It’s Time for Taxpayers to Start Issuing Campus Demands
We pay the bills, not radicalized students.
If taxpayers are funding public colleges and the loans which make it possible for many students to attend them, then taxpayers are completely entitled to issue demands.
That’s the subject of a new column I’ve written for Townhall:
American Taxpayers Should Start Issuing Demands to College Students
If you offered to buy dinner for a total stranger, but the minute you got a table in a decent restaurant your guest stood up on his or her chair and began loudly issuing demands, how long would you sit there and listen before getting up and walking out? Most people probably wouldn’t even make it to the drink order.
This scenario may sound cartoonish, yet it accurately describes the relationship between American taxpayers and increasingly radical leftist college students…
Here’s the question American taxpayers should be asking themselves: Who is paying the bill for this?
Here’s the harsh answer: They are.
There is good news, however and here it is. The people who pay the bills are more entitled to make demands and that’s exactly what American taxpayers should start doing.
Here are a few suggestions which I offer taxpayers as a guide:
1. Public colleges and universities which do not defend the free speech rights of students, faculty or speakers invited by recognized student groups should be stripped of all tax funding.
Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen State College professor at the center of ridiculous student outrage at the school, told Tucker Carlson last night that he still hasn’t returned to campus. Apparently, the administration has done next to nothing to guarantee his safety. Watch:
Meanwhile, Evergreen State College President George Bridges has finally said something negative about the behavior of the students. He’s “disappointed” in them.
KING 5 News reports:
Evergreen State College president ‘immensely disappointed’ by protesters
Students involved in on-campus protests at The Evergreen State College could be punished, according to college president Dr. George Bridges.
In May, dozens of protesters interrupted a class taught by Bret Weinstein, a biology teacher.
The students called for Weinstein’s resignation after he criticized moves to change campus policies involving race.
He also refused to participate in an April event where white students and faculty members were encouraged to leave campus.
Following the protest, Weinstein held classes off-campus. Campus police told him they could not guarantee his safety at the college.
“I was immensely disappointed with the students who obstructed his class,” Bridges said. “Those actions are indefensible.”
Bridges said the school is investigating the students involved.
Too little, too late. If the administration at Evergreen (and other schools) won’t take action to stop the madness, then the people who are paying the bills, i.e. taxpayers, should start issuing demands of their own.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
The very actions by Professors (such as this one), university administrations, etc – are the one and only reason we are at the boiling-point with schools. The Leftist/Feminist-Cult created this mess, but now expect the rest of us to bail them out, defend them, side with them, and have pity for them?
I think now is the time to sit back, and watch the entire college-scene implode, and NOT lift a finger.
The problem is the system won’t implode as long as trillions of taxpayer dollars keep flowing to these “students” and “professors”.
let the schools know that they can keep these wonderful “students” but no federal dollars will be there as long as they stay.
The cretins who run these schools care more for their salaries, pensions and other perks and suddenly they will find reasons to expel the savages.
I’ve always been for a clean separation between all of government and these schools. This would be a non-issue if it were so. Also, strip all colleges and universities of their tax-exempt ‘org’ status, effectively privatizing them.
This is part of a much larger cultural war going on with the left, and much of its energy comes from government funding. We’re funding the people destroying our nation and attacking our way of life. We’ll never make headway unless we defund the left, and the Academia is a perfect place to begin.
Hear hear!
Privatize all higher education!
People forget it is still a “LUXURY” good – definitely not a right.
It isn’t just the flow of taxpayer dollars that keeps almost every campus well fed. Some of the more in-the-news events are happening at colleges with every more fat endowments. Until there is some penalty, the administrators will continue to establish more left-favoring environments. The academe is the progressive petri dish, almost entirely without consequence.
Outside of Missouri, few have suffered any backlash whatsoever. Supposedly Evergreen’s applications have been down for a few years. So I’m not sure it has any relation to being in the news.
