Opinion | Republican war on college demands liberal defense of higher education

Democratic officials and the broader left generally support America’s long-standing system of universities that operate largely independently from partisan politics. Now, they need to act on that belief by aggressively and forcefully pushing back against the right’s war on colleges.

There’s nothing new about conservatives attacking academia. The right views universities like the news media: as a left-leaning institution that must be delegitimized, weakened or taken over by conservatives. Attacking the University of California at Berkeley as a symbol of out-of-control liberalism was part of how future president Ronald Reagan rose to power in the 1960s.

That said, over the past decade, the Republican Party has become even more fixated on what’s happening on campuses. Bashing colleges and enacting policies to constrain them weren’t hallmarks of being a George W. Bush-era Republican politician.

Public colleges are reliant on states and the federal government for much of their funding, so they need politicians on their side to survive. But although Democrats often try to make college more affordable, such as President Barack Obama’s proposal for free community college, the party hasn’t positioned itself as a stalwart defender of universities. Until recently, that wasn’t necessary — the happenings on campuses weren’t at the center of state and national politics.

And many Democratic politicians and prominent left-leaning figures have positions on higher education that make them less than ideal defenders of it. They view college as a luxury for students who choose to pay for it and a pathway to white-collar jobs, as opposed to a place for learning and intellectual development. As factory jobs declined and racial inequality persisted, the Clinton and Obama administrations pushed K-12 reform and expanded college access as ways for working-class Americans to essentially educate themselves into the middle class with a bit of government help.

So Democrats who consistently push for increased funding for K-12 schools and forcefully oppose cuts to that spending aren’t as invested in public dollars for colleges and universities. They haven’t opposed the gradual shift in financing of higher education over the past four decades, as colleges went from charging low tuition to dramatically increasing costs and expecting most students to take out loans.

Also, many prominent Democrats agree with and therefore reinforce conservative depictions of colleges as enclaves for the elite and super-liberal. Democratic politicians, their children, their advisers and the journalists whose articles they read disproportionately attend or attended Ivy League schools and other expensive private colleges with lots of rich students and some very vocal left-wing professors and activist groups. So leading Democrats’ personal experiences don’t match reality: The overwhelming majority of American students attend public colleges that don’t have intense left- or right-wing activism, in part because many of those students have part-time jobs and don’t live on campus.

Another reason Democrats are reluctant to defend colleges is that an overly simplistic view of the electorate has taken hold within the party. White Americans without bachelor’s degrees are increasingly voting Republican, while White Americans with degrees are shifting left. The nondegree group is about 40 percent of voters, those with a bachelor’s about 30 percent. So many Democratic pundits and strategists (wrongly) argue electoral math requires the party to distance itself from people who are attending or graduated from college.

“People say to me sometimes, ‘Well, Joe, that’s great, you’re helping people get into college, but how about all those hard-working people you grew up with in the neighborhood? How about all those folks in labor unions? How about all those hard-working people that work with their hands?” President Biden said in a speech in February.

I doubt people are actually coming up to the sitting president and complaining that he is too supportive of Americans going to college. Hopefully Biden doesn’t actually think (wrongly) that the country is…