Republicans Really Hate Universities These Days

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?

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

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