Even those who aren’t surprised by the simple fact of Donald Trump’s assault on America’s universities must be shocked by the full frontal magnitude of it all, belated attempts to walk back parts of it, notwithstanding. (Harvard is putting up a courageous, clever, and effective defense.)
It’s been the goal of the oligarchs and their pet politicians to dismantle any attempt to educate and maintain the system of indoctrination that exists. The system was designed to produce obedient factory workers who do what they are told. Once the Robber Barons were gone the new generation of oligarchs did not see a reason to replace the system. As it obviously benefited them to keep a mindless populace around. Colleges and universities have had to deprogram students to be able to think for themselves. Now that so many people are getting college and university degrees, the oligarchs want to dismantle the system so that it goes back to only being a privileged few are able to see what is actually happening.
It has always been the oligarchs fault for how shit our education system has been. We have always been an oligarchic third world country that has been draped in a disguise of being better than it was.
What’s bizarre is that even with so many degrees, the qons were still mostly getting what they wanted, and even a great deal of people, including not just the rabid right wing, were/are advocating for college as being ONLY a path to getting a job.
So a whole lot of people seem to come out of college thinking nearly the exact same things they thought going in. Many college graduates still seem unable to do sound critical thinking and many still seem unable to spot glaring logical fallacies that are employed in the everyday. You can enter college being a radical right winger, and sail through college without really having any of that seriously challenged. If it’s only treated like a job training program, that is almost the inevitable result, I guess. This seems especially egregious in areas like engineering, at least in my view.
And it’s not even just in areas of political thought and philosophy, but somehow you can have people coming out with a bachelors in engineering and yet still be “skeptics” (not really skeptics) about things like climate change and evolution, which is a tragic failure in education. You cannot just kind of wave it away as, “oh, well, their degree was in a soft science so that’s why they are ignorant on this”.