According to a new study from Pew, the 2016 presidential campaign produced a huge increase in the number of Republicans who think universities are bad for America:
I’m a little puzzled by this. Conservatives have been railing about universities forever, from Bill Buckley’s quip about the Boston phone book to Spiro Agnew’s nattering nabobs to the post-Gingrich assault on research of all kinds and continuing to this day with the more recent indignity over safe spaces and trigger warnings. So if this sentiment has been around so long, how did Trump produce such a sudden and large jump in the space of a single year? He mostly goes after the news media, not universities.
Or is it due to something else? I know that National Review has substantially upped its coverage of the latest outrages in higher education, but how about Fox? Have they been campaigning to scare old people about America-hating professors? Or is something else afoot? Does anyone have any ideas?
