Thoughts on Romney and Higher Ed

At least hes not mandating creationism.

Mitt Romneys plans for higher education hence far are silly, but not catastrophic. Currently that puts him ahead of much of his party. .

It was not often hence. There was once a time — not all that lengthy ago, truly — when Republicans took public larger education seriously. The SUNY system never ever had a greater good friend than Nelson Rockefeller, for instance. The University of California program even survived two terms of Governor Ronald Reagan, despite occasional snipes about hippies. .

And that tends to make sense. As conservatives, their burden involved squaring arbitrary economic outcomes with a common cultural sense of the worth of fair play. Education provided a nice way to thread that political needle. The intelligent and driven kid who was born poor could work challenging in a public method and operate his way into the middle class and above. As long as that was correct, individuals on leading could plausibly claim that the total technique is fair, even if they just take place to be a entire great deal wealthier than absolutely everyone else. As extended as the economic hierarchy was at least open to a thing like meritocratic striving, those who have been left out could be blamed for their very own fate.

Over the previous decade or so, though, Republicans — as opposed to conservatives, which they are not any more in any meaningful sense — have shifted their position. Now they&rsquore openly hostile to increased education, except in for-profit kind. Rick Santorum&rsquos “what a snob!&rdquo comment, for all of its artlessness, fairly considerably encapsulated the id of the party in its current form. (The same could be said of Santorum typically.) Some of that is the lingering residue of hippie-bashing, but the latest surge in stridency can&rsquot be explained that way. (I don&rsquot recall a hippie resurgence in 2010.) I consider it goes a tiny deeper than that.

The increased education landscape in its current kind represents a direct disproof of the core of Republican ideology. That&rsquos why they hate it so considerably. It reminds them of the conservatism they left behind.

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