I was doing a show at Ft. Polk for the troops in Louisiana a few months ago. Anyway, there are 40,000 men stationed at Ft. Polk. And this really well-dressed, drunk lady yells out, “Every one of them is a bad f***!” You know, after about 39,000 times, wouldn’t you start to go, “Maybe it’s me. I seem to be the only common denominator in this equation.”

Comedian Ron White/You can’t fix stupid

Conservatives are wringing their hands over what they believe is liberal indoctrination of young Americans at the nation’s colleges and universities. This is nothing new. In 2004, George Will, using an American Enterprise Institute survey, wrote:

 [The survey] of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring.

This ideological shift is not limited to the humanities and social sciences. A similar review of faculty at Stanford and Berkeley, which included engineering and natural sciences professors, reported nine Democrats for every Republican. Pretty damning evidence that higher education in the United States is populated with left-wing madrasas. Except for a universal truth, there is a difference between correlation and causation.

Will points out this disparity has doubled in the past 30 years. So, just maybe, it is important to take a look at exactly how the conservative movement has changed in that same period.

• The Republican Party, led by Ronald Reagan, believed the Soviet Union (now Russia) was an “evil empire.” Today, registered GOP voters give Vladimir Putin a higher favorability rating than Joe Biden, despite the former’s invasion of Ukraine and multiple crimes against humanity.
• The current GOP majority in the House of Representatives rails against the national debt, but conveniently ignores the fact George W. Bush’s and Donald Trump’s tax cuts are the single largest contributor to the spending/revenue imbalance.
• Conservatives claim the best government is government closest to the people. Yet, they fire locally elected district attorneys, intervene in local criminal investigations, dissolve local school boards, and yesterday, expelled two members of the Tennessee General Assembly for daring to challenge the state’s permissive gun laws.
• They wrap themselves in the First Amendment, but ban books and punish those who disagree with them.
• They claim to be for “law and order,” but are silent when the MAGA wing of the Republican Party honors convicted felons who pummeled Capitol police with American flags.
• The party that once impeached Bill Clinton saying “character matters,” again plays deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to falsifying business records to disguise hush money payments to a porn star and a Playboy model and calls efforts to investigate the alleged perpetrator a “witch hunt.”
• They declare “individual freedom” to be a sacred except when it comes to a woman’s right to choose and sexual orientation.
• They promise economic opportunity for all but continue to push two economic theories (supply side and trickle down) which have resulted in an ever growing disparity between the haves and haves not.
• And just yesterday, we watched as Republicans cried foul over Judge Juan Merchan’s donations to Democratic causes in 2020 (totaling $35) but said nothing about Justice Clarence Thomas’ accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars of unreported gifts from a major GOP donor.

Which brings me back to Ron White.  Conservatives sound an awful lot like that well-dressed, drunk woman at his Ft. Polk performance.  They are dissatisfied, not with sexual gratification, but ideological fulfillment.  Imagine if White had said:

There are thousands of college and university faculty out there. And you think every one of them is a socialist or communist who hates America. They come from a lot of different places and different backgrounds. So, maybe it’s you. You are the common denominator in this equation.

An argument can even be made that even the most conservative educational institutions contribute to this liberal movement.  Hillsdale College’s website states this uber conservative Christian liberal arts school challenges its students to “study timeless truths.”  If the administration and faculty believe what they say, they should not be surprised when students compare the brand of conservatism being peddled by the growing MAGA influencers in the Republican Party to that of a previous era and look elsewhere.

There was a college which promoted the principles of curiosity and personal exploration.  New College of Florida.  Once described as the learning ground for “free-thinkers and risk takers,” the school has been emasculated by Governor Ron DeSantis.  After replacing the entire board of trustees with friends and political allies, applications have declined, current students are transferring to liberal arts colleges in other states and alumni donors have pulled back $30 million in pledges.  Among its first actions, the new trustees abolished the Office of Outreach and Inclusion Excellence.

So much for school choice.  Oh, you can go to any college or university you want.  But it is becoming a false choice, much like having the freedom to select any flavor at the local ice cream parlor.  Except every tub is vanilla.

When Donald Trump said, “I love the poorly educated,” he made the point better than I can.  If a generation of young people with college degrees, at institutions where they were taught research skills and critical thinking, grow up to be liberal professors that is not the fault of the professors.  They are responding to the social, political and cultural environment in which they live, using a value-free skill set to observe and come to their own conclusions.

