Republicans’ faith in the American higher education has sharply diminished since 2015—as it well should have. A national survey from the Pew Research Center found a growing majority of Republican and rightward-leaning independents believe colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country. Pew probed 2,504 American adults’ esteem for labor unions, banks, churches, the news media, and colleges and universities, asking whether “each has a positive/negative effect on the way things are going in the country.” Democrats’ view of the media improved since last year’s survey, while Republicans’ far more negative overall ranking of the fourth estate stayed mostly the same—as did the partisan divide on religious institutions, which Republicans hold in constant esteem, and Democrats increasingly distrust.
It was, however, Republicans’ trust in higher education’s benefit to the country that declined most dramatically. As recently as September 2015 only 37 percent of Republicans considered colleges and universities a drag on the nation, while a majority (54 percent) found them a boon. Last year, their ratings were more or less evenly mixed. And now a full 58 percent majority—high as 68 percent among conservative Republicans—consider colleges and universities to have an ill-effect on national affairs.
The most illustrative figure Pew published was a line graph, showing Republicans’ negative rankings of higher ed steeply incline after the fall of 2015:
Since 2015, Republicans’ views of the impact of colleges have turned much more negative
This was the season, recall, that Yale devolved into a riotous mess over whether students should be subjected to the psychic pain of culturally appropriative Halloween costumes. Concurrent protests at the University of Missouri, where the president and chancellor resigned in disgrace for their failure to correct symptoms of “systematic injustice”—and a professor was fired after threatening a student journalist—proved campus hysterics were not an ivory tower exclusive.
The timing of the Pew poll is interesting given that the New York Times has put those Missouri protests back in the spotlight this week with an article about how, two years removed, the fallout from those protests has tanked enrollment and caused the university crippling financial losses.
There are rumblings, too, that enrollment and morale are down at Middlebury College in Vermont—where student protesters and black-masked agitators back in March assailed conservative scholar Charles Murray and the liberal professor who interviewed him. And it’s hard to imagine many parents want to send their kids to Evergreen State College, where violent protests and threats after a white professor refused to leave campus for a planned “Day of Absence” prompted enhanced security measures.
Reports on the Pew data have credited right-wing media coverage of recent campus unrest for conservatives’ “souring on higher education”—although it was notably a September 2015 Atlantic cover story by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, neither of whom qualifies as a conventional Republican, warned against the rise of “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” “microaggressions” and the cultural sickness they’re symptoms of. The following year, Purdue University president, former governor, and former OMB director Mitch Daniels lectured bipartisan billionaires in Sun Valley, Idaho on the crisis gripping college campuses.
And just last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee—a necessarily bipartisan body, currently in the hands of a Republican majority—held a hearing “Free Speech 101” to assess none other than the negative national impact of censorious campus protest culture. What the senators said that day—their defense of civility, intellectual diversity, the rule of law, and above all the First Amendment right to freedom of expression—helps clarify why colleges and universities disproportionately worry conservative Republicans. Conservatives, according to another recent Pew survey, are 83 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to want the Constitution upheld as originally written.