Yeah, the endowments. I think those will dry up once schools are privatized and donations no longer qualify for charitable deductions.
Also, privatize student loans.
I suspect the administration is just hoping to run out the clock. The semester will be over soon, classes will finish and the activists will go #RESIST somewhere else for the summer.
It is kicking the can down the road, naturally. But it would give a brief period of calm.
Some one has to speak up and defend poor president Bridges. He probably is just concerned about the damage he would do to his lace panties were he to get them into a wad. He is not a Deplorable living in a trailer with several nonfunctioning vehicles in the yard. He is a man of class who would never risk damage to his lace panties baiting a trotline or some other crude action. I say respect the man even if he can’t get fired up like Ashley Judd. He can make a manicure last a very long time. Just try that when you are pulling that greasy engine out of your 54 Ford pickup.
There is so little sympathy for a cretin such as Wienstien being the victim of his own leftism that I couldn’t muster enough crap to give it.
If you watch GoT, you’ll remember Ramsay Bolton, who raised vicious hounds and set them on people, until they were turned on him and they tore him apart (unfortunately off-screen). That’s who these professors are like. They’re fine with setting the hounds they raise on others, and then they scream when the hounds turn on them. What did they think was going to happen? He probably really isn’t safe on campus, and it’s his, and his brethren’s, fault.
He’s “disappointed”? Wow, that’s gonna leave a mark. Next thing you know he’ll be right up in their faces saying “…and this time I really mean it!”
Then he’ll retire.
Weinstein is a self-proclaimed Progressive.
But I suspect his problem is that Progressivism in America has moved past him, into territory where he can’t follow … and he doesn’t realize it yet. That territory is outright racism … sexism … deviance worship … religious intolerance, and it’s a logical development of our Left’s long-time electoral strategy to divide and conquer. We call that “identity politics” but that phrase doesn’t really explain what it is. It’s a strategy to identify groups which can be distinguished from other groups, emphasize group identity by fanning grievances, and then pandering to—and bribing—those individual groups via government handouts and general favoritism, all under cover of relieving or compensating for those grievances, whether real or imaginary. But the former mere tool has turned into the movement itself. The crimes of civilization (racism, sexism, the triumph of sexual deviance, etc) now are Progressivism—the old intellectual Progressivism has been submerged and smothered, and only the naked power grab remains. And Weinstein can’t be a proper Progressive because he’s white and he’s male. There’s no way around those stumbling blocks—so they don’t want him. He’s one of The Enemy, no matter how fawning and sycophantic he remains to his (now obsolete) vision of Progressivism.
The old Bolsheviks of 1917 had the same problem when Secretary Comrade Stalin’s purges began. They had no idea what he was up to—they’d been impeccable Communists for years, and didn’t deserve such treatment. And they were right, but that didn’t matter in the least.
By now, we should all know what’s in that playbook, but there’s always some fool who doesn’t get the word.
What to do about it? I’m afraid we’ll need a much bigger hammer than mere defunding, even though that’s worth doing purely on its own merits.
And that “old intellectual Progressivism” was nothing to write home about. It gave us Prohibition – which led to the establishment of organized crime mobs, and Margaret Singer Harris’s “family planning” with it’s emphasis on abortion……
It’s interesting how similar the promised benefits of Prohibition to society (none of which materialized, in addition to the distortions to society and the rise of organized crime as unintended consequences) sound so much like the promises of the gun grabbers.
The system will not improve. Absolutely no reason to, NOTHING happens to the protesters or administration for lack of rules. There’s is, for now, a closed society, little if any, market forces involved. The real world awaits. How far will your made up degree get you? Want fries with that?
Time to treat these students and school administrators like the southern KKK government officials. I am sure there are Federal laws on the books that can be used to deal with these fascists.
The original premise is flawed.
State legislatures do not provide all the funding to a state university — far from it. In fact, money from the state treasury is a minority of the funds for a typical state university.
Where do these universities get their funds?
