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In America, Most Republicans Think Colleges Are Bad for the Country (chronicle.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Chronicle of Higher Education: A majority of Republicans and right-leaning independents think higher education has a negative effect on the country, according to a new study released by the Pew Research Center on Monday. The same study has found a consistent increase in distrust of colleges and universities since 2010, when negative perceptions among Republicans was measured at 32 percent. That number now stands at 58 percent. By comparison, 72 percent of Democrats or left-leaning Independents in the study said colleges and universities have a positive impact on the United States... In the Pew Research Center's study, distrust of colleges was strongest in the highest income bracket and the oldest age group, with approval levels of just 31 percent among respondents whose family income exceeds $75,000 a year and 27 percent among those older than 65.

15 of 996 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Evergreen State by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    And I wish Evergreen were just a completely fringe case. But sadly, even many mainstream universities in red states are now indoctrinating students and stifling any dissent. Even reddest of red states, Tennessee, had to pass a law (against the opposition of its own public university administrations) just to guarantee students basic free speech rights.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  2. Re: Get back to tech news please by that+this+is+not+und · · Score: 4, Informative

    Slashdot didn't die. Malda just sold it. It's been skidding along ever since. And that was a long time ago now.

  3. Obligatory Asimov quote: by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

    Isaac Asimov, 1980

  4. Re:SJW/Antifa backlash by markdavis · · Score: 4, Informative

    +1

    Universities have become a haven of political correctness, speech-banning, and catering to every special flower at the expense of critical thinking, diversity, and learning. It doesn't help that the costs have gone through the roof and the average graduate (those who actually do graduate) are often less educated than high-school students of many years ago.

    If you want to understand why most Conservatives are so upset about the state of Universities/Colleges, just check out some PragerU videos on the topic:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    I certainly don't agree with everything Prager U puts out, but they have lots of very good points that are well illustrated, well supported, and educational.

  5. Re:SJW/Antifa backlash by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    So, I'm currently a faculty member of a major university. Prior to my most recent position I was at Birmingham Southern College (a small school in Alabama) and before that I was at the University of Maine. It is pretty clear that left-wing student protests and threats of student protest are having a real chilling effect on what schools do and what sort of speakers they invite; there's also a clear chilling effect from the right, albeit smaller. However, none of this is impacting regular education much at all. The vast majority of classes are not impacted; it is a serious mistake to think that because we have a problem with some student groups trying to push for control and censorship now that somehow there's a problem with colleges and universities as a whole. Colleges remain the primary and best way to get serious education on almost any topic; as technology and science become more advanced and more relevant to serious issues we face as a society, the importance of colleges and universities if anything has grown. Universities also remain the hotbeds of basic research, a vital aspect of a long-term healthy economy.

    It is unfortunate that people are using the genuine but minor problem of student activism as an excuse to have a generally anti-intellectual position against colleges as a whole. Moreover, if one is concerned about the influence of such groups, the last thing one should want to do is to give up the colleges and universities to them wholesale. If they become purely "liberal" or "left-wing" institutions, we all lose.

  6. Re:There's an obvious reason by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Informative

    Right, and that's why we have:

      - States trying to ban people marrying the person they love because it disagrees with the Bible.
      -States trying to force women to carry babies to term even when it'll kill them, because the Bible apparently says they have to.
      - States erecting public monuments to christianity, despite constitutional requirements that they don't.
      - States trying to force people to be taught non-science in science classes because it disagrees with the Bible.
      - States trying to give tax payer funding to churches and calling them schools
      - ...

    Don't give me that bullshit about no one trying to ram ideology down throats other than the left. The religious right has been trying to ram the bible down everyone's throats for decades.

  7. Spin it! by Dan+East · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wow, what a biased way to spin things and distort facts.

    A majority of Republicans and right-leaning independents think higher education has a negative effect on the country

    That is not the question the Pew Research survey asked, nor how they reported the results. The question was whether or not colleges and universities are having a positive or negative affect on the way things are going in the country. "Higher education" is far more general terminology than "colleges and universities", and by underhandedly substituting that term they make it sound like Republicans think that being educated or obtaining a higher education is bad for the country.

    But then, what else should we expect from The Chronicle of Higher Education but that kind of bias?

    --
    Better known as 318230.
  8. Re:There's an obvious reason by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Informative

    I doubt Republicans consider engineering, math, biology, English and such as bad.

    Sadly, there's plenty that do. I'm currently living in Texas, and I can take you to meet several of them right now. Here's a Republican elected official over in Arizona.

    http://tucson.com/news/local/e...

    “It got hijacked by Washington, by the federal government,” said Melvin, a candidate for governor, and “as a conservative Reagan Republican I’m suspect about the U.S. Department of Education in general, but also any standards that are coming out of that department.”

    Melvin’s comments led Sen. David Bradley, D-Tucson, to ask him whether he’s actually read the Common Core standards, which have been adopted by 45 states.

    “I’ve been exposed to them,” Melvin responded.

    Pressed by Bradley for specifics, Melvin said he understands “some of the reading material is borderline pornographic.” And he said the program uses “fuzzy math,” substituting letters for numbers in some examples.

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    You are welcome on my lawn.
  9. Re:There's an obvious reason by dunkelfalke · · Score: 1, Informative

    Bullshit. Children stopped being disposable in the early 20th century. Before that Christians were perfectly fine with using them as chattel or as cheap labour.

