By Chris Powell
Even people skeptical of the bloat of the federal government may not have fully appreciated its discretionary political patronage until, upon his return to the presidency in January, Donald Trump began to reduce it.
Who outside the universities themselves knew that Columbia University has been getting more than a billion dollars a year in grants and contracts from the federal government, Yale University almost $900 million, and Harvard University almost $700 million, or that the University of Connecticut has been getting more than $400 million and the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System about $150 million?
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Now some of that money is in jeopardy as the Trump administration scrutinizes universities for the renewal of their traditional hostility to Jews and for their unconstitutional racial preferences dressed up as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Of course federal student loans also extravagantly subsidize higher education, with $1.7 trillion in loans outstanding.
Higher education has reciprocated by providing almost unanimous support for the party of bigger government, the Democrats. Higher education infiltrates government with what it supposes to be its expertise but what increasingly is merely political correctness.
Having recently been caught discriminating against applicants of Asian descent, Harvard has just announced that it will offer remedial math courses to students, supposedly to help them recover from learning deficits suffered during the recent virus epidemic. Such deficits might have been easily discovered by Harvard prior to any student’s admission if the university had not abandoned standardized testing for applicants because it was getting in the way of racial preferences in admissions.
This doesn’t mean that research financed by the federal government in higher education has not had beneficial results. It means that those beneficial results help camouflage the vast political patronage, higher education’s reciprocation of it, and leftist political indoctrination of students. Indeed, with new programs and subsidies every year, government now finances not only the government class but that class’ political party. To a great extent federal aid to higher education has become a one-sided form of government financing of political campaigns.
The indoctrination involved was exposed in Connecticut the other day when a conservative civil liberties group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), reported that four years ago the University of Connecticut Medical School rewrote the Hippocratic Oath it administers to students to make them pledge “to promote health equity,” “support policies that promote social justice,” and “work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination, and racism.”
Exactly what do the new elements of the oath mean? What exactly are the inequities, exclusion, discrimination, and racism in medicine in Connecticut?
The rewritten oath doesn’t explain, but its new elements are the jargon of political correctness.
Rather than explain the new elements when FIRE challenged them, UConn announced that taking the oath would no longer be mandatory for students. Thus the university devalued the basics of medical ethics as laid out by Hippocrates in ancient times.
In the General Assembly similar forces are operating on medicine, where more legislation is advancing to reduce parental responsibility for children.
The bill would authorize doctors to provide contraceptives and pregnancy-related treatment to minors without the consent of their parents. Connecticut law already allows minors to obtain abortions without parental consent, thereby protecting rapists from exposure and prosecution and worsening the alienation of children from their parents.
But political correctness in Connecticut considers abortion to be the highest social good, far more compelling than deterring child rape.
Connecticut law still upholds parental responsibility in one respect. A parent’s approval is required for children to get tattoos, since state government thinks that the superficial appearance of children is more important to parents than their children’s health and morals.
This is the kind of stuff that sustains Donald Trump with millions of people despite his awfulness. That is, to many people Trump’s adversaries are often even more objectionable than he is, and as was said a century and a half ago about Grover Cleveland, Trump’s supporters “love him most of all for the enemies he has made.”
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 