How Higher Education Became a Pawn in the Partisan Forever War

Michael Penn, Juneau Empire, AP Images

The quakes came in quick succession, first a 6.4 on the Richter scale, rattling nerves and door frames across Southern California, then a 7.1 just 34 hours later, knocking homes off foundations and sending families into the street. Days earlier and 3,000 miles north along the Ring of Fire, Alaska’s governor, Michael Dunleavy, had created a different kind of jolt, no less abrupt and jarring, by announcing a 41-percent cut in state funding to the Alaska public-university system.

Greater Los Angeles is still standing, as is the foundation of state financial support for college nationwide. But politics, like seismology, is an inexact science, full of hidden pressures and unexpected catastrophes. The question is whether Dunleavy’s actions are a foreshock of greater destruction to come.

While conventional wisdom holds that states massively disinvested in higher education after the Great Recession, the national picture 10 years later has become more complex. Overall state funding per student, generously adjusted to account for college labor costs, is still about 10 percent lower than the pre-recession peak. But individual state paths have diverged. California and New York have increased spending on their enormous university systems while states including Maryland and Massachusetts have all but restored recession-era cuts.

Others made different choices. Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Alabama all cut funding by 35 percent or more, a club Alaska is poised to join.

What distinguishes these states? Mostly, the political party that governs them. While nearly all states trimmed funding in the initial years after the financial crisis, the largest sustained budget cuts have been inflicted by Republicans.

The recession gave austerity-minded leaders cover: With revenues shrinking, something had to give, and you can’t raise tuition for elementary schools (at least not yet). Then it was just a matter of never getting around to putting the money back.

And that’s what makes the Alaska news so unsettling. If devastating cuts can come in the best of times, or at least far from the worst, then how sustainable can public higher education really be? Dunleavy appears to be acting from pure anti-government animus. There’s a hole in the budget, and he promised not to raise taxes, and Alaskans want their free Permanent Fund money, so, ergo, slash the university to the bone.

In fairness, Alaska is a strange and largely unpopulated place, with fewer residents than the greater Dayton, Ohio, metro area. Sometimes, what happens in Alaska stays there.

But the reactions from conservative cheerleaders offer plenty of reasons to see Dunleavy’s cuts as warnings of a future disaster. Frederick Hess, director of education at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote: “Gosh. It’s almost as if higher ed systems dependent on the public purse could face consequences for becoming ideological entities that have unabashedly opted to take sides in today’s culture wars.”

As the American electorate becomes ever-more efficiently divided into ideologically coherent political parties, every major issue of public concern becomes another front in the partisan forever war. State university systems have mostly avoided that fate, held steady by history, tradition, cultural commitments, and a bipartisan faith in the economic value of learning and knowledge production.

Now tectonic political pressures are threatening to overwhelm that consensus, creating a fault line running north to south through the heartland and then east all the way to the sea.

Propaganda outlets like Fox News have turned difficult campus free-speech debates into a nightly drumbeat of manufactured outrage against colleges and universities. Liberal professors are indoctrinating the youth, the true fascists are in the lecture hall, and so on. The anger builds, and soon the academy becomes the enemy and the other.

Defunding higher education is economic madness in red states that are already struggling with out-migration. But that’s the problem with partisan hatred — it transcends self-interest. Many of the same leaders are happy to let thousands of their fellow citizens sicken and die for lack of health insurance by refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would pick up the tab.

College leaders have historically stayed well above the partisan fray, wisely building a broad base of support that can absorb political oscillation. But the parties are now dividing along educational lines. The Alaska crisis suggests that if universities don’t pick sides, the sides will pick them.

Kevin Carey is director of the education-policy program at New America.