You’ve heard the saying: Get woke, go broke!
It seems like this is fast becoming an undeniable law of the universe, and our college campuses are learning about this law the hard way.
Let me give you a few recent examples of just how woke our universities have become:
- A Barnard College English professor by the name of Ben Philippe has caused a bit of a firestorm since it was revealed that his book Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Friend contains a passage where he fantasizes about the genocidal murder of white people! This is, keep in mind, an English professor!
- The University of Rhode Island has publicly and formally condemned one of their own Women’s Studies Professors for writing an op-ed that criticized what she called LGBTQ ideology!
- A Cypress College professor was caught on video berating one of her students for saying that police were heroes; she insisted that the modern-day police force was created in the south to oppress slaves!
We of course could go on and on! The modern-day college campus has been infested with cultural Marxism and has turned into one of the most leftist institutions that anyone could ever encounter! It is thus no coincidence that more and more people are turning their backs on these colleges, and the economic consequences of this default boycott have been catastrophic!
A number of articles have come out of late detailing the astonishing number of colleges that are permanently closing across the nation! While most of these articles blame the closures on the pandemic, woke colleges have been closing their doors permanently for some time now. For example, several months before the pandemic, a Harvard Business School professor actually predicted that by the year 2030, the higher education bubble will completely burst and as many as 50 percent of all colleges will close their doors permanently! His basic argument is that virtually all colleges are using a business model that can’t even remotely keep up with all the technological and telecommunicative innovations that we’ve seen over the last 10 years or so. And so, in order to compete with these online digital innovations, colleges have had to discount their tuition by an average of about 50 percent. The problem is that any discount that goes past 35 percent puts the college in a danger zone in terms of paying for its annual expenditures.
And so, colleges have begun closing their doors in record numbers. Every year since 2016, dozens of colleges have collapsed, closing their doors permanently! In fact, Inside Higher Ed published a list of permanent college closures that was published back in 2019, a year before the coronavirus!
Could it be that the coronavirus isn’t putting these colleges out of business as much as the virus of wokeness?
For example, in radical contrast to the enrollment deficits that so many of these leftwing secular colleges experienced prior to the Covid outbreak, enrollment has actually been rising at conservative and Christian colleges! In fact, four of the five conservative Christian colleges and universities with the highest freshman enrollment have actually tripled the size of their incoming class since the fall of 2001. Liberty University quadrupled their student enrollment in the last few years prior to the pandemic. According to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the 150 colleges that they represent have grown on average by an astonishing 20 percent in their enrollment since 2003, all the while the absolute enrollment among universities nationwide went down 10 percent.
Thus, I don’t think it’s the coronavirus that’s killing schools; it’s rather the virus of wokeness. It’s the universal principle of get woke, go broke! When you or your institution become insufferable you inevitably become unsupportable! And that is what’s ultimately closing these colleges!
Having said that, there’s no question that Covid is only further decimating colleges across the nation. The coronavirus alone is projected to cost colleges upwards of 20 percent of their student enrollment. US News and World Report is actually calling it a Higher Education Apocalypse. As we noted, we’ve upwards of 10 colleges closing their doors permanently each year over the last few years, and the coronavirus is only going to exacerbate those numbers.
The significance of these closings for the political makeup of our nation simply can’t be exaggerated.
Scholars have looked into the question as to what makes people liberal, and what they found is that a recurring factor is that most liberals graduated from college. Now notice I didn’t say that most liberals were ‘educated’; that’s precisely what liberals often say. They would say that conservatives are basically uneducated knuckle-draggers. But I think we need to be very clear here: it’s college, not education per se, that seems to be making the most significant difference in terms of differentiating who’s liberal and who’s conservative. And as we saw above, colleges are not so much educating as they are indoctrinating.
What we’re finding is that those who don’t have a college degree are disproportionately more likely to consider themselves conservative and vote conservative. The Voter Study Group found that white non-college voters comprised two-thirds of Trump’s base in primaries and three-fifths in the election. Among those who claimed that they wanted to preserve their culture and their traditions, 6 in 10 had actually left the educational system during or after high school and only 1 in 8 went to college. In fact, Hillary Clinton lost among whites without degrees so badly that even if she received Obama’s turnout among blacks she would still have lost. During the primaries, Trump won more than 150 counties where at least 8 in 10 people were whites without college degrees.
Similarly, across the pond, Brexit was supported by 74 percent of people without degrees. By contrast, 84 percent of Brits under the age of 34 with degrees voted to remain with the EU.
So what we’re finding is that people who attend or graduate from college are disproportionately more liberal in general. And if more and more of these leftist indoctrination centers are closing down, then the woke left is slowly but surely losing their major recruiting center for cultivating a new generation of social justice warriors.
Too bad so many colleges never learned a fundamental law of the universe: Get woke, go broke!
