Why are we seeing the craziness on college campuses, with speakers shouted down, professors afraid of students, and certain subjects off-limits from public discussion? Is there a generational change, with Gen Z just that much more radical even than millennials?
Truth be told, what’s different now from when I was in college 25 years ago isn’t so much that faculties, or students, have shifted Left. This is not the decades-old conservative complaint about the liberal takeover of the academy. Instead, it’s that the illiberal Left now drives campus culture. University officials placate, facilitate, and even foment social justice mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down so as not to be caught in the cancellation crossfire. And this is largely the result of growing higher education bureaucracies.
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The statistics on the growth of these Left-skewed non-teaching staff are mind-boggling. In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don’t teach grew at about twice the rate of students. In the same period, tuition at four-year public colleges more than tripled. Curiously, uniform statistics for the decade-plus since then are hard to come by, as the big surveyors stopped separating administrators and faculty or stopped collecting information entirely. The Department of Education has contributed to this obfuscation, changing methodologies year-to-year if not failing to collect or disclose the relevant data.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Washington Examiner
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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