MAYBE MAKE A CASE FOR A HIGHER EDUCATION THAT IS HIGHER?

Common Dreams contributor Douglas Medina might have posted the most ridiculous essay that site has ever presented, and that is a hard bar to top!  "Let’s stand together and go on the offensive to create a social democratic vision for higher education and other universal public goods now under assault by Trump and his right-wing allies."

Dear reader, if I had taken him to task for not grasping "nonexclusive and nonrivalrous," that would suggest the balance of his essay might have attempted a serious argument, which would have taken it out of the running for "most ridiculous essay."  The case he makes for being ridiculous is in his opening paragraph.

There is no question that the contemporary system of higher education in the United States was facing several crises (commodification of education, access and affordability, faculty precarity, violations of academic freedom, the “rationality crisis”, administrative bloat, etc.—what we generally refer to as the neoliberalization and corporatization of education) before the Trump administration began its assault on colleges and universities in 2025. Trump’s Executive Orders (EOs) related to education have magnified these crises. At the very least, he has forced those of us working in higher education to seriously reflect on what needs fixing. I point to these EOs as an illustration of intent to destroy colleges and universities as public goods by his administration, supporters, and surrogates, including Chris Rufo and Marc Rowan, two of the most notable agents who are not shy about using the authoritarian playbook. They are deliberately pushing the limits of legal and constitutional mores and precedents to achieve their goals. This should not be a controversial interpretation of intent, considering how transparent the expression of the authoritarian turn has been and continues to be when it comes to higher education and, well, everything else.

If you charge tuition to individual students, you are dealing in a commodity whether the tuition is used for a tenured professor's salary or for a freeway flyer, and if you are trading in prestige degrees, whether your institution is selling it to high rollers for a consideration or not, by definition your service is exclusive and rivalrous.  Again, that might keep the essay off the "most ridiculous" list: nay, I could reproduce that paragraph on a political economy assignment and ask students to identify and rebut as many logical errors as they could.

Rather, it is for the jumble of leftist incantations and invocations of criticisms from a variety of sources that I rank it as ridiculous.  Put bluntly, dear reader, Donald Trump is the symptom of higher education's breach of faith with Normals, not the cause.  That breach of faith has been long in coming: people with platforms much bigger than mine have been calling attention for going on forty years.

For as long as I have been writing Cold Spring Shops, though, I've noted two ways in which institutions of higher education undermine their value proposition.  First, those "irksome special education impedimenta" traffic under the rubric of access-assessment-remediation-retention, often disguised as boosting enrollments or ensuring equity.  Second, students are on to the pandering, as that post also observed.  "The easiest way to retain students and make the disparate outcomes go away is to pass everybody, no matter how poorly they perform."  Behold, you get the sub-prime party school, with a non-aggression pact between the professors and the students.

But rather than suggest that continuing business as usual, where admitting unprepared students and calling it access or treating ascriptive characteristics as reasons to credit said students for exceeding expectations or otherwise suggesting that Saul Bellow or Allan Bloom or Charlie Sykes got it wrong, Mr Medina wants to hold a United Front rally at the Pride parade, or something.

Their goal, and the goal of at least some elements of the capitalist class, is to dismantle the administrative state as part of the long-running backlash against FDRs New Deal programs that were rooted in the progressive ethos that government should directly serve the needs of the people. The construction of an enemy is crucial in executing the backlash. Today, the targets are, though not exclusively, teachers and what they do in the classroom, college and university professors, immigrants, transgender people, and the working class writ-large. Collectively, it’s time for faculty to show their power, moving beyond the lines of defense they have already established, creating networks of solidarity across industrial sectors, all while conducting political education about how the system works and who benefits under capitalism. It’s time we start to engage in discussing different tactics and overall strategies that include, but are not limited to, building the capacity for strike actions in collaboration with unions nationwide.

Now is evidently the time to go Wobbly, rather than contemplate the possibility that faculty complicity with the administrative state has contributed to the loss of reputation of the faculty and of the administrative state.  It goes on in a similar class struggle vein for some paragraphs, concluding,  "Let’s stand together and go on the offensive to create a social democratic vision for higher education that affirms the value of knowledge and truth-seeking for the benefit of the public good."

You spend forty years talking about differing ways of knowing and putting truth in scare quotes and you now expect me to endorse continuing that sort of business as usual in higher education.  Not. A. Chance.