1. Tuition and fees (big chunk from federal grants and loans to students)
2. Grants and contracts that fund research (mostly federal)
3. Gifts and endowment income
4. Auxiliary enterprise income (dorms, dining halls, etc)
5. Funding from the state
In fact, money from the state legislature is generally 15 to 20% of that total.
There’s nothing wrong with the legislatures exercising oversight and fiscal discipline — in fact it’s absolutely necessary. Controlling 15% of the income is a useful way to get the attention of university faculty and leaders. But the states don’t control the majority of a university’s income — that honor, as usual, belongs to the Feds.
Damn right. Turn off the money spigot to these indoctrination hellholes. Focus on actual, verifiable learning and the special snowflakes will scatter like roaches – studying is hard work, which is anathema to the privileged punks.
Since Evergreen is the alma mater of Rachel Corrie, I think it would be entirely appropriate if the entire campus were to be bulldozed.
And once it has been razed, build a Holy Pancake House on top of the rubble!
Their could be a statue out front holding up a plate of pancakes, kinda like the old Bob’s Big Boy, but instead it would be Rachel Corrie.
Campus Police can not guarantee his safety? It’s simple you put a uniformed officer with a gun next to him while on campus and let it be known that anyone approaching without permission can/will be subject to physical force, up to and including deadly force, as well as arrest.
If the campus police can’t keep one person safe then they are a waste of money.
C’mon, those campus cops are way too busy for that. Those donuts won’t eat themselves, you know.
The college’s president told the campus police to stand down during the period of unrest. He has no interest in actually putting an end to the fascist dictatorship established by Evergreen’s students. (I wonder why the Olympia police weren’t called in at the time, but it would be no surprise to anyone if the mayor told them to stand down too.)
Has anyone brought up this little tidbit on Evergreen College:
It’s official motto is the Latin phrase “omnia extares!”
These clowns interpret it as “Let it all hang out!”
There is only one problem; that is not what it means. In fact, it has no real meaning at all.
From their college “history”:
“Dave Hitchens, a founding faculty member of The Evergreen State College, gave his recollection of how the motto,
Omnia Extares!, came about:
I have been privileged to play a role in the history of Evergreen. As a member of the eighteen-person Planning Faculty, I was present one Spring day in 1971 when my colleague Beryl Crowe made a lunchtime suggestion: the motto
of the school should be: “Let It All Hang
Out!”. Several of us applied our rusty Latin to
see what a formal Latin in scription would be —
Will Humphreys, Bill Aldridge, Beryl, Al Wiedemann, Richard Jones, and I took cracks at it.
We were stumped until someone remembered that Librarian Monica Caulfield had been an undergraduate Latin major. We called her over to our temporary building and posed the problem. She pondered at least thirty seconds then wrote “OMNIA EXTARES!” on the chalk board. “Because it is an imperative, we’ll need
the exclamation point,” she said.
“LET IT ALL HANG OUT!”
We liked it. We meant it. Most of us still
mean it. We [w]anted a College which did its
best to nurture openness and unself-conscious searches for truth.”
Well, there is an irony pimp-slap. Obviously, her Latin Major was worthless. It is ridiculously incorrect Latin and practically meaningless. A worthless motto for a worthless school.
It seems Evergreen is falling short of that “openness” goal.
You got that right!
Divert monies used for school loans to fund trade schools instead. Plumbers and electricians make far more money than say, majors in ‘gender studies’.
Trump had the right idea in a speech he gave in the primaries.
Let banks partially underwrite the student loans. They know what a good credit risk. An engineering student in good standing won’t have a problem getting a loan. A gender studies student might be told no loans are available.
Colleges fight this because then their gender studies and other leftist departments will suddenly lack students and be exposed for the useless appendages they are. It would clean a lot of bad students out of universities, because the marketable majors tend to be the hard ones.
I am waiting for DeVos to start talking about this. But it seems so far she’s been concentrating on K-12.