If conservatives want a better ratio of kindred ideologues in higher education, return to true conservative values that might make sense to inquisitive young people.  Until then, stop playing the victim, accept some personal responsibility, stop whining and lead by persuasion, not force and suppression of free thought. You know, the very things you allegedly claim to believe.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

Entrepreneurship education used to be solely about starting for-profit businesses. That changed in the early 2000s. Instead of focusing on a single desired outcome, the discipline shifted its emphasis to human development. The spirit of this movement was captured by Guy Kawasaki, a member of the Apple team which developed the Mac computer. In his book Rules for Revolutionaries, Kawasaki wrote, “Entrepreneurship is the mindset of individuals who want to alter the future.”

In response, universities started offering courses in corporate entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and public entrepreneurship. Whether operating in a complex organization such as a Fortune 500 company, a mission driven not-for-profit entity or in the public sector, students were taught the value of opportunity recognition and problem solving based on the Timmons model of entrepreneurship: balancing opportunity with team and resources.

Being a political animal, I looked for occasions to demonstrate the efficacy of entrepreneurial thinking and behavior in the realm of governance and public policy. One such opportunity was the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 20 years ago today (Monday, March 20). I developed a lesson plan in which I asked students to think about the war effort as an entrepreneurial venture. I had not thought about this classroom moment for years until watching a rerun of Shark Tank on CNBC. And realized, if I were going to do something similar today I would fashion it after that show. Consider the following.

“Middle East Democracy” UPDATE:  The business shut down after eight years and a total investment of $2.4 trillion.  Neither Iraq nor any other Middle East country is currently importing democracy from the United States.  On the bright side, the region has not exported a terrorist attack to the U.S. since 2001.  When asked if they planned any future activity in America, an Al Qaida spokesperson responded, “How do you expect us to compete in your country when the market is dominated by domestic suppliers?”

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

Welcome to Black History month.  Or if you live in Florida, END OF BLACK HISTORY month.  Ironically, it is the loudest voices decrying “freedom of expression” in education and view their opponents as “snowflakes” who (1) are passing laws to limit free speech and (2) claim their children can not handle controversial topics.  As has been said on numerous occasions, these folks need to take the copy of the U.S. Constitution they use as a performance art prop out of their coat pockets and purses and actually read it.

If they did, you might not have a spokesperson for Florida governor Ron DeSantis tell us “the state education department is reviewing the revised (AP Black History) curriculum for compliance with Florida law.”  If DeSantis was ever to take an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he would be committing perjury if he did not add the words “except for the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”

Forgive the brief lesson in Constitutional Law.  The First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…” among other things. For those of you who believe this restriction to Congress means it applies only to the federal government, you would be right if you lived in pre-1868 America.  Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment made the “incorporation doctrine” the new standard. According to Cornell University’s Law School, “The first ten amendments of the United State Constitution (know as the Bill of Rights) are made applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause.  Incorporation applies both substantively and procedurally.”

In what can only be described as 1984-style NewSpeak, the Florida Legislature passed and DeSantis signed HB 7, the “Individual Freedom Act” under which a public school teacher can be charged with a crime for mentioning “critical race theory (CRT).” That act defines CRT as the concept that “one race, color, national origin, or sex are morally superior to members of another race, color, national origin, or sex” and that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”  Hard to disagree, except that it is not true.

An honest discussion about CRT should start with a more accurate description.  Per the Encyclopedia Britannica:

An intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color.

In  other words, CRT specifically contradicts the false narrative that it accuses individuals of being racists.  The latest and best evidence is the beating death of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis black police officers.  Nichols was not the victim of a hate crime.  He was the victim of a public policy, the creation of the “Scorpion Squad,” an elite, specialized unit formed in 2021 to fight violent street crime.  The culture and training associated with the Scorpion Squad was colorblind. It did not matter if the members of the unit were white or black. 

The valuable lesson a CRT discussion in public schools could provide is that policy matters. If an excessive response to urban crime can turn Black police officers into alleged murderers of a brother who just wanted to get home, what other policies result in harmful outcomes? That conversation does not teach any black child to accuse a white classmate of racism or for any child to think he or she is superior to another. It implies just the opposite. Each of us, regardless of accident of birth or life experience is susceptible to the the same shortcomings of human nature. And it does not matter if children grow up to be a police officer or governor, they need to be cognizant of the power they wield and the consequences of misusing it.

Sadly, the Florida Department of Education and an increasing number of parents across the state think their precious snowflakes lack the intellectual capacity to appreciate the importance of that lesson.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP