When Ronald Reagan launched his bid for governor of California in 1966, igniting the conservative revolution that would reinvent the Republican Party, he promised “to clean up the mess at Berkeley.” He blamed the campus unrest on “a small minority of hippies, radicals and filthy speech advocates” whose leaders should “be taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown off campus—permanently.” After taking office, Reagan promptly fired University of California President Clark Kerr and axed the university system’s budget.
Half a century later, surveying the national public-university funding scene in 2015, The Chronicle of Higher Education bemoaned “the list of budgetary showdowns playing out between Republican governors and higher education.” While higher education’s state funding problems over the past decades have bipartisan causes, the targeting of these institutions’ budgets lately is much more common in states with GOP leadership—and may worsen yet.
Writing at Salon last year, Sean McElwee and Robbie Hiltonsmith analyzed a Grapevine study from Illinois State University and found “when Republicans take over governor’s mansions they reduce spending on higher education by $0.23 per $1,000 in personal income (a measure of the state’s total tax base). […]
Even elementary schools and middle schools and high schools have increased the amount parents need to spend just to give their children the opportunity to get an education. The amount can be staggering to a poor family and force them to cut their food budget or any other source they can cut just to get their children through high school, not just universities. It is a shameful reminder of the trend of the “trickle-down” policies which do not trickle down anything.
If we are going to survive in the twenty-first century, we must change the course of education, and make it free to all.