The GOP is Winning Its War Against Higher Education. We'll All Lose as a Result | Opinion

The past several years have made clear that Republicans have become committed to waging an all out war against higher education by attacking its finances, seeking to regulate the content of professors' speech, and seeking to end the institution of tenure. The GOP is currently winning on all three of these fronts, and unless the tide soon turns, the end result will be a devastating loss to the United States as a whole.

One of the least discussed yet most damaging means by which the GOP has gone to war with higher education is by slowly bleeding it to death financially. State schools, most especially in red states, are increasingly finding that the outlays they can expect from state legislatures are only going in one direction, down.

Perversely, a favorite line of attack against universities in Republican circles is the cost of tuition. While Republicans are right that college is now seen as unattainably expensive for most middle class Americans, this isn't a consequence of colleges building ornate dorm rooms, lazy rivers, or splurging on administrator and professor salaries. However, the reality is that tuition hikes are largely a necessary result of an ever decreasing level of state support to universities.

Before COVID-19 hit, state funding nationwide for higher education was roughly 9 percent below what it enjoyed prior to the Great Recession and a full 18 percent below where it was before the 2001 tech bubble blew a hole in the economy. When the well of government money dries up, universities have little choice but to pass the costs on to their students in the form of tuition hikes.

Of course universities must tighten their belts where they can, particularly when it comes to salary costs, but they are often pressed to do so in a manner that causes more harm than good over the long term. For example, the utilization of part-time "adjunct" professors has become a mainstay at many major public universities.

Adjuncts face an overcrowded labor market and near poverty level wages. Worse yet, adjunct professors have a near total lack of a guarantee of employment beyond the semester at hand. The result of the "adjunctification" of higher education is that many potentially great professors are scared out of the industry well before they even enter it and our students are increasingly taught by professors with the most shallow of roots in the university.

Academic freedom in higher education is also under sustained attack by Republicans, particularly as it relates to discussing anything to do with race. In Florida, the state is currently embroiled in a lawsuit where it is arguing that public university professors do not have freedom of speech when they are teaching. The reason for the state's assault is none other than to service the Republican crusade against critical race theory (CRT).

CRT has become a boogeyman in Republican campaigns on par with communism during a Red Scare, with many often equating the two as ideological bedfellows used by liberal professors to indoctrinate students. Never mind that almost no professors actually teach CRT. The anti-CRT bills Republicans tend to write are so broad that they effectively make it impossible to even touch on any issue involving race without risking running afoul of the law.

The logic behind these bills seems to be rooted in the unfounded belief that university professors are indoctrinating students. Republicans apparently believe that university students, adults who are old enough to serve in the military and buy firearms, need to have their malleable minds protected from manipulation at the hands of their professors. It seems as though Republicans feel that students need a "safe space" on college campuses after all, one free of any ideas that go against the party line.

The final field of battle in their war against higher education has Republicans taking aim against the central pillar of academic freedom, tenure. Tenure is a core component of academic freedom in that it allows a professor the ability to bring truth to power. It is little wonder then that Republicans would loathe it so, as it allows professors at public universities the ability to criticize the GOP for its authoritarian ideology without fear of losing their job as a consequence. After all, authoritarians crave the ability to control others and tenure is the shield by which professors become protected from pressure to bend the knee to those in power.

Thanks to our public universities we've grown our nation's soft power by educating a host of world leaders, consistently on the receiving side of a global brain drain, benefited from an incalculable number of scientific advancements, and so much more. However, all of these strengths will dissipate as Republicans keep winning their war on higher education, which is why we'll all lose if they aren't stopped soon.

Nicholas Creel is an assistant professor of business law at Georgia College and State University.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.