It has been said that what is taught in the classroom in this generation will be practiced in the legislature in the next. Bottom line: If free speech is lost on our campuses, it will shortly thereafter be lost in our politics.
This commentary originally appeared in Forbes on May 30, 2017. President Trump’s first budget has been submitted to Congress. It would enact a number of changes in higher education policy: eliminating the taxpayer subsidy for low-income students’ loan interest payments while enrolled in school; raising the limit on borrowers’ payments under the Income-Driven Repayment program...
This commentary originally appeared on Forbes on May 19, 2017. Nicki Minaj just became a higher-education philanthropist. But her well-intentioned generosity could ensnarl her in significant debt of her own. Here’s how it happened. As reported by Avalon Zoppo on NBCNews.com, Grammy nominee Minaj announced on social media that she would pay the college tuition...
In short, our universities have none but themselves to blame for the growing public backlash from which they are suffering—and will likely suffer further if they continue to treat concerns over campus censorship with what sometimes appears to be smug indifference. By letting ideology trump scholarship, by elevating feelings over rational arguments, by strangling the quest for truth—their reason for being—at the altar of political correctness, our colleges and universities have squandered the almost-devotional respect felt for them by the larger society.
Now, I’m all for protecting the rights of minorities to participate in public discourse—that’s why I support the First Amendment, which protects free speech for all. But, according to Baer, supporting free speech for all disenfranchises minorities. Somehow, minorities are not included in “all.”
Free speech, though under assault on a growing number of campuses, is still deemed a paramount feature of American democracy by most Americans--certainly those who received their college educations years earlier. But Americans’ devotion to the First Amendment can be expected only to weaken annually if we continue to graduate college students reared in the new regime of intolerance establishing ever-more beachheads on our campuses.
The data reveal that older Americans with “outstanding student loans are more likely than those without outstanding student loans to report that they have skipped necessary health care needs such as prescription medicines, doctors’ visits, and dental care because they could not afford it." This increased burden on older Americans has caused them to tap savings that were being safeguarded for their retirement years.
But there’s another, fundamental step we need to take if we are truly serious about eradicating all distinctions among human beings: Dexterity equality.
The solution to administrative bloat in public universities is less a challenge to the intellect than to the political will and courage of university trustees, chancellors, presidents, and state legislators.
Here, then, straight from the horse’s mouth, is the sorry state of American higher education today. Current administrators, we have learned, cannot to be counted on to right the ship.
In short, things are getting worse on the student loan front—and have been for some time; something we would and should have known earlier, had it not been for the federal government’s “technical programming error.” For my part, I will not question the veracity of the prior administration’s claims. I will wait patiently for the Department of Education to heed the GAO’s admonition to clean up its books.
2017 08 Speech NatlAssocScholars Lindsay by texaspolicy on Scribd