American higher education’s credibility crisis is self-inflicted. According to the article, Gallup found that only 38 percent of adults retain “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in colleges and universities, while roughly one-third of respondents blamed partisan bias or indoctrination—the leading cause of distrust, even ahead of tuition costs.
That verdict should surprise no one considering how universities have served as the incubator for the woke plague. Universities have allowed ideological conformity to replace intellectual inquiry, staffing departments with overwhelmingly liberal faculties while marginalizing conservative, libertarian, and dissenting perspectives.
The result is not education but an echo chamber funded by students, parents, donors, and taxpayers who are increasingly unwilling to subsidize institutions that are aggressively hostile to their values. The damage extends far beyond politics. Americans also question whether colleges teach the practical knowledge graduates need for employment.
Meanwhile, falling enrollment, declining revenue, and school closures threaten the financial survival of institutions whose administrators appear more committed to ideological purity than reform.
Students understand the climate and increasingly have to submit biased information to be able to go along to get along in these captured institutions. Surveys cited in the article show widespread self-censorship, including at Harvard, where only about one-third reportedly feel comfortable expressing their views. Yet academic elites dismiss concerns rather than confront the culture they created.
These Marxist academics have gotten high on their own supply. We must reject the assumption that universities deserve automatic public support. Legislatures and donors should demand genuine intellectual diversity, institutional neutrality, free speech, and measurable reform before providing additional funding.
The Trump administration’s war against woke-ism in the school system is a good start, but every level of government must put this agenda in their crosshairs so we can root it out of the university system and public education for good.
