stay in college? Why go to night school? Gonna be different this time.
We’ve been thinking a little bit about education and reality lately, particularly the Right’s ongoing war on both, which only seems to get worse.
Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education and gut higher education by eliminating accreditation as we’ve known it, and to institute nationwide “school choice” by giving public school money to private religious schools. Oh, yes, and he also wants to create a “non-woke” national online college alternative that’s as real as his plan to replace Obamacare.
Professors Are The Enemy
Distrust of education and educated people has always been a touchstone of rightwing ideology, going back forever. Richard Nixon infamously fumed in a 1972 Oval Office recording — to Henry Kissinger, the Harvard PhD — that he should “never forget” that
“The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”
Kissinger agreed, of course, but still went by “Dr. Kissinger.” The immediate context for the remarks was Nixon’s planning for that year’s massive Christmas bombing campaign against North Vietnam. But it also reflected Nixon’s worldview. He always resented/bragged that he hadn’t gone to an elite university, but to Whittier College, wearing a plain cloth Republican coat like his little dog Checkers did.
Still, for all their beating up on academics as dangerous scary Marxists, Republicans at least used to see some practical value in getting an education, at least if you majored in business or management or one of the useful sciences. Today, Trump loves the poorly educated, because they mostly vote for him, and the Right is all in on wrecking higher education, or at least Hillsdaling it.
Trump has pushed anti-expertise to a new level by actively avoiding appointing any experts to Cabinet positions. Pete Hegseth was in the Army, but more importantly was on Fox News, so that’s the only qualification he needs to run the Department of Defense. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rejects medical science, so he and a collection of other anti-vaccine people will be in charge of the nation’s health agencies. Linda McMahon has never worked in schools, so she’s perfect to oversee the dismantling of the Department of Education. Sometimes, we’ll admit, Trump knows when a bit of expertise might be useful, as long as it’s for malign ends, which is why he picked fracking company CEO Chris Wright to be Energy secretary — it’s just a bonus that Wright also thinks climate change is no big deal.
Girls Go To College To Get More Knowledge
In addition to the Right’s usual antipathy to all those tenured radicals, there’s another reason the current Republican establishment is so hostile to higher education, as Celeste Davis argued in a recent essay that looked at why far fewer men than women are even bothering with college in recent years. In the 1950s, men outnumbered women on campuses by two to one; by the 1990s, it was about equal; and now women make up almost 60 percent of college students. Why is that?
Davis isn’t terribly convinced by the multitude of potential explanations offered by “Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers,” because none of the guesses “address what has actually CHANGED in recent decades to cause the drop.” It’s actually pretty simple, she argues:
What has changed is an increase in girls.
When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.
We’re just not talking about it.
It’s not unlike “white flight,” the phenomenon where white people move out of areas when people of color start moving in. And when “large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry — the men leave. That industry is then devalued.”
Such male flight has occurred over time in the veterinary profession, where 89 percent of veterinary students in 1969 were male, but by 1987 the ratio was 50-50 men and women — after the federal government banned discrimination against women in 1972. In 2009, “male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%.”
The biggest factor in men choosing not to enter a field appears to be “the number of women in the classroom,” which tends to lead to that field being seen as “women’s work,” and eww, no, men don’t want to be doing that. Similar male flight has been seen in fields ranging from teaching to biology, which has come to be seen as “the ‘easiest’ of the STEM majors.”
Again and again, once women become the majority in a previously male-dominated field, men rapidly start leaving, and “once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.” College was once for manly strivers who wanted to make something of themselves, but it’s increasingly coming to be perceived, especially among young online men, as
stupid and unnecessary. A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college.
When you consider the increasing legitimization of the manosphere in rightwing politics — the whining about the loss of manliness, women “ruining” the military, Tucker Carlson and his ball-tanning quackery, and the like — this really does seem to fit together! Hypermasculinity and fascism and disdain of higher learning are three shit tastes that taste like shit … together! No surprise that college-educated white women overwhelmingly voted for Kamala Harris, and while Trump got the majority of college-educated white men, it was a only by a slim two percent margin. (Of course, those educated white guys who voted for Trump are soy boy beta males, at least according to MAGA world.)
MAGA Went To Jupiter To Get More Stupider
Republicans’ embrace of anti-knowledge accelerated during Trump’s first term, with “alternative facts” — a justification of Sean Spicer’s confident insistence that you didn’t see a smaller crowd at Trump’s inauguration than Obama’s, you actually saw the biggest crowd ever. During the Russia investigations, Rudy Giuliani blurted out that “Truth isn’t truth,” although with him the line between idiocy and delusion is always blurry. It got even worse during the pandemic, with the rise of fake COVID cures and flat out lies from Trump and his supporters, and eventually reached its apotheosis in the Big Lie about the 2020 election.
Trump and Republicans are benefiting bigly from low-information voters, precisely because, as a recent Northeastern University study found, Trump voters were far less likely than Democrats and independents to get their information about news and politics from not just traditional media but from literally any media at all.
“Trump voters and persons inclined towards Trump got a lot of their information from friends and family, which speaks to a kind of network tribalism that is apparent in American politics now,” says [study author John] Wihbey, associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern.
“You can see a general reduction in the ability of high-quality news media to reach a lot of the citizenry.”
They prefer to do their own research, on Twitter, using sources that cater to their preconceptions, whether they’re factual or not.
That’s part of why, when the lamestream media and effete educated policy people are talking about how climate change contributed to the unprecedented LA fires, people on Twitter are blaming the devastation on diversity policies.
No wonder the enormous fires driven by hurricane-force winds spread so fast: LA Fire Chief Kristen Crowley is a lady, and a gay lady at that, so obviously she was a DEI hire and incompetent. To believe that, you need to pretend that an apocalyptic fire is easy to stop in the first place, and to ignore Crowley’s long record of working up through the ranks over decades. All those promotions were undeserved, you see. It’s magical misogyny!
To be sure, a college education isn’t the only way to learn how to tell bullshit from reality, but liberal arts education really does focus on critical thinking, building the toolkit of how to do actual research and what counts as a valid, supportable evidence. Haha, there we go being elitists again!
The danger isn’t just that awful people believe untrue things, but also that, in rejecting higher education as mere liberal brainwashing, the Right is actively hurting democracy, which is fine with many in the MAGA leadership anyway.
[NPR / Ann Telnaes / Mother Jones / Matriarchal Blessing / Discourse / Times of San Diego]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time donation, here is that button.
Heretical thought:
I want an alternate timeline where Hanekawa and Senjougahara just forget Araragi and go off together.
At the 1952 Democratic National Convention:
Woman in audience: "Governor Stevenson, you have the support of every thinking American"!
Adlai: "That's not enough, Madam! We need a majority"!