Republican Governor of Alaska Mike Dunleavy
Alaska has been thrown into chaos as newly elected Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy used a line-item veto to slash funding for the public university system by 41 percent — a devastating blow that has the already cash-strapped University of Alaska scrambling to furlough professors and cancel classes.
It’s a nightmare situation for the state — and, wrote Adam Harris for The Atlantic, a “worst-case scenario” of what happens when higher education becomes a partisan issue.
“It has not been uncommon to see significant cuts by states to higher-education funding—particularly during economic slowdowns—but ‘it is uncommon to do it in one fell swoop,’ Nick Hillman, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me,” wrote Harris. “Alaska had a deficit, and the governor had promised not to raise taxes to deal with it, so he chose a favored punching bag to take the hit instead: higher education.”
The problem, Harris said, is that over the past several years, […]
America has always had a strong anti-intellectual emphasis – I long ago realized this when I lived in the UK, where people have a much broader education, and a social respect for education, resulting in a population that is much more informed and conversant, in my opinion. But the “dumbing down” of america has reached, as this article illustrates, a whole new level under the fascism of republican Trumpism and evangelical ideology. An illiterate, uneducated, undiscerning, uninformed population is a malleable population that can be controlled and easily influenced. Education is, as my father so often used to tell me, necessary to a real democracy.