How did higher education reach its current state? Where did all the woke nonsense come from?
Campus Reform Editor in Chief Zachary Marschall makes a lot of sense here:
ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING: Follow the money to understand why universities went wokeMoney matters in higher education because universities, as social institutions, like to behave simultaneously as if they are and are not businesses. And in recent years, they enjoy being woke.Those two behaviors are connected.Most colleges are not-for-profits with educational and research missions, but entrepreneurial speculation is present all over campus. Large new shiny buildings, corporate partnerships, and new academic programs resemble the components of a for-profit growth strategy.Money dictates the trajectory of higher education because revenue and spending influence the composition of people who have a political stake in the research, curriculum, and programming on campus.In previous editorials, I have argued that hiring practices and administrative hierarchies are the sources of leftist indoctrination on campus. Those trends represent the spending side of financial matters.Revenue is equally important.The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Aug. 17 report “State Support for Public Colleges, 2002-20” is essential to understanding why university revenue influences social institutions so strongly.The stratospheric rise in revenue since 2002 is indicative of an institutionalized growth strategy throughout higher education that uses rising tuition and fees to fund new programs, initiatives, and offices that specifically cater to college as an experience for leftist activism.For that reason, conservatives who support limited government and financial restraint should still worry about the decline in state funding of public universities.During this 18-year period, public universities receiving less public money learned to fund their operations through other sources.In most cases, that new funding came in the form of higher tuition rates and higher levels of fundraising. As Campus Reform continues to report, both earned and contributed income in the form of donations, tuition, and fees fund the administrative glut in higher education imposing leftist ideology on all aspects of life.The data confirms the trend academics like me have informally known for years: that states are funding their universities less and less, making those schools reliant on tuition increases to operate and grow.Though many universities received more money in state funding in 2020 compared to 2002 in real dollars, inflation means that many of these colleges are operating with less state support than twenty years ago.
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