    --
    "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
  10. Generalization... by XSportSeeker · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm not american so I don't have to worry about stuff like this, but let me tell you guys that this isn't a great signal and people should be extremely careful about ideas like those...
    Obviously, as with anything else, education is never perfect. People will pick and choose the worst examples to say how colleges and whatnot are awful.
    But that fact that there are indeed bad colleges and bad education does not mean that no education is the better alternative.
    I've heard this rhetoric of universities and college degrees being worthless here were I live before. It was among the justifications for electing a couple of presidents that never went through college and university plus a whole bunch of politicians taking representative seats.
    And I'm not saying that people who didn't go through college and university are always idiots, stupid, ignorants and bad administrators... nothing like that. Some of the brightest people I know don't have a degree, or ended up working in areas unrelated to their degrees.
    But what we've seen here was a weird and misguided glorification of ignorance. Picking exceptional cases like millionaires who flunked higher education to put it as the norm, people thinking it was better to vote for politicians that did not have a degree in anything, and a misguided idea that not having passed through college or university education meant that the candidate was "more honest", "closer to the people", "knew what poor people passed through" and stuff like that.

    The end result of all that is a country in deep recession with the worst corruption crisis in history, one ex-president arrested, another impeached, and one current that should be impeached, tons of politicians in jail, numerous example cases of extremely bad administrative decisions, and the general sense that the country is indeed run by ignorants, corrupt people and bad decisions.

    Sure people love to talk about the SJW epidemic, all the white knighting, all the young adults behaving like spoiled brats, political correctedness, plus a bunch of other stuff. It's easy to blame institutions for behaviours like those, but more often than not, it's an age thing.
    People get this skewed perception that bad things happen on campus while ignoring all the shit that happens outside of it.

    So there you go. Sure, college isn't perfect. A degree isn't an indication of morals, ethics and great behaviour. And there are plenty of people who do very well without going through college. But people better be careful about sweeping generalizations, because some lines of reasoning (or lack thereof) can end up very very badly.

  11. Re:Evergreen State by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    I love how you snowflakes cry.

    A "snowflake" is someone who whines about their own sense of entitlement, not someone who speaks up for the rights of others.

    Suppression of free speech on college campuses is a serious issue. Liberal advocates of restrictions should learn from history. In the past, policies designed to suppress the right were later turned against the left. McCarthyism was based on laws originally intended to suppress the far right, rather than "commies". Judicial activism was originally a tool of Liberals, but is now increasingly used against them.

  12. Re: Evergreen State by acrimonious+howard · · Score: 4, Informative
    I'm trying to extrapolate some coherent point from this post. It's difficult, but seems like some common ... thoughts ... should be addressed:

    The liberals were the fascists in the Nazi party (Nazi meaning new socialist)

    Where the heck does this come from?? Every single iota of non-biased information I've ever seen points to the opposite. Eg Wikipedia:

    the Nazi Party was a far-right political party in Germany

    You ... are a "climate denier". Notice that none of these ad homonym attacks...

    If you deny the scientifically-accepted theory of climate change, then you're a climate denier. It's not ad homonym. (face-palm). It's not ad hominem to accuse someone of a position that they hold.

  13. Re: Evergreen State by WindBourne · · Score: 4, Informative
    how the fuck did you get modded up at all, with your rewriting of history and not a single thing to back it up?
    This is why we get so much fake news from you far righties.

    Constantly, historians, have shown that NAZI facism was far right. In fact, it is by definition, consider to be a far right action.:

    fascism
    faSHizm/
    noun
    an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. synonyms: authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, autocracy; More (in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.

    Here are more links:
    Fascism /fæzm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism,[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and control of industry and commerce,[3] that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before it spread to other European countries. Opposed to liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism, fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum.[4][5]
    Then we have the implication of your posting that NAZIs were left-wing, which is as far from the truth as your calling W or trump liberals.
    National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism (/ntszm, næ-/[1]), is the ideology and set of practices associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party, Nazi Germany, and other far-right groups. Usually characterised as a form of fascism that incorporates scientific racism and antisemitism, Nazism's development was influenced by German nationalism, Pan-Germanism, the Völkisch movement and the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged during the Weimar Republic after Germany's defeat in World War I.
    Nazis were strongly opposed to the far left, but added minor elements of it, to appease ppl. The real fist in the nazis was PURE RIGHT WING, just like Trump today is. NAZIs HATED the far left which is why they invaded USSR as soon as they thought they could. Perhaps the ONLY element of the left that they accepted was the lefts love of science. Sadly, the NAZIs perverted science, just like today's GOP does

    Here is how the ORIGINAL socialist party was perveted in under a year, by hitler and his far right cronies.
    The small number of party members were quickly won over to Hitler's political beliefs. He organized their biggest meeting yet of 2,000 people, for February 24, 1920 in the Staatliches Hofbräuhaus in München. Further in an attempt to make the party more broadly appealing to larger segments of the population, the DAP was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) on February 24.[12][13] Such was the significance of Hitler's particular move in publicity that Karl Harrer resigned from the party in disagreement.[14] The new name was borrowed from a different Austrian party active at the time (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, German National Socialist Workers' Party), although Hitler earlier suggested the party to be renamed the "Social Revolutionary Party"; it was Rudolf Jung who persuaded Hitler to follow the NSDAP naming.[15]

    That is history. What you are writing is nothing more than a total re-writing of history in hopes that the idiots will follow your line of thinking .

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    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  14. Re: Mod Parent Up by WindBourne · · Score: 1, Informative

    fascism
    faSHizm/
    noun
    an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
    synonyms:
    authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, autocracy;


    Hmmm

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    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  15. Re: Evergreen State by Jesus+H+Rolle · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... [churches] are funded voluntarily by individuals, not the state.

    In the US, churches have been supported by the state for about a century now. Their tax exemption means I am forced by law to pay their bills.