Make no mistake that the Trump administration’s ultimatum to Columbia University this month ordering a dramatic overhaul of admissions and disciplinary rules could crater all higher ed in the U.S. But really, isn't that what this dumb Turd and his sapling followers always wanted? And going back to his first term, didn't Dotard proclaim his "love for the poorly educated". Forgot? Then read this Reuters link:
Trump loves 'the poorly educated' ... and social media clamors | Reuters
Wherein we read:
"U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump's declaration of love for "the poorly educated" in his Nevada victory speech lit up social media on Wednesday, sparking a battle between those dumbfounded by the remark and those saying it had been taken out of context...By Wednesday morning, the phrase "I LOVE THE POORLY EDUCATED" was trending heavily. On Twitter, it was tweeted roughly 15 times a minute, according to social media analytics firm Zoomph.
Well, they aren't laughing now, least of all those overseas students who'd planned to advance their higher education at a U.S. college or university. But given this attack on higher learning, they can no longer depend on university support and will go elsewhere.
For those not paying attention, with $400 million in canceled government grants and contracts on the line, federal officials ordered Columbia’s administration to place the university’s Middle Eastern studies department under academic receivership for at least five years.
Typically, a receivership is handled internally. University administrators can take the rare step of imposing this measure if an when a department descends into chaos. It is viewed as a last-resort solution to extended periods of internal strife and dysfunction.
This time is different. The call for a receivership is coming from outside the university — and directly from Trump's White House. It also arrives at a moment when dozens of other colleges and universities are facing federal inquiries and fear a fate similar to Columbia’s.
But as with his other burst norms, including plans to destroy the Dept. of Education, and taking over the Kennedy Center, Dictator Trump is testing how far he can push boundaries. Then, if successful - no major outcry or backlash- take over the last bastions of independent thought capable of offering strong criticism to his authoritarian reign.
Why be surprised? Numerous election post-mortems - from Nate Silver to Ezra Klein - have noted the major 2024 election fracture was between the college educated and non-college educated.
Silver, the polling expert, argued in a December Substack essay, “The Expert Class Is Failing, and So Is Biden’s Presidency,” that the emergence of the Democrats as “'the party of the educated” has resulted in what he called “ the Indigo Blob,” which he described as:
"the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia and public health on the one hand — institutions that draw almost exclusively from the ranks of college graduates —"
The result, Silver wrote, is that the left “is losing the
battle of ideas, the one thing that it’s supposed to win.” In fact, the
left is losing the battle of ideas to stupidity, mass stupidity infused from
multiple sources and fed by the basic diminution of intelligence in the
electorate over the past two decades.
The current assault against the "elites" can be traced back to a December, 2022 WSJ rant by Barton Swaim in which he screamed:
"The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class.....That one party is the educated party—that its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponents—has generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves..."
Swaim takes a fact everyone knows to be valid: Democrats have the largest proportion of college-educated voters - and twists it into a liability. I.e. that the "smart party" is also a "wiseass" snark party because it happens to attract the most educated people. Then going from there to conclude that "it needs no self reflection". But in fact it is the party (GOP) featuring the fewest college-educated voters that is the one with the least self-reflection.
All of which has been a lead up to the current assault on the last bastion of elite, objective knowledge - in the universities. In the words of Sheldon Pollock, a retired former chair of the Middle Eastern studies department at Columbia:
“It is one small department in one university. But it will reverberate across the entire country.”
You better believe it, and I can just visualize Barton Swaim gloating now as the Trumptards take an axe to the last redoubt of higher ed and a university system that had been the envy of the world.
One comment in the NY Times perhaps summed it up best as to how we got here:
"The root of the Democratic party's failure and the Republican party's success is that the public is so spectacularly ill-informed. Only 15% of adults read a newspaper? Good lord, no wonder people are so easily snookered."
And Dotard loves them being snookered because then he can more easily consolidate and expand his misbegotten, ill-gained and feral power, e.g.
Excerpt:
“Why do so many
Republicans like the direction Trump is taking the country in? Is it about his
style, or his policies?... Sixty-nine percent believe the
“political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.” If those
are your priors, then you’re going to be happy with a president who wields a
wrecking ball….and many Republicans (sadly!) want their opponents to suffer.
They’re actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose
funding if those people are perceived as part of the “deep state” or ”elites”
See Also:
Anti-Intellectualism In The U.S. - A Real Concern Or Hyped Worry?
And:
Columbia University’s Concessions to Trump Seen as a Watershed - The New York Times
And:
by Robert Reich | March 23, 2025 - 5:01am | permalink
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
If you give in to extortionists, they’ll extort you and others for more. If you let bullies get their way, those bullies will bully you and others even more menacingly.
Which brings me to Columbia University’s president and trustees, who today surrendered the university’s academic freedom to the Trump regime.
Trump threatened to cancel $400 million in federal funding if Columbia didn’t put its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department in “academic receivership.”
Columbia has now agreed to appoint a senior vice provost to oversee the department.
And:
Can America’s universities survive the Trump era?
And:
by Bill Berkowitz | March 23, 2025 - 4:55am | permalink
Trump’s Executive Order Defunding Museums and Libraries Across the Country is Another Authoritarian Attempt to Control Culture
“They were careless people … They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
—F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Historically, authoritarian regimes have used cultural appropriation to consolidate power and control cultural narratives. Suppressing artistic expression, attacking the media and academia, banning books, destroying historical documents, saturating the culture with groupthink, are all part of an authoritarian’s supercharged playbook. Donald Trump, in his rush to eradicate and/or rewrite history and reshape America’s cultural institutions has, among other acts, named himself Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and dismissed existing board members, appointing a new Trump-aligned board; rewritten guidelines for National Endowment for the Arts grants, emphasizing the need for so-called patriotic art; appointed a new head of the National Archives; and most recently signed an executive order to eliminate the agency that funds museums and libraries.
And:
Another academic has been arrested by President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on legally dubious grounds, according to a new report.
Politico reported Wednesday that Indian national Dr. Badar Khan Suri was recently arrested outside of his Virginia home by "masked agents" who said they were with the DHS. Suri — who is in the United States legally on a student visa and who is married to a U.S. citizen — was not charged with any crime and has no criminal record, yet he is being targeted for deportation and awaiting transfer to Texas.
Suri is being put into deportation proceedings under the same vaguely worded statute that the Trump administration invoked after it arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil (a legal permanent resident and Columbia University graduate student who led pro-Palestine protests last year). That statute claims that an administration has the authority to deport any foreign-born resident who it suspects could be a threat to U.S. foreign policy.
And:
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