"WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH FLORIDA?": The GOP's doomed war against higher ed.

• Author: Fallows, James
• Position: 2024 United States presidential election

The Republican Party's current campaign against higher education came more or less out of the blue. When Ron DeSantis ran for reelection as governor of Florida barely 10 months ago, his website listed "Education/Banning Critical Race Theory in Classrooms" as only number seven among his priorities, three places behind "Preserving Florida's Environment."

DeSantis is now well known for legislative and administrative efforts to control the state's educators--for instance, his push to ban AP courses in African American history, to prohibit state colleges from using public or even private funds on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, to dismantle tenure protections, and to appoint a right-wing governing board for New College, a public liberal arts school. These and other measures built on DeSantis's yearslong background of anti-"wokeness" but were officially kicked off only during 2023, as he launched his ill-starred presidential campaign.

Similar measures in other Republican-run states-- North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Ohio, Iowa, and most of all Texas--have sprung up in just the past two years. All continue a long historic pattern of conservative political suspicion about "elite" or "liberal" institutions. But compared with other big themes in the modern GOP platform--tax cuts, redistricting and voting controls, court appointments, abortion--they are sudden new objects of attention, without decades' worth of legislative or lobbying push behind them. Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society have been laying the groundwork for a politicized right-wing judiciary for decades. DeSantis et al. are just getting started.

A sign of how recent the switch has been: An authoritative New America survey called "Varying Degrees" found that only three years ago, in 2020, some 69 percent of Americans felt that colleges "have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country." This included majorities from both political parties. Two years later, that overall-approval number had fallen to 55 percent, with almost all of the change coming from Republicans. According to New America, some 60 percent of Republicans now view colleges as actually damaging the country, rather than helping it. Among Democrats, more than 70 percent still view colleges as a net plus.

"For many conservative lawmakers, higher education isn't simply in the crosshairs," Karin Fischer, of The Chronicle of Higher Education, writes in an extensive new report called College as a Public Good. "It's Enemy No. 1 in a new culture war."

How did this happen? And what can colleges and their supporters, leaders, and constituencies do about it? Time is our enemy on many fronts. But in this case colleges should be heartened in the knowledge that time is on their side--if they use it correctly.

What is old: "The past is not even past."

America's achievements are always new; its tensions and tragedies are always old. Look at the headlines in 2023. With allowances for technology and demographic and legal change, you could be reading about 1923, or 1823. Racial inequity and strife. The right balance between the secular and the sacred, between the urban and the rural, between big cities and smaller towns. Between idealistic involvement in the world and self-protective isolation. Between ... you get the idea.

One of those constant tensions is America's view of advanced education. Choose nearly any decade in our national history, and you will find an instance of political action, rhetoric, or censure--almost always from conservatives-- directed against what are seen as privileged, dissolute, and disloyal ivory-tower types. Nearly 60 years ago, Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on the topic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Watch the recent movie Oppenheimer and note the role that UC Berkeley played in national politics from the 1930s onward. In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower--who in addition to commanding Allied troops had served as president of Columbia University before becoming commander in chief--led the Republican Party against Adlai Stevenson and the "eggheads" he would bring into public life. And this was even after the vast...