OPINION:
Why the push to cancel college debt? Conservatives complain that it’s another vote-buying gimmick. They’re right. But there’s more to it.
Democrats want everyone to go to college and to stay there as long as possible – not to become educated (God forbid!) but to be indoctrinated in their worldview on race, anti-Americanism and Cultural Marxism.
In a meeting with the Hispanic Congressional Caucus last week, President Joe Biden hinted at forgiving some or all of the $1.6 trillion in student loan debt owed collectively by 43 million borrowers.
Asking them to start repaying their freely contracted debt (after over a year of suspensions) would work a hardship on the poor dears, the president fretted. Better to have Walmart workers pay off the debt of the upwardly mobile middle class. And we’d all pay for Washington’s latest extravagance by printing more money. Apparently, we need to do more to fuel the highest inflation rate in almost 40 years.
With the Democrats facing a bloodbath in November, they’re desperate to shore up support among young voters by bribing those with college debt.
But the leftwing of the party also understands that forgiving current debt will encourage future generations to go in hock to pay for college, expecting their debt to be cancelled too sometime in the future.
Progressives understand that the longer someone spends in school, the more likely he’ll join their legion of the undead dead.
Pollsters speak of the diploma gap. According to Gallup, in 2000, Republicans enjoyed an 11-point edge in party affiliation among college-educated voters. By 2020, the tables had turned, and Democrats had a 13-point advantage among voters with an expensive piece of paper.
Everything in the college experience is designed to push students leftward. Among faculty at top colleges, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8.5-to-1. It’s more lopsided in liberal arts departments. Among English faculties, Democrats have a 27 to 1 advantage.
Writing in Newsweek in 2021, Samuel J. Abrams (who teaches politics at Sarah Lawrence College) disclosed, “As a college professor, not a week goes by that I don’t hear from frustrated students who feel they cannot speak freely” in class, for fear of retaliation.
Pedagogy is reinforced by leftist speakers (conservative speakers are suppressed by the mob) and in speech codes, which – in the name of inclusiveness – seek to crush First Amendment rights.
Campus orthodoxy is also supported by administrators, who lean even further left than the professoriate. Here, liberals outnumber conservatives by 12-to-1. And most believe that it’s their sacred duty to shape students’ thinking through the academic experience.
Besides the thought-control that goes on in traditional curricula, increasingly, colleges and universities offer courses that sound like they were designed by the Squad on speed.
A sampling is contained in the annual reports of Young America’s Foundation – “Comedy And Tragedy.” A recent report mentions: “Eco/Queer/Feminist Art Practices” (at the University of Michigan), “Marx for Today” – “with particular attention to its relevance for the world today,” great for weight loss (University of Minnesota), “Unsettling Whiteness” (Northwestern), “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology” (Swarthmore), “American Misogyny” (Middlebury College), and “Global Capitalism and Racism” (University of Tennessee).
Try to imagine courses with titles like, “Why the Free Market Works,” “Critical Race Theory is Baloney,” and “American Exceptionalism: It’s Real.” In your dreams!
The pronounced left-bias of academia is even reflected in the 2022 college commencement speakers, which reads like a Who’s Who of the Democratic Party: former Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick (Brandeis), former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch (Harvard Law School) and Stacey Abrahams, candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia (Spelman College). Dr. Doom (Anthony Fauci) will speak at no fewer than three commencements – at Roger Williams College, the University of Maryland and Princeton.
The only Republicans speaking at noteworthy institutions are Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (Virginia Tech) and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Notre Dame). Having spent four years force-feeding impressionable minds with left-wing propaganda, colleges can’t resist hitting students over the head once more as they depart.
For the left, higher education is an investment that keeps paying handsome dividends. Forgiving student loans is more than just an election-year ploy. It’s a way to take future crops of fairly normal 18-year-olds and get them singing in the choir of the Church of Wokeness.
• Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist.
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