The Rude Pundit: The GOP War on College

[babylonsister]

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-gop-war-on-college.html
The Rude Pundit

Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
11/21/2017
The GOP War on College



Up there is a photo of the college where I work. It's part of the rows of American flags that lined the sidewalks that go through the center of campus. Every year, a group of student veterans plants the flags in honor of Veterans Day. No one knocks them over. No one steals them. It's an impressive display, actually, in the autumn light, the fallen leaves around them. My school is not conservative. In fact, it's incredibly open to all sorts of ideologies and activities. Military recruiters set up booths in the student center. There have been pro-Palestine and pro-Israel marches. The LGBTQ organization is very active. One bathroom in each building has been designated as non-gender specific. During the election, someone wrote "Vote Trump" in chalk on the sidewalk. No one batted an eye. We just walked over it. In one of my classes last year, I had a student wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt and another student in a MAGA hat. No one asked for a safe space, but, if someone did, we do have those on campus because what's the big fucking deal if we do?

The point here is one I've made before: All the shit you hear about what goes on at colleges and universities is a grotesque exaggeration of the day-to-day life of most campuses. But conservatives have long been beating themselves off about those crazy-ass liberals cruelly opening the minds of their precious, protected, tender children. Oddly, most of those conservatives are college-educated, yet they still managed to turn out to be total assholes, which ought to completely fuck up their point. But that would require logic, and logic, as we have learned time and again, is not one of the tools available in the savage right-wing toolbox.

Now, Republicans are finally putting into action their desire to snuff out the educational dreams of the poor and middle class. The phenomenally destructive tax bill just passed by the House of Representatives contains multiple provisions to dick over college students in order to simply shovel more cash into the gaping maws of the ultra-rich. The House bill would turn tuition waivers for graduate students into income, which would mean that the taxes for poor grad students and law school and medical school students would go up by about 400%. The bill would eliminate the deduction for student loan interest. It would tax the endowments of universities, funds that are used for, you know, education. And it would consolidate some tax credits into a lower, single credit that will directly affect millions of Americans.

Part of this is the desperation that Republicans have for offsetting the ludicrous cost of lowering taxes on the wealthy. But part of it comes from Republican animosity towards higher education. 58% of Republicans in a poll this past summer said that college has a "negative effect" on the country. Which, if you think about it, is pretty fucked up because Republicans are, in large part, responsible for gutting and dumbing down elementary and secondary education and making it so that most decent jobs require a Bachelor's degree. But now that kids are going to college and learning history and other shit that makes them question authority, especially religious and conservative authority, all of a sudden it's bad.

The right can't just say, "We hate universities because they teach kids how to be decent human beings, and it actually sticks for some of them." But conservatives can point to the excesses at a pretty limited number of colleges, like protests against speakers or speech codes or other stuff. Then they can say, "Oh, look at these motherfucking intolerant lefties who get so much from the government."

And if they can fuck the kids over in the name of keeping more people stupid and thus keeping them more Republican, all the better.

[niyad]

1. as always, RP nails it!

[Fred Sanders]

2. Religious war on science and knowledge never ends. But they always lose. Always because

the truth gets its pants on and eventually laps the religious fantasies and lies many times over.

[LiberalLovinLug]

3. We have to pound this out to the youth voters

[Red Pest]

4. Here is how to destroy US leadership in the sciences

The plan to tax graduate student tuition waivers will cause many students to not apply to graduate school because of the increased tax burden that they will bear if they receive tuition waivers. Not only do they never see the money, someone else pays those funds to the university. Usually, the tuition waiver is paid from grant funds that the major professor obtains to fund the research project that the student is working on. Other times it is money from the university in the form of a teaching assistantship. Either way, the student will be responsible for the taxes. The stipends allow the grad students to live just a bit above poverty. Why will anyone go to grad school, if they have to live in poverty?

Oh wait, there's more - the Republican plan also includes no more deduction for students loans. So, if a student does not get a waiver and must pay tuition, they also do not get to deduct their interest payments later after they graduate. Poverty continues after graduation.

This is just a way to petrify the social strata. No higher degree, lower pay. No upward social mobility.

Further, with a decrease in graduate students, the next generation of scientists and engineers educated by US universities will be much smaller. The scientific advances that result from the graduate students carrying out research projects will be similarly diminished. Foreign graduate students who come to US universities will no longer come unless they are wealthy. Our best students will go to Europe or Japan or China. The US will become an under-educated nation and a source of cheap labor.

Did Putin concoct this to bring down US intellectual leadership or did the Republicans come up with this idiocy all by themselves?

[DDySiegs]

5. The People behind the Right Wing are SIMPLY EVIL

One of the ways they show this is through their approach to education of ordinary people. They don’t like the idea of people acting rationally and relying on accurate info and clear thinking. If such behavior became prevalent, their greedy grip on things of economic value and their authritarian power over their mostly mindless followers would collapse.

This explains their utter fear of an informed and logically thinking electorate. This fear results intheir willingness, and indeed desire, to eliminate effective and useful education for the vast majority as much as they can. It also explains their goal of eliminating the use of logic as a tool for bringing about a “life worth living” for all. Thus Rude Pundit is right on when says that “logic, as we have learned time and again, is not one of the tools available in the savage right-wing toolbox.”

[Irish_Dem]

6. Exactly, well said. nt