One of the things that is supposed to be bedrock about conservatism is reluctance to use the government to…well, do anything. It’s a form of political cruelty-you’re on your own, go to hell, it’s all your fault if you go under. It absolves bad politicians of their responsibility to deliver services to the people. Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation is all about further erosion of the government’s ability to assist us, and it dovetails nicely with parts of Agenda 47. It’s hard to imagine America being more of a rat race than it is now, but if they whisper in Trump’s ear enough, we can expect more meanness as public policy.
However, when it comes to education, Trump seems to be swimming against the conservative tide.
In recent weeks, Americans have been horrified to see students and faculty at Harvard and other once-respected universities expressing support for the savages and jihadists who attacked Israel. We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they’re turning our students into Communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions — we can’t let this happen. It’s time to offer something dramatically different.
This is mainly in reference to an open letter drafted by Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee shortly after the Hamas attack. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not it was well-thought out and whether the response to it was overblown. I think we should get nervous, though, when a presidential aspirant is doing dumb things like red-baiting in 2024. It’s a silly anachronism, even as we seem to be lurching towards new cold wars urged on by Russia’s attempt to digest Ukraine and China’s powerful state capitalism in fierce competition with our own system. The important point is, let the kids think what they want. They’re growing and learning about the world and they are honing their opinions. If they are poor ones, leave them be. Opprobrium will typically cause them to pull back and rethink. If there’s a good place to have a market it’s in a school setting, where ideas are commodities to be exchanged and the value of each is tested.
Under the plan I’m announcing today, we will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy.
Its mission will be to make a truly world-class education available to every American, free of charge, and do it without adding a single dime to the federal debt. This institution will gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free.
Ugh, the American Academy? Can we dial back the jingoism, please? The value of an education to Donald Trump is in serious question, considering that the last university he ran was a scam. But what he’s proposing here is against conservative dogma- it’s naked redistribution. Both liberals and conservatives are wildly skeptical of this idea. They should be:
Most importantly, the American Academy will compete directly with the existing and very costly four-year university system by granting students degree credentials that the U.S. government and all federal contractors will henceforth recognize. The Academy will award the full and complete equivalent of a bachelor’s degree.
That’s quite a limited set of employers who will accept the “equivalent” of a bachelor’s degree. I guess there’s a good reason why this is free; it’s relatively worthless, lacks utility and looks like a waste of people’s time. So it’s a reboot of Trump U in that respect.
As it appears to require legislation to establish, this lead zeppelin is unlikely to take off. But we must look at the idea as yet another broadside against education itself. Across the United States, children are being deprived of access to accurate information and curriculums are neutered to conform to naive public pressure. Now we want to stop higher education students from saying their piece and use their inartful statements as a means to funnel funds for their education into some free White House-run paper mill whose issuances don’t even have the strength of a diploma. The Stupiding Of America continues.
The Illogical Seminary 